3DS, Wii U eShop Shutdown Leaves Archivists In The Wind, Hobbyists Pick Up The Pieces

Culture

from the nintendon't dept

A little over a year ago, we discussed Nintendo’s shutdown of the eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles. That shutdown ended up being delayed due to a metric ton of outcry from the gaming public, but that was only a stay of execution. In a matter of days, those shops will be discontinued, preventing anyone from purchasing any titles in those stores. Many of the titles that are original to those consoles are not available anywhere else. Nintendo has made some vague noises about them becoming available on modern consoles, but all of those plans live at the pleasure of Nintendo executives. Coupled with its extremely litigious nature on matters of intellectual property, that’s how you get to my nicknaming Nintendo as “the Disney of the video game industry.”

Preventing the gaming public from continuing to buy games that rely on a company-operated backend infrastructure is one thing. After all, Nintendo can do what it wants when it comes to putting its products into commerce. But what really annoyed a ton of people, myself included, was how this would impact archivists and historians, or anyone else interested in preserving video game history and culture. With the impending shutdown, some of those entities are once again expressing concern.

“While it’s unfortunate that people won’t be able to purchase digital 3DS or Wii U games anymore, we understand the business reality that went into this decision,” the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) tweeted when the eShop shutdowns were announced a year ago. “What we don’t understand is what path Nintendo expects its fans to take, should they wish to play these games in the future.”

Yeah, if you’re concerned about preserving culture for the public, this is a big fucking deal. And you really do have to keep in mind that the entire bargain that is copyright law is designed around offering a limited amount of monopoly protection to content creators specifically so that the public gets access to more content. Because Nintendo is litigious, utilizes DRM, and the DMCA exists, all of that combines to make it wildly unsafe for museums and archivists to actually retain copies of these games that will shortly no longer be found anywhere else. And, no, the exemptions built into the DMCA for content such as movies and literature simply don’t exist for the video game space.

The US Copyright Office has issued exemptions to those rules to allow libraries and research institutions to make digital copies for archival purposes. Those organizations can even distribute archived digital copies of items like ebooks, DVDs, and even generic computer software to researchers through online access systems.

But those remote-access exemptions explicitly leave out video games. That means researchers who want to access archived game collections have to travel to the physical location where that archive resides—even if the archived games themselves were never distributed on physical media.

All of this was lobbied for by an industry that apparently has some kind of fear of these organizations creating online sites where anyone can go and play any archived game at any time, leading to the decimation, nay, destruction of the video game industry. Industry lobbyists have pointed to the Internet Archive’s emulated games collection, which — checks notes — , well, I guess that didn’t destroy the industry at all, so I’m not sure what point they’re trying to make.

So what can be done? Not a whole lot, honestly, but some hobbyists are at least going to make a go of it.

In an effort to address this—or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible—YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries.

He’s now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks.

As part of this effort, The Completionist has said he plans to donate all of this digital media to the VGHF. What they can do with all of that content still remains to be seen. All of the same copyright and DMCA rules still apply, so what access it can grant to researchers, never mind the public, is in question.

But at least the content resides somewhere where it can be preserved for now. It just sure would be nice if the deal struck for copyright didn’t somehow leave one hobbyist having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do the work that Nintendo should be doing alongside museums itself, if it had any actual interest in preserving the culture it helped create.

Filed Under: 3ds, archivists, culture, eshop, history, hobbyists, shutdown, wiiu
Companies: nintendo

Antisemitism On Twitter Has More Than Doubled Since Elon Musk Took Over

Content Moderation

from the shocked,-shocked...-not-that-shocked dept

In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but.

Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took charge, according to research that I and colleagues at tech firm CASM Technology and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank conducted. Between June and Oct. 26, 2022, the day before Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, there was a weekly average of 6,204 tweets deemed “plausibly antisemitic” – that is, where at least one reasonable interpretation of the tweet falls within the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of the term as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.”

But from Oct. 27 until Feb 9, 2023, the average was 12,762 – an increase of 105%. In all, a total of 325,739 tweets from 146,516 accounts were labeled as “plausibly antisemitic” over the course of our study, stretching from June 1, 2022 to Feb. 9, 2023.

Finding antisemitism with AI

To identify plausibly antisemitic tweets, my co-authors and I combined 22 published hate speech-identifying algorithms into a single mechanism and used even more machine learning to see which combinations of decisions led to the correct result. We then passed through all tweets – over a million in total – that contained any one of 119 words, phrases, slurs and epithets related to antisemitism.

No such process is perfect. We estimate our model to make a correct decision about 75% of the time. We also no doubt missed some antisemitic tweets not containing any of those 119 key words, as well as those taken down before early December when we collected the data.

We then used an algorithm to draw out 10 different themes of antisemitism seen in the tweets. Some centered around the use of specific antisemitic derogatory epithets. Others alluded to conspiracy theories concerning hidden Jewish influence and control.

Antisemitic tweets directed at Jewish investor and philanthropist George Soros warranted its own category. He was mentioned more than any other person in our data, over 19,000 times, with tweets claiming he was a member of a hidden globalist, Jewish or “Nazi” world order.

Another theme were tweets defending the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, who had made a number of antisemitic remarks after he had his account briefly reinstated by Musk.

Our research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also found around 4,000 of the antisemitic tweets were focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These variously claimed that the conflict was caused by Jews, or that Jews secretly caused the U.S. to support Ukraine. They also contained direct antisemitism directed against the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.

Musk rolls back content moderation

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter came on the back of what I have observed as a decadelong trend among tech giants to take more responsibility for hate speech, harassment, incitement, disinformation and other harms lurking in the information flowing through their platforms. Over that period, companies such as Facebook and Twitter gradually enacted policies to respond to extremism, hate speech and harassment, or increase “civility,” as Twitter itself described it in 2018, and built out the teams and tools to enforce them.

Musk, a self-professed “free speech absolutist,” pointed the platform in a different direction after taking control. In short order, Twitter’s independent Trust and Safety Council was dissolved, previously banned accounts were reinstated and over half of Twitter’s staff was laid off or simply left – including many of those responsible for enforcing the company’s hate speech policies.

As someone who has tracked hate speech on places like Twitter for around 10 years, I believe the changes to Twitter’s moderation practices are only partly to blame for the jump in antisemitism on the platform.

The media spectacle surrounding Musk’s takeover, along with his very vocal views on free speech, likely also encouraged exactly those people to join or rejoin the platform who had fallen foul of its previous attempts to confront hate. Our research gives some backing to this theory. Some 3,855 accounts we identified as posting at least one plausibly antisemitic tweet joined Twitter in the 10 days after Musk took over. This is, however, only a small proportion of the 146,516 accounts that sent at least one antisemitic tweet over the course of the entire study.

Little effect on curbing hate speech

A surge in hate speech on Twitter was flagged by researchers in the weeks after Musk took over, concerns the billionaire dismissed as “utterly false,” having earlier vowed to “max deboosted & demonetized” hateful tweets.

If Twitter has been de-amplifying antisemitism, our research shows almost no evidence of it. Before Oct. 27, antisemitic tweets received an average of 6.4 “favorites” and 1.2 retweets. Since then, they have averaged 6 “favorites” and 1 retweet. Although such engagement isn’t a perfect measure for visibility, tweets made much less visible to users would generally receive less engagement.

We also attempted to measure takedowns of antisemitic tweets. On Feb. 15, 45 days after we initially collected the data, we tried to re-collect all the tweets we identified as antisemitic. Tweets can be unavailable for lots of reasons, and Twitter’s enforcement is only one of them. Imperfect though this is, it does give us a tentative glimpse of what might be happening in regard to the removal of antisemitic posts. And across those dates, 17,589 antisemitic tweets were taken down – 8.5% of the total.

Rising tide of antisemitism

Our findings come at a time when many fear growing threats to Jewish communities. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League tracked the highest number of antisemitic incidents – including harassment, vandalism and assaults – in the U.S. since they started tracking numbers in 1979. And this is not just a U.S. phenomenon; in the U.K., the Community Security Trust has recorded a similar spike in anti-Jewish activity, while in Germany, anti-Jewish crimes surged by 29% over the pandemic.

Studying social media has shown me again and again just how powerfully it helps to form the cultures and ideas that underlie its users’ behavior. Ultimately, the proliferation of tweets that hold Jews responsible for all the world’s ills, that circulate dark conspiracies of control and cover-up, or that fire derogatory attacks directed toward Jews, can only support antisemitism online – and in the real world.

Carl Miller is a research fellow at King’s College London.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: antisemitism, content moderation, elon musk, hate, trust & safety
Companies: twitter

Why Link Taxes Like Canada’s C-18 Represent An End To An Open Web

Policy

from the save-the-open-web dept

Well, here we go again. For years now, the legacy news industry, often led by lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch, have been pushing a bizarre plan to tax links on the internet. The entire rationale for this plan seems to be “news organizations used to be rolling in easy money, they failed to innovate with the times, and now Google and Meta are rolling in easy money, so we should just make Google and Meta give news orgs cash.”

That’s it. That’s the entire rationale. Sometimes people try to get all high minded and talk about the importance of journalism, which I agree is important and which certainly could use new sustainable business models, but that doesn’t explain why they should break the fundamental nature of the internet (everyone can link to everyone) to solve that problem. Also, none of it explains why internet companies should magically be responsible for paying journalism outfits.

At best supporters of these plans come up with this rationale: Google and Meta take a huge percentage of digital advertising, and it’s likely that those ad budgets used to be what supported news orgs, so therefore, they should share some of the cash. When people look askance at that — or point out that under that logic any business that successfully competes with a legacy business should be forced to share its revenue with the business they out competed — they might say “but Google and Meta “use” news without paying for it.

But, let’s interrogate that claim as well. No, Google and Meta don’t “use” news without compensation. Quite the opposite. Both sites have a very, very small part of their sites that may link people to news. Google News is an aggregator/news search engine that sends traffic to people’s sites by linking to those news stories. Meta’s Facebook property similarly allows its users (who often include news sites themselves) to link to their stories elsewhere and drive traffic to them.

If those sites fail to monetize that traffic, that’s kinda on them.

Now, when I point that out, some people claim that those links don’t really send that much traffic, because too many people just see the link/headline/snippet and decide they don’t need to click. And, um, the answer to that is again to suggest that it’s difficult to see how that’s Google or Facebook’s fault. If your news articles provide so little value beyond the headline, image, and a snippet, I dunno, you kinda don’t deserve to make that much money? Good journalism has to add value, and part of that is building up a reputation that readers should want to read the details and nuances.

Also, what this article kinda highlights is that many of these news publishers who are whining for a bailout from Google and Meta spent many years focused on gaming Google and Facebook’s algorithms for clicks rather than building a loyal audience who recognized and valued their journalism.

And this takes us to the real proof that news publishers are full of shit in all of this: just look at what they do rather than what they say. If Google and Facebook sending them traffic was really a problem, they could easily fix that themselves. They can use robots.txt to block Google. They can use referrer tags to block traffic from Facebook. They can change the social graph content to make it less appealing.

But, of course, they do the opposite of that. They hire Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing experts to try to help them “rank better” on these sites and get more traffic. They explicitly try to get better promotion from those sites because they already get tremendous value from that traffic.

Now they want to get paid for that traffic that they already value! It’s basically news orgs saying “hey Google and Meta, not only must you advertise us for free, you must ALSO pay to advertise us.” The whole equation seems backwards.

Similarly, you sometimes see people make quasi-copyright arguments in favorite of this scheme, but that’s a fundamental perversion of copyright, an already extremely perverted concept designed to create incentives for creation. In order to function in a free society, copyright has to be limited to more egregious levels of copying. But linking an including a headline/snippet can never reach that level of a copyright violation, and changing the law to make it so would have so many downstream negative effects, enabling all sorts of copyright abuse and silencing speech.

And, of course, the only way that these link tax plans actually work is by breaking the most fundamental element of the open web: the hyperlink. For the entire history of the open web, a key attribute was the freedom to link to others. Now, those others could block the traffic, or put up a paywall, or whatever else they wanted. But everyone must be free to link to one another.

These “big tech pays news” schemes break this fundamental idea. They announce that some companies, these big companies who apparently no one likes, must suddenly pay to link. And sure, you can easily state (1) these big companies can afford it, and (2) no one likes them any way, so maybe you think that’s good. But nothing good comes from breaking the fundamental principles of the open web.

Once you break this concept of the freedom to link, you’re flinging open Pandora’s box to all sorts of mischief. Once industries learn that the government has no problem stepping in and forcing companies to pay for links, does anyone really believe it will stop at news organizations? Of course it won’t. Then the whole internet just becomes a food fight for lobbyists to argue with politicians over which industries they can force to subsidize other industries.

It’s pure unadulterated crony capitalism at its worst. Those with the best connections get to have the government force those with weaker connections to subsidize their own failures to innovate and compete.

And yet, this idea remains inexplicably popular (I mean, it’s quite explicable for the news orgs, but it’s inexplicable why so many others have jumped on board). As you’ll recall there were a few early experiments with this in Europe. In Belgium, when such a law passed, Google threatened to block any publisher who didn’t give them a free license, and all the publishers rushed in to give Google a free license, showing again how much they actually value the traffic. In Germany, the tax was applied to snippets, so Google did the only sensible thing and removed snippets, causing the publishers to freak out again.

In response, Spain passed an even more problematic version that said that Google literally couldn’t block those it didn’t want to pay. They literally said that if you have a news aggregator product, paying for links is mandatory. So Google did the only reasonable thing: shutting down Google News in Spain. Still the program went ahead, and, of course, it was the smaller news orgs who suffered the most.

Of course, the biggest success for all this, not surprisingly came in Australia, where everyone freely admitted that it was a plan to extract money from Meta and Google and hand it to Rupert Murdoch, who has been most pleased with the arrangement. Yet again, while this subsidy to Murdoch may have made him happy, it served to screw over smaller publications.

This whole scheme has now come to North America. Last year, Senator Amy Klobuchar pushed to help Rupert Murdoch and to harm the open internet with her JCPA. While that failed, it’s quite likely it’ll come back in some form — probably worse — soon.

But now the biggest push is up in Canada, where bill C-18 has been a big point of discussion for months. As in Australia, backers of the bill insist it’s not a link tax, it’s just a law to require a negotiation on how much to pay. But… pay for what? The answer is to link. It’s a link tax. The people claiming otherwise think you’re stupid.

Already, both Google and Meta have said they’ll block news links in Canada if this bill passes. And, again, this is the only reasonable move: if the government taxes something you expect to get less of it. The stupidest thing in all of this is not only is the government trying to force the payment of something that is fundamentally free, they seem to expect the sites to just continue letting news flow across their platform, despite its costs.

The Canadian government is so mad that Google and Meta are doing exactly what the government is pressuring them to do by taxing an activity, that they’re calling it “intimidation” and demanding internal communications from both companies. It’s kind of a galaxy brain take to say “you’re engaged in intimidation by following the incentives we’re creating, so in response, we’re going to intimidate you by demanding your private communications.”

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the whole framework of C-18 is particularly disingenuous. The bill’s title is: “An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.”

Can you spot the problem? I knew you could, because you’re not as stupid as people pushing this bill think you are.

Google and Facebook are not “making news content available” to people in Canada. They’re linking to that news that the news organizations are themselves making available.

The whole thing is problematic… and has a decent chance of becoming law in Canada. The days of the open web where concepts like “linking” were unquestioned may be coming to an end.

Filed Under: australia, c-18, canada, competition, crony capitalism, jcpa, link tax, news, rupert murdoch, subsidies
Companies: facebook, google, meta

TSA Confirms Biometric Scanning Soon Won’t Be Optional Even For Domestic Travelers

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the nice-travel-option...-be-a-shame-if-something-happened-to-it dept

Ah, mission creep. The government loves it. Keeps people employed, keeps citizens on their toes, keeps privacy-focused sites in business, etc.

In 2017, the DHS began quietly rolling out its facial recognition program, starting with international airports and aimed mainly at collecting/scanning people boarding international flights. Even in its infancy, the DHS was hinting this was never going to remain solely an international affair.

It made its domestic desires official shortly thereafter, with the TSA dropping its domestic surveillance “roadmap” which now included “expanding biometrics to additional domestic travelers.” Then the DHS and TSA ran silent for a bit, resurfacing in late 2022 with the news it was rolling out its facial recognition system at 16 domestic airports.

As of January, the DHS and TSA were still claiming this biometric ID verification system was strictly opt-in. A TSA rep interviewed by the Washington Post, however, hinted that opting out just meant subjecting yourself to the worst in TSA customer service. Given the options, more travelers would obviously prefer a less brusque/hands-y trip through security checkpoints, ensuring healthy participation in the TSA’s “optional” facial recognition program.

A little more than two months have passed, and the TSA is now informing domestic travelers there will soon be no way to opt out of its biometric program. (via Papers Please)

Speaking at an aviation security panel at South by Southwest, TSA Administrator David Pekoske made these comments:

“We’re upgrading our camera systems all the time, upgrading our lighting systems,” Pekoske said. “(We’re) upgrading our algorithms, so that we are using the very most advanced algorithms and technology we possibly can.”

He said passengers can also choose to opt out of certain screening processes if they are uncomfortable, for now. Eventually, biometrics won’t be optional, he said.

“Eventually” is a rather vague timeframe. ASAP would be the TSA’s preference. TSA chief Pekoske likes it because, like the head of any sizable entity, the possibility of providing even fewer people with employment opportunities appeals to him. According to his comments at the panel, the TSA expects passenger loads to increase about 4% a year. The use of this tech means the TSA won’t have to hire more agents to handle the increase in workload.

But Pekoske is not just a guy who likes seeing fewer people employed. He’s also a salesman. Biometrics may be faster than interacting with humans during identity validation, but it’s a tradeoff not everyone wants to make. Pekoske buries the problematic aspects of biometric harvesting in exchange for domestic travel “privileges” by claiming this is all about making things better for passengers.

“It’s critically important that this system has as little friction as it possibly can, while we provide for safety and security,” Pekoske said.

Yes, you’ll get through screening a little faster. Unless the AI is wrong, in which case you’ll be dealing with a whole bunch of new problems most agents likely won’t have the expertise to handle. Pekoske claims this version is the best version of its facial recognition tech, making a completely unbelievable claim the new tech “hasn’t found any problems with passengers with darker complexions.” It may have fewer problems, but even the best facial recognition AI is still less accurate when dealing with anyone other than white males.

More travelers. Fewer agents. And a whole bunch of screens to interact with. That’s the plan for the nation’s airports and everyone who passes through them.

Filed Under: biometric scanning, data, dhs, facial recognition, mandatory, papers please, privacy, tsa

Daily Deal: The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle

Deals

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

The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle has 12 courses to help you become a Python expert. These courses will take you from beginner to expert in Python. They cover major topics including Object-Oriented Programming, Web Scraping, GUI development, and more.  Courses also cover how to build your own smart devices, how to build your own apps, and how to use Python for Machine Learning and data science. The bundle is on sale for $19.

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

Silicon Valley School District Files Laughable, Vexatious RICO Claims Against Big Social Media… But Not Facebook Or Instagram

Legal Issues

from the just-make-an-angry-youtube-video-or-something dept

Back in January, we wrote about the Seattle public school district filing an absolutely laughable lawsuit against basically all of big social media, based on a bunch of misread and misunderstood studies, and general moral panic that social media must be “bad” for kids. In February, we wrote about the school district in Mesa, Arizona filing a very similar lawsuit (using the same law firm). We wondered if we were going to see a flood of such lawsuits.

Also, we pointed out how these school districts were effectively announcing publicly to all parents that they had given up on actually educating their children on how to understand the modern digital world, and were basically caving to moral panics and admitting that they don’t know how to prepare children for today’s world. As I noted in both of those stories, if I were a parent in either district, I would be furious.

Well, be careful what you wish for, because last week, at least two* more such lawsuits were filed, including one by the San Mateo County Board of Education, which oversees the school district that my children attend. So, yeah, now I’m furious. As I told the superintendent in an email last week, I had been actually quite happy with how the schools my children attended had taught digital citizenship, and how to they seemed to have good programs designed to prepare kids for a digital future. But, filing such a ridiculous lawsuit is the opposite of that and now has me concerned that the district is so unprepared to teach kids about the modern world that I should be worried about their education.

It gets even worse. The San Mateo County lawsuit is similar to the ones filed in Seattle and Mesa, but with a few differences. While both of the others mainly focused on (already laughable) “public nuisance” claims, San Mateo… also includes a RICO claim.

Yes. RICO.

As regular readers of Techdirt well know, IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT. It’s never RICO. But it’s especially not RICO in this case. RICO means something. It most certainly does not mean “a lot of these companies have been bad for the kids I’m supposed to be teaching how to live in the modern world, which we can only support by cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence.” You need to show conduct of an enterprise, through a pattern of racketeering activity called predicate acts causing injury to the plaintiff’s business or property. And you need to show all five elements in there.

Here’s how the San Mateo County Board of Education — which is responsible for educating my children — handle that. They claim each of the defendants (Google, Snapchat, and TikTok — but not Meta, which we’ll get to, and not Twitter, which, hrmph, I guess I’ll also get to) have formed “an association-in-fact” with the “shared goal… to preserve and enhance the market for its social media platforms and RICO Defendants’ own profits.” I mean, under that definition companies in any industry have “an association.” But that’s not how the law actually works.

What about the “pattern of racketeering?” Well… again, they basically say these companies wanted more users, and that’s racketeering. Oh, and then at the very end they just randomly accuse these social media companies of wire fraud. I wish I were joking.

RICO Defendants had the common purpose of preserving and enhancing the market for their platforms and for youth as consumers for RICO Defendants’ own profits, regardless of the truth, the law, or the health consequences to the American people, including Plaintiffs’ students and the communities Plaintiffs serve.

RICO Defendants deceived consumers to use RICO Defendants’ platforms while concealing and/or suppressing the relevant findings and research. RICO Defendants deceived consumers, particularly parents and children, adolescents, and teenagers, by claiming that they did not market to children, adolescents, and teenagers, while engaging in marketing and manipulation of their platform algorithms with the intent of causing children, adolescents, and teenagers to engage in excessive use of their platforms, regardless of the health or safety concerns.

RICO Defendants achieved their common purpose through co-conspirators’ actions in deceiving consumers, regulators, and the general public about the dangerous nature of their platforms. Through the enterprise, RICO Defendants engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity consisting of numerous acts of racketeering in the Northern District of California and elsewhere, including mail fraud and wire fraud, indictable offenses under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343.

That’s not how any of this works.

How about the “predicate acts?” Well, here they claim that social media companies… use the mail “to mislead the public.”

From a time unknown and continuing until the time of filing of this complaint, in the Northern District of California and elsewhere, RICO Defendants and others known and unknown did knowingly and intentionally devise and intend to devise a scheme and artifice to mislead, and obtain money and property from, members of the public by means of material false and misleading pretenses, representations, and promises, and omissions of material facts, knowing that the pretenses, representations, and promises, were false when made.

The “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” seem to be based on the laughable claim that these companies… sent promotional material through the mail. Really.

For the purpose of executing and attempting to execute the scheme and artifice described herein, RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators would and did: knowingly place and cause to be placed in any post office or authorized depository for mail matter, matters and things to be sent and delivered by the United States Postal Service (and its predecessor, the United States Post Office Department); took and received therefrom such matters and things; and knowingly caused to be delivered by mail according to the direction thereon, and at the place at which it is directed to be delivered by the person to whom it is addressed, any such matter and thing, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1341.

They also fail to plead how any of these harmed SMCBoE’s business or property, meaning they didn’t actually plead all the elements of RICO anyway.

After reading this, I asked defense attorney, and RICO specialist, Ken White whether he thought the lawsuit, and especially the RICO claims had any merit. Ken did not hold back:

It’s a mish-mash of junk science, nanny-statism, and pro-se-style and likely sanctionable legal buffoonery.  The RICO claims are preposterous and betray the vexatious intent of the entire — pun definitely intended — enterprise.  This is the worst that modern pandering, performative litigation has to offer.  Jesus, just make an angry YouTube video or something. This is exactly why judges need to be much more aggressive sanctioning lawyers and reporting them to the bar.

The RICO claims are definitely the most preposterous, but that doesn’t mean the other parts of the lawsuit are any better. As Ken notes, it’s full of junk science. It takes correlations to be proved causation (despite tons of evidence to the contrary — such as the fact that adolescent suicide rates were way higher in the 1980s and 90s than they are today). It cherry picks unsubstantiated claims regarding social media and focuses on extreme cases that have been overplayed in the media.

Just as an example, it calls out the infamous “devious licks” TikTok challenge that got a lot of attention in the fall of 2021. The complaint implies, without any evidence, that the devious licks challenge caused a problem in San Mateo schools based entirely on the headline in one school newspaper. Really. Of course, as we covered back in 2021, the whole devious licks thing was mostly a silly moral panic spread by adults. Kids in schools actually responded to the few cases of actual vandalism (which has happened in school probably going back to the beginning of school) and many turned it around and created the “angelic yields” challenge of getting kids to help clean up their schools.

The complaint also ignores that TikTok banned anything related to “devious licks” as soon as it started getting any attention. It was moral panic reporting from news reporters and adults that spread the concept.

So why is the San Mateo County Board of Education suing the news?

There is, of course, the ever popular comparison to tobacco:

It is apparent that when the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies were faced with a choice about making a change, they decided to stay the course. They simply put profit over the health and safety of children. Like the public health crisis caused by Big Tobacco, the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies have endeavored to shift blame and shirk responsibility through a concerted effort to withhold and distort the facts. Despite their advanced knowledge of the disaster they are causing, the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies have made no meaningful attempt to address this exploding crisis. As they look for new and ingenious way to leverage their unmatched access to technology to keep children addicted to their platforms, Defendants feed their own addiction, to profits and ever larger user bases. Due to the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies’ unwillingness to address the crisis of their making, the San Mateo Board of Education and its Superintendent feel they have no other choice than to bring this lawsuit to ensure the health and safety of children in their care.

Except that almost every sentence in this paragraph is false. It’s embarrassing. First of all, tobacco has no redeeming value. Social media is about speech. Not smoking a harmful product. Kids have free speech rights as well, though apparently my local school board wishes to deny them of that right.

Second, all of these companies have large trust and safety and research teams that actually do tons of work to try to limit any harm, especially to kids. I already mentioned how TikTok stopped the spread of the “devious licks” concept almost immediately. The complaint ignores that.

The complaint also ignores copious studies that show most students get tremendous value out of social media, not harm. Just recently the Pew Research Center released a massive report showing how the vast majority of students found they benefited from social media, and only a small minority found it problematic. Or how about this massive study from 2019 of over 12,000 students, that could find no evidence to support the idea that social media made kids depressed.

Incredibly, the complaint does mention the recent Pew study, but totally misrepresents what it says. It does not mention how the majority of students found they benefited from social media, and only 9% said it had a negative impact on their lives. You’d think such a stat would be relevant. Instead, the complaint focuses just on how many teens say they use social media and don’t want to give it up, and then leap to insisting that this proves that social media is addictive and that the companies are nefarious.

But, uh, try asking that same question about… watching TV, hanging out with friends, or even reading books, and you’d likely get pretty similar answers. Kids do it because it’s fun and it’s how they socialize. Hell, ask the same questions about going to school. Indeed, kids go to school every day, and I’d bet they’d report that school leads to a higher level of depression than social media.

Maybe the School Board should be suing itself? Or at least, be willing to do the same kind of research that Meta did to try to learn about its own impact on teenagers’ well being. No, instead, it would rather stick its head in the sand and insist that it must be social media to blame for the school not being prepared to educate and take care of kids following a pandemic.

You’d think that these other studies might give the people behind this lawsuit pause. Indeed, I asked the superintendent if she had read those studies and if she had any comment on them. Instead, she passed me on to a San Francisco PR shop and said they’d answer my questions. I asked the PR guy in question on Friday. On Sunday he told me that his client (which appears to be the law firm, rather than the school board) would not debate this with me (I wasn’t asking for a debate, I simply said I was hoping he could explain some of the decisions, since they appeared incomprehensible). Despite follow ups to both the PR guy and the Board, asking for simple answers to straightforward questions, no further responses were given.

Specifically both of them also failed to reply to my question about who actually initiated this process: was it the school or the law firm of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy? The law firm put out a silly press release about it. It is a different law firm than the one that filed the Seattle and Mesa cases, but at least that law firm didn’t… do the RICO.

The only one of my questions that was answered by the Board in an FAQ they posted, was that this is (not surprisingly) being handled on contingency, meaning that the law firm isn’t getting paid unless they win this case. Which they won’t. So, really, this just seems like an attempt by a terrible, mockable law firm, which deserves to be sanctioned, to try to score some cheap advertising.

And, now, we get to the very, very notable absence of Meta (Facebook and Instagram) in the defendant list. It’s… you know… kind of a glaring omission, given that it’s the largest social media platform, and so many of the studies that the complaint relies on are actually about Meta’s platforms and not the ones in the actual lawsuit.

Incredibly, the complaint uses (a misreading of) Meta’s own research… against those other companies! There are literally 5 pages of the lawsuit talking about the research leaked by Frances Haugen about Meta. And, of course, yet again, this research is misleadingly presented and cherry picked.

In 2021, a whistleblower and former employee of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”), known formerly as Facebook, Inc., leaked documents to journalists at the Wall Street Journal and government officials. These documents showed that Meta was aware as early as 2019 that one of its platforms, Instagram, caused body image issues to worsen for at least one third of teenage girls on the platform based on its own research and analysis. These documents settled what scientists had long suspected about Instagram’s harmful impact on children, in addition to confirming that Meta was completely aware of this issue based on Meta’s own studies. The leak confirmed that Meta designed Instagram in a way to risk the mental and physical health of children because that is what makes Meta profitable.

Except… that’s not what the leak showed at all. As we’ve highlighted in great detail over and over again, the study actually showed that in every category they studied for boys, Instagram made more teen boys feel better about themselves than worse (by a significant amount). And in 11 out of 12 categories, they made more teen girls feel better, rather than worse. There was only one category in which more girls felt worse, and it was body image, where the breakdown was still pretty close to equal. And, the whole freaking point of the study and the internal report that Haugen leaked, was that Facebook found this one category making girls feel worse to be unacceptable. That’s why they called it out!

Even as the complaint highlights how Meta was carefully studying this to understand what was happening and look for ways to fix the problems, the complaint pretends that they learned this… and ignored it.

And then to try to tie all this research from Meta (who again, was not sued in this complaint!) back to the companies that were actually sued, the complaint literally just says the other companies are all the same… “on information and belief.”

Defendants’ platforms operate similarly or in the same way as Meta’s platforms. On information and belief, Co-conspirators were and continue to be fully aware of the negative consequences of their platforms and their effects on minors’ health. Co-conspirators intentionally designed their platforms to exploit children and leave them riddled with mental and emotional health issues. Co-conspirators have endeavored to shift blame and shirk responsibility through a concerted effort to withhold and distort the facts, saying one thing publicly while admitting privately that the mental health issues detailed herein are caused by their platforms. Co-conspirators have conducted research and analysis, and have compiled data and documentation further substantiating the harms they cause to minors, and have falsely represented that they would disclose this research. Co-conspirators have intentionally withheld this information from the American people in a coordinated campaign to protect their profits from public scrutiny.

On information and belief indeed. Once again, this is not how any of this works.

And, of course, this raises the question of why Meta is not included in the lawsuit. I asked the superintendent and the PR guy, and neither would respond. I wondered if it could have something to do with the number of Meta employees who are parents with kids in San Mateo schools? It’s possible, though YouTube is also headquartered in the county and it’s still being sued.

As for the absence of Twitter, well, Twitter was never quite as big as the other big social media companies and always much less interesting to teens anyway, so one way to read this decision is as something of an insult to Elon Musk and his social media toy. Twitter is barely even mentioned in the complaint at all with the only mention coming to note that TikTok was bigger than Twitter. But… much of the research on social media happened around Twitter, in part because Twitter was the social media app with the most open API (which has since changed under new management). So, once again, we’re in a situation where the complaint uses research done on other platforms to hold YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok to blame, despite little shown connection. As Ken White noted above, this is sanctionable behavior, and the kind of thing you expect in a pro se filing, not one from a formerly reputable law firm.

The only attempt the SMCBoE makes towards showing harm to the schools is by noting that… their own school districts weren’t prepared for the mental health crisis of the pandemic. Yes.

More than 8 in 10 public school reported that, due to the pandemic, students exhibited stunted behavioral and socioeconomical development. Sixty-one percent (61%) of schools perceived that general misconduct had increased. Schools reported substantial increases in the frequency of tardiness, skipping class, rowdiness, bullying, fighting, threats of fighting, use of electronic devices during class, and other classroom disruptions. Thirty-six percent (36%) of schools recorded an increase in vandalism.

And so we have to… sue social media? The same social media that… enabled your schools to stay open and relevant during the pandemic? The same social media that allowed kids across San Mateo County to continue to communicate with their social circle while they were locked down in their homes for over a year? The same social media — especially YouTube — that was critical to helping teachers continue to provide lessons to kids online? I know my kids were regularly assigned to watch science and history YouTube videos during remote learning, and many of those videos were fantastic! Way better than most science and history lectures I had in school.

That’s who you’re suing?

Like other school districts, Plaintiffs bear the cost of the increased need for youth mental health services. Operating under pre-crisis budgets, Plaintiffs have scrambled to reallocate resources to address the mental health crisis. Plaintiffs have diverted time and funds to hire additional health care professionals, to train teachers and staff on how to educate students on their mental health, to develop mental health curriculum and materials, and to keep students and parents notified and informed about mental health issues that arise.

Again, what does that have to do with social media? We had a pandemic. That’s been kinda stressful for everyone. And that’s true of kids as well. But social media actually helped tons of kids get through the pandemic and still stay in contact with their social circle.

Indeed, the complaint even admits all this:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, due to lockdowns, remote schooling, and physical isolation from friends, young people drastically increased their use of social media. One study explained its findings: “adolescents augmented their social media use, including general screen time.

But, then it blames all the mental health problems… on social media, and not the “physical isolation from friends” or the stress of, you know, a freaking pandemic.

This use of social media is accompanied by detrimental mental health effects

Again, studies show the opposite. The very Pew study that this complaint relies on to show that kids use social media a lot… showed that it did not have detrimental effects on the vast majority of kids.

Also, it turns out more people are absent from school… and somehow that’s also social media’s fault rather than a deadly, contagious virus.

Absenteeism also became a problem during the Covid-19 pandemic. Public schools reported both student and teacher chronic absenteeism increased compared to prior school years. Seventy-two percent (72%) of schools reported an increase in chronic student absenteeism compared to pre-pandemic school years.

The complaint details high rates of absenteeism at some of its schools, and makes zero effort to actually connect that to social media. It just acts as if it must be true, despite no reason to believe they’re connected, and many, many fairly obvious reasons to suggest that the pandemic is actually to blame.

The complaint also tries to connect bad behavior in schools to social media… and fails in almost hilarious ways. It mentions that since 2020 the entire county (which has a population of over 700,000 with between 85k and 100k enrolled students) there were… OMG… TWELVE threat incidents involving the internet.

Most egregiously, since 2020, Plaintiffs’ schools have had 72 Student Threat Assessment Training (“STAT”) Level 2 cases, 12 of which (16.7%) were a direct result of negative social media use.

Wait. Wait. Wait. So, with nearly 100,000 students, across three separate school years, you had… twelve incidents from social media? That’s an average of… four a year? From at least 85,000 students? I’m shocked it’s that low!

They also blame two hoax shooter phone calls… on the internet?

In addition to vandalism, social media has been tied to active shooter hoaxes. In October 2022, two San Mateo County high schools—Woodside High School and South San Francisco High School—had to go into lockdown when hoax phone calls to police departments reported possible active shooters on the campuses.

You don’t think it’s got more to do with the rise in actual high profile school shootings?

And, I mean, kids do stupid stuff like this. When I was in junior high school, a kid I knew from around the corner called in a bomb threat because he wanted to get out of a test he wasn’t ready for. We didn’t blame anyone, but him. Because he did it. Some kids are always going to do something like this. It happened before social media, and literally nothing in this lawsuit shows that social media has increased this kind of thing. Nor does it even attempt to link these claims to the internet, rather than just generally assuming they must be connected.

This whole lawsuit is a mess. And it’s a joke. And I’m sad because the people who brought this lawsuit are the people in charge of educating my kids. And anyone who thinks this lawsuit makes sense has shown a real failure. It’s a failure of critical thinking. It’s a failure of understanding evidence. It’s a failure of being carried away by a moral panic instead of evidence. It’s a failure in passing the blame. It’s a failure in not doing your damn job as educators.

It’s just shameful all around. I’m hoping more parents call out this nonsense. Yes, it’s difficult to manage schools these days, especially with all the nonsense culture wars and craziness. But any school board member who thinks this is how they should be spending their time will never receive my vote again, and makes me think it’s time to actively campaign against them in the future. They are failing our children.

* As noted above, this wasn’t the only such lawsuit filed last week. Bucks County, Pennsylvania filed one, as well. And, you know, it’s dumb too. Though, they did sue Meta as well. And went with the whole “public nuisance” claim like everyone else, but weren’t so crazy to go for the RICO nonsense. It’s still ridiculous and should fail easily in court, but this post was long enough, and frustrating enough that Bucks County gets off with just this one footnote paragraph.

Filed Under: covid, moral panic, nancy magee, protect the children, rico, san mateo, san mateo county, san mateo county board of education, social media
Companies: facebook, google, instagram, meta, snapchat, tiktok, youtube

Forget A TikTok Ban, We Need To Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Real Privacy Law

Privacy

from the you're-not-actually-fixing-the-problem dept

We’ve noted for a while now how the great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era.

Most of the folks crying the loudest about TikTok were the same people that created the policy environment that lets TikTok (and anybody else) play fast and loose with consumer data in the first place.

And they don’t want to actually fix the mess they created. U.S. corporations don’t want to make slightly less money under a policy framework that empowers consumers, and the U.S. government doesn’t want to have to get a warrant for all of that data it buys from brokers.

So you get what we have here: a big dumb performance in which we pretend that banning a single app actually does anything of use. After all, the Chinese, Russian, and U.S. governments can all just buy data from the poorly regulated data broker market. They don’t need TikTok for surveillance and propaganda; they have plenty of data brokers and U.S. tech giants for that.

For a while it was actually kind of hard to see this viewpoint reflected in press coverage of the TikTok fracas, which initially leaned heavily toward patriotic fervor. Fortunately that’s slowly starting to shift as calls for a ban begin to grow in earnest. Case in point: this New York Times piece by Julia Angwin that once again makes it clear that a TikTok ban isn’t thinking broadly enough:

The even deeper problem is that putting TikTok under state control, banning it or selling it to a U.S. company wouldn’t solve the threats that the app is said to pose. If China wants to obtain data about U.S. residents, it can still buy it from one of the many unregulated data brokers that sell granular information about all of us. If China wants to influence the American population with disinformation, it can spread lies across the Big Tech platforms just as easily as other nations can.

Angwin also points out something else I’ve found annoying about the myopic fixation on TikTok: we’ve never seen anything close to the same level of concern about the poorly-secured Chinese-made routers and internet of things devices Americans happily attach to their home networks with reckless abandon:

Not to mention that our national lack of focus on cybersecurity defenses means that it would be much more effective for China to just hack every home’s Wi-Fi router — most of which are manufactured in China and are notoriously insecure — and obtain far more sensitive data than it can get from knowing which videos we swipe on TikTok.

None of this is to say that TikTok is some innocent daisy and doesn’t pose a privacy risk.

Just that myopically fixating on the ban of one app — but doing nothing about the shitty policy environment that created the problem — is more political performance than meaningful solution. A performance that will annoy young voters, make it tougher on researchers and educators, uproot established community, face numerous First Amendment challenges, and not actually fix the core issues.

I still maintain that the most vocal supporters of a TikTok ban understand this perfectly well, and couldn’t actually care less about consumer privacy or national security. They’re eager to deflect blame for decades of failures on consumer protection, to pretend they’re being “tough on China,” to agitate a xenophobic base, and if they’re really lucky, to offload TikTok’s ballooning billions in ad revenues to U.S.-based cronies (as Trump indicated was his intention from the start).

Filed Under: chinese, data brokers, moral panic, privacy, privacy legislation, social media, surveillance, tiktok ban
Companies: tiktok

Pokémon Anime Community Up In Arms As ShoPro Issues Copyright Strikes On YouTubers

Copyright

from the collect-all-the-dmca-abuses dept

Searching out stories we have done on intellectual property conflicts surrounding the Pokémon franchise will give you no shortage of results. Part of that is that there is simply a ton of content out there: books, cards, video games, animated TV shows, movies, and mobile games. It is also the case that there are a ton of rightsholders to all of these different content categories and many of them are quite aggressive when it comes to intellectual property. I mean, Nintendo’s involved, so how could it be otherwise?

But like I said, Nintendo isn’t alone on this. ShoPro is the publishing house for the Pokémon animated series. ShoPro is also at the center of a copyright strike blitz that has caught up a whole bunch of YouTubers engaging in very clear fair use of stills from the anime in order to discuss episodes.

As explained in a Twitter post by Pokeferlax, YouTubers using still images from the Pokémon anime have found themselves hit with a sudden barrage of copyright strikes. This has resulted in the removal of their content from the platform.

While YouTube responded to that tweet stating that it would look into the issue, Pokeferlax’s YouTube channel has basically had all of its content removed as of the time of this writing. Other YouTubers have also chimed in stating that they’re dealing with similar copyright strike issues.

Now, what is important to keep in mind when it comes to the Pokémon community and the franchise’s popularity is that it thrives on the exact kind of commentary content these YouTubers are engaged in. Be it for the games or the shows, the Pokémon fanbase is a rabid one and part of the reason for that is all of the engagement the community has with one another.

In other words, ShoPro’s actions are harmful to its own product. Or, certainly more harmful than the use of some still images of the show in a YouTube video.

Fans in the comments are outraged, encouraging those affected to attempt contacting ShoPro for an explanation. The accounts experiencing strikes repeatedly state that they are not in violation of YouTube’s Fair Use requirements, but three strikes result in the complete removal of the offending account. Because of this, many content creators are at risk of losing years worth of work.

Additionally, Twitter and YouTuber user, CoreySpikeChase, has made a video in response to the copyright strikes against Pokemon Anime accounts, stating, “ShoPro, YOU Are Hurting Your Fans & Community! STOP THIS NOW!”

Perhaps ShoPro will get the hint and stop cutting off their nose to spite their face. After all, I have heard that actually being human and treating your biggest fans well is, ahem, super effective.

Filed Under: copyright abuse, dmca, fair use, pokemon
Companies: shopro, youtube