President Of ‘Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings’ Party Fires Statistician For Reporting Facts That Hurt His Feelings

Failures

from the oh-the-garbage-man-can,-lisa dept

We’re becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn’t want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder for firing squads.

You’re getting the government you deserve, even if you claim you didn’t vote specifically for whatever new insanity might be hurting you personally at this moment in time. You wanted a demagogue and you got one — a man so incapable of handling the slightest bit of bad news, he feels compelled to go full Stalin the moment a factoid puts a slight dent in his self-perception as the Greatest Human Being Who Has Ever Walked The Face Of The Earth.

His party — and his enablers — spent years screaming into the faces of anyone questioning their mere humanity that “facts” were more important than “feelings.” But that was never true. Only facts that allowed them to be inhumane towards their fellow human beings mattered. All other facts should be ignored, buried, or misrepresented. And their top dude – King Shit himself — feels the same way. When the facts aren’t the facts he likes, they become subservient to his feelings.

So, when Department of Labor employment stats reflected the reality of six months of absolute financial psychopathy from President Trump, Trump decided the best response was to shoot the messenger. We can only take solace in the fact that he didn’t do this literally.

Behold the power of your Golden Calf, “we didn’t vote for this” asshats!

President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt.

In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data.

This reporting downplays the pure un-hingedness that is Trump’s actual social media post. The obvious outcome of massive tariffs (some threatened, some deployed) and the ejection of thousands of tax-paying, hardworking employees of US companies whose jobs will never be filled by the same white people claiming these jobs were “stolen” from them resulted in an outcome that would have been obvious to anyone who’s ever spent more than 5 minutes paying attention in an Economics class.

Job growth slowed because US manufacturers are finding that everything that isn’t uncertain is now certainly more expensive. And the ejection of more than 100,000 people from the work force via mass deportation efforts has left more holes than natural-born Americans willing to fill them.

Of course, Trump will never take the blame for anything that’s directly his fault. So he went to his own social media service to perform a public execution of the person bearing the inevitable bad news.

I’m going to quote it in full because I’m absolutely daring the Trump supporters who read this site to wade into the comment section with their defense of whatever the fuck this is:

I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This absolute coward and loser thinks job numbers are a political operation meant to make him look bad. But the numbers are what they are. While presidents have always been willing to apply spin to job numbers, no one until Trump has been willing to fire a Labor official simply for reporting facts.

Most GOP members are abject cowards. But at least a couple of them stepped up to criticize (however mildly) this transparently authoritarian action by Donald “My Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts” Trump:

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”

Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.

North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”

The biggest problem isn’t that Trump did this, although it is actually a serious problem. The biggest problem is that Trump did this despite it being immediately apparent this was done solely to punish someone for daring to publish facts that undermined the administration’s narrative on tariffs, mass deportation, and the alleged benefits of shitting the international bed on a regular basis.

But all the firings in the world won’t change the facts: the Trump administration is eviscerating everything that makes America great. And while it works towards the goal of creating a perpetual fascist state for Trump and his acolytes, it will steadily destroy everything that makes America operable. Trump will break this country and then declare his love for its corpse while fondling an American flag.

Filed Under: bullshit, bureau of labor, employment, erika mcentarfer, facts, loser energy, stats, trump administration

Daily Deal: EDU Unlimited by StackSkills

Deals

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

StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today’s most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you’ll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life! Whether you’re looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses featuring the skills that matter most today, both personally and professionally. From blockchain to growth hacking, to iOS development, StackSkills stays ahead of the hottest trends to offer the most relevant courses and up-to-date information. It’s on sale for $19.97.

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

Substack’s Algorithm Accidentally Reveals What We Already Knew: It’s The Nazi Bar Now

Failures

from the "we-think-you'll-also-like-nazi-content" dept

Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced their reputation as the Nazi bar.

Last week, we got a perfect demonstration of what happens when you build your platform’s reputation around welcoming Nazis: your recommendation algorithms start treating Nazi content as more than worth tolerating, to content worth promoting.

As Taylor Lorenz reported on User Mag’s Patreon account, Substack sent push notifications to users encouraging them to subscribe to “NatSocToday,” a newsletter that “describes itself as ‘a weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.'”

As you can see, the notification included the newsletter’s swastika logo, leading confused users to wonder why they were getting Nazi symbols pushed to their phones.

“I had [a swastika] pop up as a notification and I’m like, wtf is this? Why am I getting this?” one user said. “I was quite alarmed and blocked it.” Some users speculated that Substack had issued the push alert intentionally in order to generate engagement or that it was tied to Substack’s recent fundraising round. Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.

“I thought that Substack was just for diaries and things like that,” a user who posted about receiving the alert on his Instagram story told User Mag. “I didn’t realize there was such a prominent presence of the far right on the app.”

Substack’s response was predictable corporate damage control:

“We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” a spokesperson told User Mag. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused.”

But here’s the thing about algorithmic “errors”—they reveal the underlying patterns your system has learned. Recommendation algorithms don’t randomly select content to promote. They surface content based on engagement metrics: subscribers, likes, comments, and growth patterns. When Nazi content consistently hits those metrics, the algorithm learns to treat it as successful content worth promoting to similar users.

There may be some randomness involved, and algorithms aren’t perfectly instructive of how a system has been trained, but it at least raises some serious questions about what Substack thinks people will like based on its existing data.

As Lorenz notes, the Nazi newsletter that got promoted has “746 subscribers and hundreds of collective likes on Substack Notes.” More troubling, users who clicked through were recommended “related content from another Nazi newsletter called White Rabbit,” which has over 8,600 subscribers and “is also being recommended on the Substack app through its ‘rising’ leaderboard.”

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature working exactly as designed. Substack’s recommendation systems are doing precisely what they’re built to do: identify content that performs well within the platform’s ecosystem and surface it to potentially interested users. The “error” isn’t that the algorithm malfunctioned—it’s that Substack created conditions where Nazi content could thrive well enough to trigger promotional systems in the first place.

When you build a platform that explicitly welcomes Nazi content, don’t act surprised when that content performs well enough to trigger your promotional systems. When you’ve spent years defending your decision to help Nazis monetize their content, you can’t credibly claim to be “disturbed” when your algorithms recognize that Nazi content is succeeding on your platform.

The real tell here isn’t the push notification itself—it’s that Substack’s discovery systems are apparently treating Nazi newsletters as content worth surfacing to new users. That suggests these publications aren’t just surviving on Substack, they’re thriving well enough to register as “rising” content worthy of algorithmic promotion.

This is the inevitable endpoint of Substack’s content moderation philosophy. You can’t spend years positioning yourself as the platform that won’t “censor” Nazi content, actively help those creators monetize, and then act shocked when your systems start treating that content as editorially valuable.

This distinction matters enormously in terms of what sort of speech you are endorsing: there’s a world of difference between passively hosting speech and actively promoting it. When Substack defended hosting Nazi newsletters, they could claim they were simply providing infrastructure for discourse. But push notifications and algorithmic recommendations are something different—they’re editorial decisions about what content deserves amplification and which users might be interested in it.

To be clear, that’s entirely protected speech under the First Amendment as all editorial choices are protected. Substack is allowed to promote Nazis. But they should really stop pretending they don’t mean to. They’ve made it clear that they welcome literal Nazis on their platform and now it’s been made clear that their algorithm recognizes that Nazi content performs well.

This isn’t about Substack “supporting free speech”—it’s about Substack’s own editorial speech and what it’s choosing to say. They’re not just saying “Nazis welcome.” They’re saying “we think other people will like Nazi content too.”

And the public has every right to use their own free speech to call out and condemn such a choice. And use their own free speech rights of association to say “I won’t support Substack” because of this.

All the corporate apologies in the world can’t change what their algorithms revealed: when you welcome Nazis, you become the Nazi bar. And when you become the Nazi bar, your systems start working to bring more customers to the Nazis.

Your reputation remains what you allow. But it’s even more strongly connected to what you actively promote.

Filed Under: algorithms, association, chris best, nazis, neo-nazis, promotion, recommendations
Companies: substack

Politico’s Rushed Adoption Of Half-Cooked ‘AI’ Continues To Go Terribly

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept

We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.

The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) or G/O Media aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.

This sort of behavior has been particularly problematic at the DC gossip rag Politico, where ownership continues to implement “AI” systems that don’t really work all that well, constantly introduce new errors human editors have to correct, and engage in “behavior” that violates editorial standards. All without the input and knowledge of actual journalists or editors.

This rundown on the Politico AI mess by Brian Merchant is worth a read. He documents how in one instance, Politico Editorial staff were told just an hour before a new AI product was introduced, given zero chance to ask questions about how it would work, why it was there, or why it was being launched. The tech then immediately proceeded to make a bunch of embarrassing, rookie mistakes:

“The AI promptly generated a post that misspelled Kamala Harris’s mother’s name. The entry was taken down without comment or correction from an editor, in apparent violation of Politico’s editorial standards. Weeks later, Politico’s management deployed the AI tool again, this time in an even higher-profile setting: The vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. The feature again trampled editorial guidelines, this time transcribing verbatim Vance’s comments about “illegal immigrants”—a term that Politico writers are not allowed to use, and editors are not supposed to publish.”

Politico management introduced another AI “report builder” for premium Politico PRO subscribers. It’s supposed to offer a breakdown of existing Politico reporter analysis of complicated topics. Apparently the “AI” sucks at doing that, as well:

“It’s wholly behind the paywall, but when we have asked it things, it’s giving us back some pretty glaring errors,” [Politico journalist Ariel] Wittenberg says. “I asked it about ‘The Impact of President Biden’s Oil Policies,’ and it wrote me a whole page-and-a half thing, and every single policy it mentioned was a policy of Trump’s. And it cited real stories at the very bottom, from our members, the implication being that if someone is reading this, and it’s erroneous, not only does our AI not know the difference between Biden’s policies and Trump’s, but maybe the authors of the cited articles didn’t, either.”

Great stuff! This reflects the same experiences with other major media outlets that expect LLMs to genuinely understand their own outputs. You’ll recall that Apple had to pull its AI news synopses system because the AI routinely introduced glaring mistakes; VC “AI” marketing has many execs believing we’re just a few steps from full sentience, when these systems are still struggling with the very basics.

We’ve seen the same nonsense over at Microsoft, which was so keen to leverage automation to lower labor costs and glom onto ad engagement that they rushed to implement AI across the entirety of their MSN website, never really showing much concern for the fact the automation routinely produced false garbage. Google’s search automation efforts have been just as sloppy and reckless.

Again, the “automation” in this instance is also a direct reflection of the quality of Politico’s ownership, who likes Trump and actively embraces lazy “both sides” journalism that buries the truth in pursuit of fake ideological objectivity. It’s not any sort of coincidence that owners who don’t care about journalism, transparency, labor, or factual reality introduce broken tools that harm all four.

In this case, the introduction of the new automation wasn’t just rushed and lazy, it was in direct violation of the editorial union’s contract struck just last year. So union employees have since been battling with Politico via arbitration:

A lot of affluent media owners have also just completely drunk the marketing Kool-Aid on modern “AI” as just a few skips away from full sentience; they genuinely believe modern LLMs are more capable than they actually are. And they’re soo keen on using this emerging technology to cut corners, “save money” and undermine and replace pesky unionized labor, they’re blind to the fact it often doesn’t work.

The CEO of Politico Owner Axel Springer, Mathias Döpfner, recently introduced a company wide mandate that every single employee in the organization has to not only use AI, but consistently file reports justifying why they don’t. This sort of stuff goes way past useful technological adoption and teeters into delusional religion, and the technology becomes a window into very ordinary human failures.

Filed Under: ai, automation, errors, journalism, labor, llms, mathias dopfner, media, politico, unions
Companies: axel springer, politico

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the on-the-grapevine dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults:

And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn’t find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE’s assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on the failure to push to trial, they note that a lot of the footage contradicted the testimony of the officers. The claims of assault turned out to be descriptions of the officers assaulting the protesters.

Remember this the next time someone comes into the comments clutching their pearls about assaults on our brave dedicated federal officers, bravely dedicated to assaulting people and lying about it.

In second place, it’s a simple anonymous comment about Axios’s approach to covering Trump:

Treating fact and fiction as equal sides is bias favoring fiction.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about copyright and AI:

The message here isn’t so much “support AI everything” as “‘limiting AI-generated free speech’ is a strict subset of ’limit free speech”.

If the AI thing isn’t substantially similar to any extant copyrighted work, or its derivation from copyrighted works is fair use, then it’s usually okay. It might be slop, it might be in poor taste, etc. but we shouldn’t sacrifice free speech on the altar of “but I don’t like that speech”, or you open up the option of censorship for whoever’s in power, which is currently more obviously a bad idea than usual.

Next, it’s iria64 with a comment about the installation of a “Bias Monitor” at CBS:

They should just call it what it is… “Political Officer”

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Strawb with a comment about Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters and his defensive response after broadcasting nudity to a meeting:

Why am I not surprised he doesn’t know what a naked woman looks like?

In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about the DHS using the Bible to pretend god hates migrants:

And God better keep pushing that narrative or Trump will sue him.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a reply from settsu to a comment about welfare handouts being popular among people who don’t pay taxes:

9 out of 10 billionaires heartily agree!

Finally, it’s another (this time anonymous) comment about Ryan Walters:

Hoist by his own pornhub.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: July 27th – August 2nd

Techdirt

from the that-was-that dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee spent over five hours asking mostly pointless questions of tech CEOs, and the notion of a TikTok ban rose to prominence then started moving forward quickly. We also saw the Internet Archive’s initial response to the publisher lawsuit against it, while one Canadian publisher decided it would be a good time to go to ward against libraries in general.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we saw some surprising criticism of the FBI’s push for encryption backdoors which then underwent some initially suspicious editorial oddities. The White House finally published an answer to the petition to pardon Edward Snowden, and we flagged a warning from Ron Wyden about the DOJ. Hollywood was ramping up its demands in the wake of the USTR getting fast track authority, a judge was asking questions about Malibu Media’s practices, and Warner Music was trying to muddy the waters around the Happy Birthday copyright. This was also the week that James Woods filed a $10 million lawsuit against a random Twitter user.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, the RIAA was defending its very expensive lawsuit tactics, ASCAP’s boss was turning down a debate with Larry Lessig and bizarrely calling it an attempt to silence him, Paramount was sending more bogus DMCA takedowns to fans who caught footage of a film shoot, and US Copyright Group was caught red-handed copying a competitor’s website. We were pleasantly surprised to see jailbreaking smartphones and noncommercial videos among the newly issued DMCA exemptions, then took a look at the things that didn’t make the cut. Also, we saw a grimly funny story of how copyright was finally destroying player piano music a century later.

Filed Under: history, look back

Smart Home Device Maker Renders Devices Dumb Unless A New Subscription Is Paid For

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the hostage-situation dept

This isn’t going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough when a company goes fully kablooey, has to shut down all their backend servers and gear, and renders their products useless. That sucks, there are ways around it, and it shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s quite different than perfectly healthy companies selling a product that has features and capabilities out of the box, only to claw back those capabilities and either shut them down or stick them behind some subscription paywall.

And that latter of those examples is what is happening again, this time from Futurehome, which makes a series of smarthome IoT products.

Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don’t pay up.

“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.

You also can’t get support from Futurehome without a subscription. “Most” paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says.

That would be potentially nearly a decade of a bought product working one way, only to have its core functionality tucked behind a subscription paywall on the whim of the company. This is one of those situations that, and I don’t care what country you live in, should elicit the common sense reaction of: this shouldn’t be fucking legal. But, due to the apathy of government and the steady erosion of anything remotely representing true consumer protection, this sort of thing is happening more and more frequently.

And it’s not as though all of this functionality requires support from backend company assets, either. Some do, sure, but some of the features that suddenly don’t work appear to have nothing to do with centralized corporate servers or services.

In response, a Reddit user, according to a Reddit-provided translation of the Norwegian post, said:

I can understand to some extent that they have to do it for services that have ongoing expenses, like servers (even though I actually think it’s their problem, not mine, that they didn’t realize this was a bad idea when they sold me the solution), but a local function that only works internally in the equipment I’ve already paid for shouldn’t be blocked behind a paywall.

So what’s the explanation here? Simple: money! Futurehome recently went through bankruptcy and is blaming that situation for why it needs to suddenly create a cash percolator among the customers that already bought its products with the expectations of the functionality with which they were sold. As always, the company has insisted the subscription fees will allow it to remain solvent and, as the evergreen promise goes, “fund product development, and provide high-quality support.” We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

As you’d expect, some people are attempting to figure out how to make Futurehome products work without the subscription. Perhaps as a result of that, Futurehome shut down its own user forum in June. In addition, the CEO is complaining about how the company now has to invest time and resources to fight its own customers’ attempts to make the products they bought work like they did at the time of purchase.

Futurehome has fought efforts to crack its firmware, with CEO Øyvind Fries telling Norwegian consumer tech website Tek.no, per a Google translation, “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

But is it as regrettable as your own customers suddenly finding out the thing they bought won’t work anymore because your company didn’t business well enough?

Filed Under: iot, ownership, smart devices, smarthub, subscription
Companies: futurehome

Creativity, The Fifth Freedom & Access To Knowledge

Culture

from the freedom-of-knowledge dept

This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological evolution while safeguarding the rights of creators and ensuring AI’s development serves the broader interests of society. You can read the first, second, third, and fourth posts in the series.

In April 2007, Janez Potočnik, then European Commissioner for Science and Research, introduced the concept of the Fifth Freedom: the “freedom of knowledge.” His vision was simple but ambitious—enhance Europe’s ability to remain competitive through knowledge and innovation, the cornerstones of prosperity. Fast forward to today, the momentum for this Fifth Freedom is building once again, with both the Letta Report and the Mission Letter of the new EU Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation emphasizing its significance.

But how does this freedom of knowledge intersect with creativity and copyright?

AI, Learning, and the Limits of Copyright

Machine learning (ML) systems learn in a way strikingly similar to humans—by observing and copying. This raises an important question: should ML systems be allowed to freely use copyrighted materials as part of their learning process? The answer is not just about technology; it goes to the heart of what copyright law aims to protect.

Traditionally, copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This is an important distinction because it allows others to take inspiration, innovate, and build upon ideas without infringing on someone else’s creative output. When an ML system is trained, it doesn’t care about specific creative choices—like the lighting or composition of a photo. It just wants to learn the underlying pattern, such as recognizing a stop sign. Similarly, a natural language model uses written text not because it appreciates the author’s unique writing style, but because it needs to learn the structure of language.

Humans also do this all the time. We often replicate expressions when learning, but our goal is not to plagiarize someone’s unique creative touch—it’s to grasp the idea behind it. This concept is embedded in many legal precedents. For instance, in the American Geophysical Union v. Texaco case, photocopying was used not for the beauty of the prose, but simply as a convenient way to access scientific ideas. Similar issues arise in cases about software interoperability, functional objects like clothing designs, and even in disputes over yoga routines. Copyright should protect creative expression—not the ideas, facts, or functional elements that underpin them.

Why This Matters for Machine Learning

This distinction is particularly important for ML. If we allow copyright law to get in the way of machines learning from data for purely non-expressive purposes, we’re potentially hampering technological advancement. Allowing ML systems to copy for learning—without trying to replicate the creative aspects of the original work—is essential for innovation. This is not just a matter of advancing technology but also of staying true to the spirit of copyright law, which is meant to balance the interests of creators and the public good.

However, as Professor Lemley has pointed out from a U.S. law perspective, the freedom for ML to learn should have limits. If an ML system is being trained to create a song that mimics the style of Ariana Grande, it’s no longer just about learning—it’s about copying a creative expression. In such cases, the question of whether it qualifies as fair use becomes much tougher. Yet, even here, it’s crucial that copyright doesn’t end up controlling unprotectable elements like a musical genre or a broad artistic style.

Finding the Balance: Innovation and Protection

The concept of the Fifth Freedom—freedom of knowledge—cannot thrive if copyright is used to restrict learning and innovation. We need a balanced approach: one that protects the hard work of creators, while ensuring that copyright doesn’t stifle the fundamental right to learn, innovate, and build upon existing knowledge. This is especially relevant now, as AI and machine learning shape the future of creativity and the knowledge economy in Europe. If we get this balance right, we can ensure that both creativity and innovation continue to flourish in the digital age.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur. She serves as Managing Director of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency, and Head of Research at Information Labs. Caroline specializes in digital rights, policy advocacy, and strategic innovation, driven by her commitment to fostering global connectivity and positive change.

Filed Under: access to knowledge, ai, copyright, creativity and ai, fifth freedom, freedom of knowledge, knowledge, machine learning

LinkedIn Joins The Parade Of Cowards: Quietly Strips Anti-Trans Protections To Appease MAGA Mob

Content Moderation

from the cowards dept

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited hateful content.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

The move is particularly cowardly because LinkedIn made the change with zero public announcement or explanation. When pressed by a reporter at The Advocate, the company offered the classic corporate non-answer: “We regularly update our policies” and insisted that “personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering, violates our harassment policy.”

But here’s the thing: if your policies haven’t actually changed, why remove the explicit protections? Why make it harder for users and moderators to understand what’s prohibited? The answer is as obvious as it is pathetic: LinkedIn is preemptively capitulating to political pressure in this era of MAGA culture war.

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

What makes this particularly infuriating is the timing. These companies aren’t even waiting for actual government threats. They’re just assuming that sucking up to the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda will somehow protect them from regulatory scrutiny. It’s the corporate equivalent of rolling over and showing your belly before anyone even raises their voice.

And it won’t help. The Trump administration will still target them and demand more and more, knowing that these companies will just roll over again.

And let’s be clear about what deadnaming and misgendering actually are: they’re deliberate acts of dehumanization designed to erase transgender people’s identities and make them feel unwelcome in public spaces. When platforms explicitly protect against these behaviors, it sends a message that trans people belong in these spaces. When they quietly remove those protections, they’re sending the opposite message. They’re saying “we don’t care about your humanity, and we will let people attack you for your identity.”

LinkedIn’s decision is especially disappointing because professional networking platforms should be spaces where people can present their authentic selves without fear of purely hateful harassment. Trans professionals already face discrimination in hiring and workplace environments. The last thing they need is for LinkedIn to signal that it’s open season for harassment on its platform.

The company is trying to argue that it still prohibits harassment and hate speech generally. But vague, general policies are much harder to enforce consistently than specific examples. When you remove explicit guidance about what constitutes anti-trans harassment, you make it easier for bad actors to push boundaries and harder for moderators to draw clear lines.

This is exactly the wrong moment for tech companies to be weakening protections for vulnerable communities. Anti-trans rhetoric and legislation have reached fever pitch, with the Trump administration making attacks on transgender rights a central part of its agenda. This is when platforms should be strengthening their commitment to protecting people from harassment, not quietly rolling back safeguards.

Sure, standing up for what’s right when there’s political pressure to do otherwise is hard. But that’s exactly when it matters most. These companies have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers. If anyone can afford to take a principled stand, it’s them.

Instead, we’re watching them fold like cheap suits at the first sign of political headwinds. They’re prioritizing their relationships with authoritarian politicians over the safety of their users. And they’re doing it in the most cowardly way possible: quietly, without explanation, hoping no one will notice.

The message this sends to transgender users is clear: you’re expendable. Your safety and dignity are less important than our political calculations. And that message isn’t just coming from fringe platforms or obvious bad actors—it’s coming from mainstream services owned by some of the world’s largest companies.

This isn’t just bad for transgender users. It’s bad for everyone who believes that online spaces should be governed by consistent principles rather than political opportunism. When platforms start making policy decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing, they undermine their own credibility and the trust users place in them.

Hell, for years, all we heard from the MAGA world was how supposedly awful it is when platforms make moderation decisions based on political pressure.

Where are all of those people now?

The irony is that these companies are probably making themselves less safe, not more. By signaling that they’ll cave to political pressure, they’re inviting more of it. Authoritarians don’t respect weakness—they exploit it.

LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and the rest need to understand: there’s no appeasing the anti-trans mob. No matter how many protections you strip away, it will never be enough. Stick to your principles and protect your users regardless of political pressure.

But instead of showing backbone, these companies are racing to see who can capitulate fastest. It’s a disgraceful display of corporate cowardice at exactly the moment when courage is most needed.

We all deserve better than watching supposedly values-driven companies abandon their principles the moment it becomes politically inconvenient to maintain them.

Filed Under: content moderation, deadnaming, harassment, hate speech, misgendering, prohibited conduct, trans
Companies: google, linkedin, meta, microsoft, youtube

He Was Asked About His Tattoos And A TikTok Video In Court. Five Days Later, He Was In A Salvadoran Prison.

Failures

from the the-cruelty dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

Filed Under: asylum, cecot, due process, el salvador, human trafficking, immigration, tattoos, torture, tren de aragua, venezuela