There’s a long way to go before the electric car revolution even comes close to the version that currently exists in everybody’s heads. Getting enough rare-Earth minerals to ramp up EV production at the scale most have in mind will be a big challenge. Then there are other issues related to safety thanks to EVs’ incredible acceleration combined with higher-end EVs incredible weight.
One less dramatic challenge created by the inevitable ascension of the EV has emerged: vehicles don’t always play well with AM radio. As a result, many automakers are considering eliminating AM radio from electric vehicles entirely, marking the end of, or at least some meaningful shrinkage in, overall AM radio usage.
Since EVs generate more electromagnetic interference than gas-powered cars, they can potentially disrupt the reception of AM signals causing static, noise and an annoying hum. This could be managed with shielding cables, filters and careful placement of the electrical components, but Tesla, Audi, Porsche, Volvo, and Volkswagen have found it more economical to cull AM radio functionality from EVs entirely.
FM radio doesn’t appear to have the same interference issues and should be safe. But AM broadcasters aren’t particularly thrilled about it, often arguing that AM radio remains an important communications medium for minority communities and during emergencies:
“It’s a killer for us because most of our listening audience is in the morning drive and afternoon drive, when people are going to work and coming from work — and if we’re not there in their car, we’re nonexistent,” said Ron January, operations manager at WATV-AM, an adult contemporary station in Birmingham, Ala.
Roughly 47 million Americans, or around 20 percent of the total U.S. public, still listen to AM radio, whether it’s religious programming, actual local community news, or right-wing propaganda. But between AM’s aging core userbase, AM radio’s steady decline in Europe, and the shift away from it in EVs, the medium’s days as a mainstream technology could be numbered.
It’s no surprise the government cheats when it prosecutes people. Judge Jed Rakoff pointed this out while resigning from the DOJ’s Forensic Science Committee when it became clear the DOJ was not interested in rooting out junk science. He called the government’s refusal to allow defendants to examine forensic means and methods “trial by ambush.”
Judge Kozinski called out federal prosecutors in one of his opinions, noting the “epidemic of Brady violations” being committed by those supposedly on the justice side of the justice system. From what Kozinski had observed, the government routinely put its finger on the scales of justice by withholding exculpatory evidence from criminal defendants.
Now, there’s this, via the Justice Building blog: a federal judge raking prosecutors over the coals trying to secure a win with flagrant cheating.
The order [PDF] granting a new trial is jaw dropping. While cheating is commonplace, it’s rarely been this thoroughly exposed.
The backstory is this: four defendants were notified they were targets of a fraud investigation involving allegedly bogus sweepstakes. The four targets hired lawyers and signed a Joint Defense Agreement that gave the four defendants access to all defense information. If any of the defendants decided to strike out on their own, they needed to give advance notice and return any shared information obtained from other defendants and their lawyers.
Nearly a year after they were indicted, and following several joint defense meetings, the other three defendants learned a superseding indictment with a lesser charge had been filed against John Leon. They also learned Leon had signed a plea agreement and was cooperating with the government. However, none of this was learned from Leon directly, who had attended meetings with the government and shared privileged information he had obtained from the joint defense meetings.
The remaining defendants filed a motion to dismiss their indictments based on the government’s surreptitious, second-hand surveillance of their defense efforts. The federal prosecutors arrived in court to fight this motion, claiming they had no idea their informant had actually been spying on his fellow defendants and their defense team.
The Government was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorneys H. Ron Davidson and Elijah Levitt. At that hearing, the Government disclosed that it began discussing with Leon the possibility of his cooperation on January 20, 2016. Leon signed the plea agreement on February 17, 2016, during a meeting with the Government (the “February Debrief”). The hearing further revealed that Leon met with the Government and was debriefed on at least one occasion. While meeting with the Government and providing information pursuant to his plea agreement, Leon and his attorney, Omar Guerra Johansson (“Johansson”), continued to meet with Pisoni, Pradel, Ramirez, and their lawyers, acting as if Leon was still part of the JDA. During those meetings, confidential information was discussed by the defendants and their attorneys. In its pleadings and at the evidentiary hearing, the Government repeatedly told the Court that it did not know about the meetings that Leon continued to have with his co-defendants and their lawyers and that the Government did not receive any privileged material.
The court didn’t necessarily buy this version of the events, but decided dismissal was too extreme a remedy because the government had independent sources for much of the privileged information it had gathered from Leon.
The defendants fought back, demanding access to evidence supporting the government’s assertions it was unaware Leon was passing on privileged information to prosecutors. The court ordered the government to produce this information. Meanwhile, the three defendants were convicted during a jury trial and sentenced.
With all of this out of the way, the government suddenly changed its story. A post-conviction review apparently carried out by the participating AUSAs’ (Assistant US Attorney) superiors uncovered evidence contradicting the AUSAs’ original statements to the court.
In this first of what would be several disclosures, the Government revealed that contrary to the testimony and arguments it previously made to the Court, the Government had, in fact, obtained written documents from Leon during the February Debrief, including handwritten notes and the “Timeline” discussed at the evidentiary hearing.
The trickle became a waterfall.
Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Attorney’s office removed AUSAs Davidson and Levitt from the case, and new Government counsel took over. These new prosecutors made additional significant disclosures, including the following: (1) a February 22-23, 2016 email chain between the prosecution team in which AUSA Levitt referenced a document provided by Leon to the Government at the February Debrief and stated that “the document was prepared in a private setting as an outline to cover their joint defense and contains information that Mr. Leon would not have had but for Mr. Pradel’s assistance[,]” to which Agent Burnham responded that “[w]e can make sure that Leon communicates to us verbally everything of importance[,]”; and (2) statements from Leon and Johansson to the OPR investigators that the Government, specifically Agent Masmela and AUSA Davidson, was aware of several defense meetings that Leon secretly attended and that Leon’s attendance was approved by the Government in advance. These disclosures revealed that the Government knowingly provided materially inaccurate information to the Court during the pretrial proceedings
Jesus. This is the government flipping a defendant and using him to completely undermine the defense of the other defendants. This is ethically and morally wrong. And the involved AUSAs not only encouraged it, they pretty much engaged in parallel construction to launder the illicitly obtained information. And they engaged in their own conspiracy to subvert any reasonable definition of “justice” to hopefully score an easy win.
Then, when confronted, they lied to the court.
These documents revealed that the prosecution team knew that Leon was providing them with information he received from the other defendants and their lawyers; that AUSA Davidson and Agent Masmela personally approved each of Leon’s meetings with his co-defendants and their lawyers despite the JDA, even though Davidson told the Court otherwise; that the prosecutors were fully aware of, and openly discussed, the existence of the JDA before they argued to the Court that they did not know of its existence; that the Government knowingly received and had in its possession the written Timeline and a set of handwritten notes from Leon containing joint defense information; and that the prosecution team had multiple communications about these documents in the months leading up to the hearings, yet testified and argued to the Court that they had nothing.
The court paraphrases the government’s attempts to mislead the judge about its malfeasance, each time landing a solid blow.
During the pretrial proceedings, the Government repeatedly told the Court that its actions were not improper because it did not know of any meetings other than the first, and that it followed a policy of deliberately failing to learn whether Leon was meeting with the others.
Just lie after lie.
These assertions were knowingly false when made.
And more lies, now spreading further than this courtroom.
The unfortunate truth is that the prosecution team lied to the Court about Leon’s cooperation in their attempt to avoid dismissal of the Indictment and their disqualification. And this deception was not limited to the Court. AUSA Davidson also misled defense counsel and Government investigators.
AUSA Davidson also tried to throw a fellow employee under the judicial bus when it became clear this just wasn’t going to go away.
At around this time, according to Agent Masmela, AUSA Davidson was “basically trying to do a CYA” and suggested to Masmela that he should write a report taking responsibility for having authorized Leon’s invasions when in fact it was Davidson who had authorized them.
The order goes on to list seven other knowingly false statements made by prosecutors when confronted by the court during the evidentiary hearing. Those lies allowed the other three defendants to proceed towards guilty verdicts while the prosecutors hid evidence of their wrongdoing.
Shockingly, throughout the entirety of the pretrial proceedings, the Government lied to the Court about its possession of privileged materials even though the prosecution team discussed this issue leading up to the motion to dismiss hearings.
New trials, led by new prosecutors are on the way. And, as the court notes in its conclusion, it’s far from assured the government can secure a second win without cheating.
Had the Court been aware of the Government’s knowing receipt of privileged information and the extent of the Government’s purposeful invasion of the defense camp, it would have at least granted the motion to disqualify the prosecution team that tried the case. The Court also finds that the Government’s misconduct had a direct bearing on the jury’s verdict. Notably, the jury only found Pisoni, Pradel, and Ramirez guilty of a single conspiracy count and acquitted them of all remaining counts, including all the substantive counts. No reasonable person could conclude that the Government’s limited victory was not influenced by the privileged information it improperly received. This goes directly to the fairness of the trial and provides reasonable grounds to question the integrity of the proceedings.
Single counts, but each one worth between 78-84 months. That’s 6.5-7 years of freedom that might have been taken away from three different people if the government’s lies and cheating hadn’t been exposed. There’s a good chance the government may decide it’s not even worth running a second trial, given that the first was irreparably tainted and that its evidentiary options will have to steer clear of the privileged information utilized in the first one.
And while Musk’s fans have been (hilariously, frankly) trying to defend these decisions by (1) claiming this is somehow “different” because it’s about “safety” — an argument we cleanly debunked this morning — and (2) saying it’s okay because the “liberal” media are now screaming about censorship and free speech, so it’s all hilarious since everyone is switching positions. Except, I haven’t seen much of that supposed “switch.” Lots of people are pointing out that the reasons stated for these suspensions have been silly. And many more people are highlighting how hypocritical the statements and decisions made by Musk are. But most people readily recognize that he has every right to make dumb and hypocritical decisions.
There are a few, however, who do seem to be taking it further. And they should stop, because it’s nonsense. First up we have the EU, where the VP of the European Commission, Vera Jourova, is warning Musk that there will be consequences.
That’s her saying:
News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying. EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct. @elonmusk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.
But being banned from private property doesn’t impact “media freedom or fundamental rights.” And it’s silly for Jourova to claim otherwise. No one has a “right” to be on Twitter. And even if the journalism bans are pathetic and silly (and transparently vindictive and petty) that doesn’t mean he’s violated anyone’s rights.
Some in the US are making similar claims, even though the 1st Amendment (backed up by Section 230) clearly protects Musk’s ability to ban whoever he wants for any reason whatsoever. Yet Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Context Next, a trade organization of “digital media companies” — but which, in practice, often seems notably aligned with the desires of Rupert Murdoch’s news organizations — demanded Congressional hearings if Musk did not “fix this within an hour” (referencing the journalist suspensions).
But that’s silly. Again, his decisions are protected by the 1st Amendment. It’s his property. He can kick anyone out. Just like Fox News can choose not to put anyone on air who would call bullshit on “the big lie” or Rupert Murdoch. That’s their editorial freedom.
And I’d bet that if Congress hauled Lachlan Murdoch in for a hearing to demand he explain to them his editorial decision making practices for Fox News, Kint would be highlighting the massive 1st Amendment-connected chilling effects this would have on any of his member news organizations.
We can mock Musk’s decisions. We can highlight how nonsensical they are. We can pick apart his excuses and the ramblings of his fans and point out how inconsistent they are. But Musk has every right to do this, and that’s exactly how it should be. Getting government involved with editorial decisions leads down a dangerous road.
Every so often, Techdirt writes about the long-standing problem of orphan works, the huge collection of older creations that are out of circulation and have no obvious owners. Arguably, they should be called “hostage works”, since they remain uselessly locked away by rigid and outdated copyright laws, to no one’s benefit. Despite that, the copyright industry always fights hard against the outrageous idea that we should make it easier to bring these works back into circulation, where people can enjoy and use them.
One of the worst results of that attitude is the EU Orphan Works Directive, passed ten years ago. It started out as an honest attempt to free hostage works for the benefit of society. But along the way, the copyright industry lobbied long and hard to make the resulting law so bad as to be useless. One minor concession granted to the many critics of the final text was that the European Commission was required to submit a report by 29 October 2015 on how the Directive was working. The Commission has finally published the report (pdf) – a mere seven years late. It’s hard not to feel that the Commission delayed the publication of the report as much as possible because it is so damning. Here’s the key finding:
orphan works make up a large share of the collections of cultural heritage institutions. However, 8 years after the transposition deadline, the Directive has been rarely applied in practice. Stakeholders are divided on whether the Directive has led to improvements in the digitisation and dissemination of orphan works. The use of the exception provided by the Directive to digitise and disseminate orphan works seems to be very limited if the low number of recorded works in the EUIPO database is taken as the benchmark.
In other words, the Directive has been an embarrassing failure. Far from leading to a blossoming of culture through the renewed availability of orphan works as its original supporters hoped, it has become the legislative equivalent of abandonware. The report goes on to explain that the main reason the Directive has failed is that the process of liberating a hostage work is too “burdensome”. That’s a direct result of the copyright industry insisting on all kinds of unreasonable limitations and disproportionate “safeguards”, supposedly to stop the release of orphan works somehow undermining copyright. They were, in fact, conscious impediments designed to make the entire Directive so awkward to use that no one would bother. The belated European Commission report confirms that they have worked.
The 2023 CISSP Security and Risk Management Training Bundle has 8 courses to help you prepare for 8 different CISSP certification exams. CISSP is the gold standard for security certifications. It covers the breadth of information security’s deep technical and managerial concepts. You’ll be learning to effectively design, engineer, and manage the overall security posture of an organization. The bundle is on sale for $40.
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.
Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It’s how it always goes.
Remember Parler? They promised that they would moderate “based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States” (a nonsensical statement for a variety of reasons, including that the FCC does not regulate websites). Then, as soon as people started abusing that on the site, they suddenly came out with, um, new rules, including no “posting pictures of your fecal matter.”
Or how about Gettr? Founded by a former Trump spokesperson, and funded by a sketchy Chinese billionaire, it promised to be a “free speech” haven. Then it had to ban a bunch of white nationalists for, you know, doing white nationalist shit. Then, suddenly, it started banning anyone who mentioned that the sketchy billionaire funder might actually be a Chinese spy.
And then there’s Truth Social. It’s also supposed to be all about free speech, right? That’s what its pitch man, Donald Trump, keeps insisting. Except, an actual study that compared its content moderation to other sites found that Truth Social’s moderation was far more aggressive and arbitrary than any other site. Among the forbidden things to “truth” about on Truth Social? Any talk of the Congressional hearings on January 6th. Much freedom. Very speech.
So, look, it’s no surprise that Musk was never actually going to be able to live up to his notoriously fickle word regarding “free speech” on Twitter. I mean, we wrote many, many articles highlighting all of this.
But, really, it would be nice if he didn’t then insult everyone’s intelligence about this and pretend that he’s still taking some principled righteous stand. It would be nice if he admitted that “oh shit, maybe content moderation is trickier than I thought” and maybe, just maybe, “Twitter actually had a really strong and thoughtful trust & safety team that actually worked extremely hard to be as permissive as possible, while still maintaining a website that users and advertisers liked.” But that would require an actual ability to look inward and recognize mistakes, which is not one of Elon’s strongsuits.
“Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Irwin said. “We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”
Yeah… that’s not what people are complaining about. They weren’t saying journalists should get special treatment for breaking the rules. They’re asking how the fuck did what these journalists posted break the rules?
Eventually Musk jumped on Twitter, of course, and like Irwin, tried to pretend that they were just making sure the rules applied equally to journalists as to everyone else. Except… that was always the case? The issue was that yesterday, they created new laughably stupid rules to ban an account tweeting publicly available information regarding Elon Musk’s jet. Then Musk took it further and claimed that this (again) publicly available information was “assassination coordinates.”
Well, except for a few minor details. First, he just fucking changed the terms of service to shut down the jet tracker, and made them so broad and vague that tons of tweets would violate the rule — including anyone using Twitter’s built-in location indicator to tweet a photo of someone else. Second, the location of his plane is public information. It’s not “assassination coordinates.” If Musk is worried about getting assassinated, hiding this account isn’t going to help, because the assassin will just go straight to the ADS-B source and get the data anyway. Third, I get that Musk claims his child was in a car that was attacked the other night, but there remain some open questions about that story. For example, the location where it occurred, as deduced by BellingCat, was not close to any airport.
Given that, it’s not at all clear how this is connected to the jet tracking service.
Furthermore, the LAPD put out a statement on this:
LAPD’s Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet.
Which, you know, seems notable. Because if a stalker actually went after him, you’d think that rather than just posting about it on social media, he might contact the police?
But, most importantly, none of the journalists in question actually posted “real time” assassination coordinates for Musk. They had posted about this whole story having to do with content moderation decisions made by Musk. Hell, one of the journalists, Donie Sullivan, got banned for tweeting that LAPD statement.
So, yeah, it’s not about “equal treatment” for journalists. It’s about coming up with bullshit arbitrary rules that just so happen to ban the journalists who have been calling out all the dumb shit Elon has been doing. Which, you know, was the kinda thing Elon insisted was the big problem under the last regime, and insisted he was brought in to solve.
From there it got even worse. A bunch of journalists, including a few of those who were banned (who, for unclear reasons were still able to log into Twitter Spaces, the real-time audio chat feature of Twitter) began discussing all of this, and Elon Musk showed up to… well… not quite defend himself? But, uh, to do whatever this was:
It starts with (banned) Washington Post journalist Drew Harwell asking a pretty good journalistic question:
One, I don’t think anyone in this room supports stalking. I’m sorry to hear about what happened with your family. Do you have evidence connecting the incident in LA with this flight tracking data? And separately, if this is an important enough issue to you, why not enact the rule change on Twitter and give accounts like Jack Sweeney’s, time to respond to, like you said, a slight delay in providing the data? Why say last month that you would support keeping his account online for free speech and then immediately suspend not just his account, but journalists reporting on it?
Unfortunately, before Elon could say anything, another reporter, Katie Notopoulos from Buzzfeed (who started the Twitter Space) jumped in with, perhaps, a less well composed question (this isn’t criticism — coming up with questions on the spot is difficult — but I do wonder what would have happened if Musk had been allowed to respond directly to Drew’s question).
Elon, thank you for joining, I am hoping that you can give a little more context about what has happened in the last few hours with a handful of journalists being banned?
Elon then says a lot of nonsense, basically just that “doxing is bad and anyone who has been threatened should agree with this policy.”
Well, as I’m sure everyone who’s been doxed would agree, showing real-time information about somebody’s location is inappropriate. And I think everyone would not like that to be done to them. And there’s not going to be any distinction in the future between so-called journalists and regular people. Everyone is going to be treated the same—no special treatment. You dox, you get suspended. End of story.
And ban evasion or trying to be clever about it, like “Oh, I posted a link — to the real-time information,” that’s obviously something trying to evade the meaning, that’s no different from actually showing real-time information.
I mean, a lot of this is kind of infuriating. Because many of the bans that happened in the last regime, and which Musk got so mad about, were also about putting people in danger. And Musk seems singularly concerned only when he’s the target. Over the weekend, he posted some incredibly misleading bullshit about his former head of trust & safety, Yoel Roth, taking an old tweet and a clip from his dissertation and acting as if both said the literal opposite of what Roth was saying in them (in both cases, Yoel was actually highlighting issues regarding keeping children safe from predators, and Elon and legions of his fans pretended he was doing the opposite, which is just trash). Following that, a large news organization that I will not name posted a very clear description of Yoel’s home, and tweeted out a link with those details. That tweet still is on Twitter today, and Yoel and his family had to flee their home after receiving very credible threats.
Again, I repeat, the tweet that identified his home is still on Twitter today. And Elon has done nothing about it.
So spare me the claim that this is about “inappropriate” sharing of information. None of the information the journalists shared was inappropriate, and Musk himself has contributed to threats on people’s lives.
As for the whole ban evasion thing, well, that’s also nonsense, but there’s more. Notopoulos asked another question:
When you’re saying, ‘posting a link to it,’ I mean, some of the people like Drew and Ryan Mac from The New York Times, who were banned, they were reporting on it in the course of pretty normal journalistic endeavors. You consider that like a tricky attempted ban evasion?
To which Musk responded:
You show the link to the real-time information – ban evasion, obviously.
So, again, that’s not at all what “ban evasion” means. The ban was on the information. Not a link to an account. Or a reporter talking about an article that links to an account. Or a reporter talking about a police report that very loosely kinda connects to the account.
And, again, banning links to the media was the thing that I thought Musk and his fans were completely up in arms about regarding the ban on the link to the NY Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Remember? It was like a week ago that it was a “huge reveal” by Elon Musk and his handpicked reporters, who apparently revealed what was the crime of the century and possibly treason when Twitter banned a link over worries of harm. Drew Harwell, finally getting a chance to ask a question, got into this slightly awkward exchange where the two seem to be talking about different things, but Drew is making the point comparing it to the NY Post thing:
Drew: You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true. I never posted your address.
Elon: You posted a link to the address.
Drew:In the course of reporting about ElonJet, we posted links to ElonJet, which are now banned on Twitter.Twitter also marks even the Instagram and Mastodon accounts of ElonJet as harmful. We have to acknowledge, using the exact same link-blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden-New York Post story in 2020. So what is different here?
Elon: It’s not more acceptable for you than it is for me. It’s the same thing.
Drew: So it’s unacceptable what you’re doing?
Elon: No. You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That’s it.
And with that “end of story” he left the chat abruptly, even as others started asking more questions.
So that whole exchange makes no sense. They’re clearly talking past each other, and Elon is so focused on the “journalists doxing!” that he can’t even seem to comprehend what Drew is actually asking him there, which is comparing it to the NY Post thing.
And, of course, it also seems relevant to the January 6th/Donald Trump decision, which Musk has also roundly criticized. One of Musk’s buddies, Jason Calacanis, was also in the space defending Musk, and I only heard bits and pieces of it because (1) Twitter Spaces kept kicking me out and (2) before the Space ended, Twitter took all of Spaces offline, meaning that the recording isn’t available (Musk is claiming on Twitter that it’s a newly discovered bug, though tons of people are assuming, as people will do, that Musk pulled the plug to get the journalists to stop talking about him).
However, on Twitter, Calacanis tweeted what he insisted was a simple message:
It’s just so obvious to everyone: don’t dox or stalk anyone.
Someone will get hurt or worse.
💕Be good to each other💕
If you are splitting hairs on the definition of these words, or claiming it’s public information, you’re missing the basic human concept here: people’s safety.
But, again, this brings us right back around to the top of the story. “It’s just so obvious” is a traditional part of this content moderation learning curve. It always seems so obvious that, “sure, this speech is legal, but man, it seems so bad, we gotta take it down.” In this case, it’s “don’t stalk the billionaire CEO” (which, yeah, don’t do that shit).
But this is how content moderation works. There’s a reason the role is called “Trust & Safety” because you’re trying to weigh different tradeoffs to make things trustworthy and safe. But Musk hasn’t been doing that. He seems only focused on his own safety.
And Calacanis’s claim that people are “missing the basic human concept here: people’s safety” well… that brings me to January 6th and Twitter’s decision to ban Trump. Because, you know, as Twitter explained publicly at the time and was re-revealed recently in Musk’s “Twitter Files,” this was exactly the debate that went on inside Twitter among its executives and trust & safety bosses.
They looked at the riot at the Capitol where people literally died, and which the then President seemed reluctant to call off, realized that there was no guarantee he wouldn’t organize a follow up, decided that “people’s safety” mattered here, and made the hard call to ban Trump. To protect people’s safety.
Now, you can criticize that decision. You can offer alternative arguments for it. But there was a rationale for it, and it’s the exact same one Musk and his team are now using to justify these bans. But we’re not seeing the screaming and gnashing about how this is “against free speech” or whatever from Musk and his supporters. We’re not likely to see Musk have Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss do a breathless expose on his internal DMs while all this went down.
That’s what’s hypocritical here.
(And we won’t even get into Musk going back on his other promise that they wouldn’t do suspensions any more, just decreased “reach” for the “bad or negative” tweets).
Every website that has third party content has to do moderation. Every one. It’s how it works. And every website has the right to moderate how they want. That’s part of their editorial discretion.
Musk absolutely can make bad decisions. Just like the previous Twitter could (and did). But it would be nice if they fucking realized that they’re doing the same damn thing, but on a much flimsier basis, and backed by utter and complete nonsense.
I asked Calacanis about the “public safety” issue and the Trump decision on Twitter, and got… a strange response.
In response he says:
I am a fan of using the blocking and mute tools for almost everything you don’t like at this joint.
Which, when you think about it, is a weird fucking response. After all, he was just going on and on about how it was righteous to ban a bunch of journalists because of “people’s safety.” But also that these problems can be solved by muting and blocking? So either he thinks Musk should have just muted and blocked all these reporters… or… what? It also does not actually respond to the question.
And, once again, we’re back to the same damn thing with content moderation at scale. Every decision has tons of tradeoffs. People are always going to be upset. But there are principled ways of doing it, and non-principled ways of doing it. And Elon/Jason are showing their lack of principles. They’re only trying to protect themselves, and seem to feel everyone else should just use “mute” and “block.”
Oh, and finally….
This post went on way longer than I initially intended it to, but there is an important postscript here. Last night, when we wrote about the banning of the @JoinMastodon account on Twitter, I actually downplayed the idea that it was about Team Musk being scared of a rapidly growing competitor. I was pretty sure it was because of the link to the @ElonJet account that was now working on Mastodon. And, that’s certainly the excuse that Musk and friends are still giving.
Buuuuut… there are reasons to believe it’s a bit more than that. Because as the evening wore on, Twitter basically started banning all links to any Mastodon server they could find. A bunch of people started posting examples. Some screenshots:
Those were just a few of many, many examples that can be found on both Twitter and Mastodon of Twitter effectively blocking any links to more high profile Mastodon servers (it appears that smaller or individual instances are still making it through).
Even more ridiculous, they’re banning people from updating their profiles with Mastodon addresses.
See that screenshot? It says “Account update failed: Description is considered malware.”
So, yeah, they’re now saying that if you put your Mastodon bio in your profile, it’s malware. Given that, it’s a little difficult to believe that this is all just about “public safety” regarding Elon stalkers, and not, perhaps, a little anti-competitive behavior on the part of an increasingly desperate Elon Musk.
We’ve written a bunch of posts concerning KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is one of those moral panic kinds of bills that politicians and the media love to get behind, without really understanding what they mean, or the damage they’d do. We’ve covered how it will lead to greater surveillance of children (which doesn’t seem likely to make them safer), how the vague language in the bill will put kids at greater risk, how the “parental tools” provision will be used to harm children, and a variety of other problems with the bill as well. There’s a reason why over 90 different organizations asked Congress not to slip it into a year-end must pass bill.
And while it didn’t make it into the NDAA bill, there are still some efforts to put it in the year end omnibus spending bill. Indeed, the sponsors of the bill quietly released a new version a few days ago that actually does fix some of the most egregious problems of the original. But… it’s still a mess, as TechFreedom’s Ari Cohn explained in a thread on Mastodon.
As his thread notes, there are still concerns about knowing which users are teenagers. The original bill would have effectively mandated age verification, which comes with massive privacy concerns. The new version changes it to cases where a site knows or should know that a user is under 18. But, what constitutes knowledge in that case, and what trips the standard for “should know?” The end result will still be a strong incentive for dodgy age verification, just so sites don’t need to go through the litigation hassle of proving that they didn’t, or shouldn’t, have known the age of their users.
But, the much bigger problem is that the bill still has a “duty of care” component. This was core to the original bill so it’s no surprise that it remains in place. As we’ve discussed for years, the “duty of care” is a “friendly sounding” way of violating the 1st Amendment. In this context, the bill requires sites to magically know if a kid is going to come to some harm from accessing some sort of content on their website. And, given the litigious nature of the US, as soon as any harm comes to anyone under the age of 18, websites will get sued (no matter how loosely they were connected to the actual harm), and they will have to litigate over and over again whether or not they met their “duty of care.”
The end result, most likely, is that websites basically start blocking any kind of controversial content, no matter how legal — and we’re right back to the issue of Congress trying to turn the internet into Disneyland, which is not healthy, takes away both parental and child autonomy, and does not prepare people for the real world.
The new KOSA tries to claim this won’t happen, because it says that nothing in the bill should be “construed to require a covered platform to prevent or preclude any minor from deliberately and independently search for, or specifically requesting, content.” But that won’t make any difference at all, if under the duty of care, the minors find that content, and then can later tie some future harm back to that content. So the real world effect of the law is absolutely going to be to stifle that legal content.
Even worse, lawyers will always stretch things as far as possible to make it possible to sue big pockets, even if they’re very distant from the actual harm. And, as Cohn, notes, the bill is so vaguely worded that the “harm” that can be sued over doesn’t even have to be connected to a minor accessing that content on the site. Rather… under the law as written, it appears that if there are minors on the site and separately, some harm occurs related to some content… KOSA is triggered. So even as the bill is supposedly about protecting children, as written, it can be used if it’s adults who are harmed in some manner, loosely tied to content on the site.
There’s a lot more in Ari’s thread that shows just how dangerous this bill is, even as its backers pretend they’ve fixed all the problems. And yet, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn are pleading with their colleagues to put it into the must pass omnibus spending bill.
This is a bill that will give them headlines, allowing them to pretend they’re helping kids, but which actually do tremendous harm to kids, parents, free speech and the internet. Sneaking it into a must pass bill suggests, yet again, that they know the bill is too weak to go through the normal process. The rest of Congress should not allow it to pass in this current state.
