Logitech’s ‘Forever Mouse’ Idea Pulled Back After Backlash

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the forever-in-our-memories dept

It was just a few months ago that we had some fun with Logitech over it’s amazing, never been done before AI mouse… that was actually just a rehash of a previous mouse that had a button that could be used to launch a ChatGPT prompt. So it wasn’t so much an AI mouse, as a mouse that could button-click you to an AI prompt. To borrow a catchphrase from John Oliver… “cool.”

Well, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber went on the Decoder podcast recently to talk about some of the changes that were occurring at Logitech, as well as an idea for a new “forever mouse” that would come with a subscription cost for regular feature updates. This device would be built solidly, so as to allow for a longer lifespan than your typical mouse. But then came the question of how to fit a device with that kind of longevity into a business model.

I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?

Possibly.

And that would be the forever mouse?

Yeah.

So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.

Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today.

But it’s a mouse.

But it’s a mouse, yeah.

I think consumers might perceive those to be very different. 

Narrator: consumers perceived those to be very different. From both the public and tech journalists alike, the idea of a subscription-based optical mouse was lampooned viciously. And for good reason. The fatigue in the public for subscription sprawl is very, very real. As is the public’s ability to suss out when they’re being scammed. The idea that a peripheral like a mouse should come with a monthly subscription is obviously absurd on its face. I need my mouse to point and click at things and then, hey, maybe a couple of other features. I don’t need it to change. I don’t need it to download anything beyond any updates that will keep it working with my operating system. Point. And then click.

Ultimately, though, I think the main problem people might find with a forever mouse—which, let’s face it, is really just another way of saying a subscription mouse—is that many of us don’t like having to continually pay for something we used to just own. It’s already unsettling just how much of our digital space is offered as a service with a subscription rather than an up-front price tag, so do we really want our physical peripherals to join that list?

It’s a question it appears we don’t have to answer in the immediate. Logitech’s Nicole Kenyon released a statement that the company has no plans for any mouse that would require a subscription with it.

“There are no plans for a subscription mouse,” said Logitech communications head Nicole Kenyon in a statement provided to The Verge and other publications.

Now, Kenyon writes in response to inaccurate reports about the interview, Logitech’s stance is that “the mouse mentioned is not an actual or planned product but a peek into provocative internal thinking on future possibilities for more sustainable consumer electronics.”

“Inaccurate reporting.” Sorry, but no. At the very best, Faber was inarticulate or unclear in her statements as to whether this device or idea was planned or just some spitballed brainstorming result. And I don’t doubt for a second that if the public was silent about this idea, it would have made its way into production plans.

For now, it appears, we’ll have to stick with enjoying the “AI” mouse along with watching this retreat from the public mocking the company has undergone.

Governor To Students: ‘Look The Other Way’ If You’re Bothered By Mandated Posting Of Ten Commandments In Public Schools

Legal Issues

We fought a revolution for this?!?

This is the new America: a loose confederacy (yes, I’m using that correctly [and pointedly]) of states that desire to see us returned to the harsh reality our founding fathers (and colonists before them) left their homelands to escape. The shift of the so-called “conservative movement” to the extreme right has created a disturbingly large subset of state legislators and governors who seem to truly desire a return to the heady days of our pre-Revolution past.

The future of the Republican party under Trump (or any of his favored toadies) is a blend of theocracy and autocracy. Trump is more partial to the autocratic aspects, but has proven willing to ingratiate himself with theocracy superfans — supposed Christians willing to see past his narcissistic nihilism as long as their own bigotry and hatred is catered to.

That’s why this country is inundated with laws that seek to forbid social media companies from ejecting the more nauseous of so-called “conservative” mouthpieces. That’s why multiple states have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ people. That’s why legislators think now is the time to give cops more rights. That’s why several states gleefully greeted the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade with trigger laws that immediately eliminated long-held reproductive rights, even though most residents of these states never pushed for these trigger laws to be written in the first place. And that’s why we have law enforcement officers blundering into school classrooms and public libraries to find content they somehow believe is against the law.

All of the above applies to Louisiana. That’s why Louisiana has decided to reject a couple hundred years of precedent to add more church to its state. In late June, Governor Jeff Landry decided it was a good idea to make this an actual thing in one state of the United States of America.

Under the new law, all public K-12 classrooms and state-funded universities will be required to display a poster-sized version of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” next year.

Yeah, that’s not what we do here. (To date, it still is. Louisiana is [at press time! things could change!] the only state with a law like this on the books.) Separation of church and state has been a key aspect of this nation since its formation because the lack of this separation in England was the impetus for colonization of America, which led to its eventual overthrow of its British overseers.

Flash-forward to 2024 and somehow everything that was old and summarily rejected by this new nation is now cool and good.

While we’ve all seen plenty of performative laws enacted in recent years, there are few that reach this level of showmanship. And if you’re wondering why I’ve dragged Donald Trump into this (this means you, disingenuous commenters who seem to think my Trump-bashing is egregious and off-target), let’s just let the law, the legislators, and the Associated Press journalists speak for themselves:

Lawmakers backing the bill said during debate in May that the posters or funds to print them will likely be donated to schools in this deep Bible Belt state. Nationwide praise for the law from conservative groups and figures including, most recently, former President Donald Trump, could result in outside financial support for the mandate.

Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian conservative organization, has already created a page on its website for donations that “will be used specifically for the purpose of producing and distributing ‘10 Commandments’ displays to educational institutions around Louisiana.”

But the question of what happens if a school doesn’t receive enough donations has lingered for months with little clarity.

“So schools have the ability to raise the funds or they (the posters) can be donated. But, what if you can’t raise the funds or find a donor?” state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat who voted against the law, asked during debate on the legislation last month.

“I don’t know what happens then,” replied state Sen. Adam Bass, a Republican who co-authored the law.

Did you get all that? The law is praised by people (like Donald Trump) for being a good thing for America, even though no other state has imposed this same demand on their public schools. The mandate does not demand schools pay for these posters, suggesting instead the mandate will be complied with thanks to the help of “donors” who care so much about imposing their preferred religion on elementary school students, they’ll ensure no school suffers the negative outcomes of failing to comply with the new law.

But if the funding fails to appear and/or the school refuses to post the Ten Commandments, the punishments will include any portion of the following: “I don’t know what happens then.” And those are the words of one of the legislators who wrote the law.

So, there’s nothing in the law that would allow the state to enforce it. That is the very definition of “performative.” It makes dumb fucks like Trump stand up and holler but the law has no teeth, no value, and very few school administrators expressing their support for the mandate. The AP asked 55 schools for comment and received only two responses in favor of it. The rest of the schools made no comment. But the two supporting respondents are already outnumbered by the school officials willing to go on record as opposed to law and unwilling to punish any “failure” to plaster classroom walls with the state’s preferred religious beliefs.

And, of course, the law has already been hit with multiple lawsuits. It’s an easy win, given that it violates a very clear delineation of church and state that has been recognized by all courts everywhere for most of this country’s history.

But the state won’t let it go. Here’s the literally unbelievable response offered by state attorney general Liz Murrill, who is the person tasked with defending the law against these constitutional challenges. The first thing Murrill does is get the law wrong:

As kids in Louisiana prepare to return to school this month, state officials presented large examples of posters featuring the Ten Commandments that Attorney General Liz Murrill argues “constitutionally comply with the law.” The Republican said she is not aware of any school districts that have begun to implement the mandate, as the posters “haven’t been produced yet.”

Murrill said the court brief being filed, which was not immediately available, argues that “the lawsuit is premature and the plaintiffs cannot prove that they have any actual injury.”

I sincerely hope I’m not the first person to tell you this, Liz, but “actual injury” is not the legal standard in lawsuits like these. The potential for actual injury is enough to move these lawsuits forward. And it’s often more than enough to obtain, at the very least, a temporary injunction blocking the law from being enforced. And if the state can’t convince a court this incursion on constitutional rights is justified by a legitimate government function, the potential for harm can be enough to obtain a permanent injunction.

But that’s not even the stupidest thing that’s been said by Louisiana state officials about this law. This is the stupidest. And it fell right out of the mouth of none other than the governor himself, Jeff Landry:

When asked what he would say to parents who are upset about the Ten Commandments being displayed in their child’s classroom, the governor replied: “If those posters are in school and they (parents) find them so vulgar, just tell the child not to look at it.”

Oh. DO TELL. Let me know how that works out. Is it your firm belief that anyone who doesn’t like constitutional violations should just look the other way when they occur? What are you? A cop?

And is this really the stance you want to take? I mean, I don’t recall you telling semi-pro busybodies who think it’s their personal duty to rid libraries of expression they don’t like to simply “not look at” books they personally find offensive. I certainly haven’t heard any of your ilk telling people offended by things they see on the TV to just change the channel. No one aligned with your perverse view of church-state separation has ever told anyone raising a complaint about drag shows to just steer clear of these events.

That’s a clearly ludicrous suggestion. Gov. Landry is one of those people who thinks he should be able to force others to live by his personal moral standards. If you told him to just “not look at” things he finds sinful or offensive, he would tell you he’s abdicating his responsibility as a government leader, parent, member of society, or whatever. But when it’s a shit law he’s particularly fond of, he’s more than willing to tell people to ignore things they disagree with. And while it might be a good idea to do that when the stakes are low and it’s nothing more than subjective opinions in play, it’s makes absolutely no sense to pretend that’s an acceptable way to handle a clear constitutional violation.

These responses make it exceedingly clear that these are not serious people. They are not capable nor willing to provide actual leadership and/or do what’s best for all state residents. They only appear interested in catering to the basest members of their voter base: the people who are only happy when they’re making other people miserable while pretending they hold the moral high ground.

Filed Under: church and state, jeff landry, liz murrill, louisiana, petit theocracy, unconstitutional

UN Delegates Cheer As They Vote To Approve Increased Surveillance Via Russia-Backed Cybercrime Treaty

Legal Issues

from the why-are-we-even-doing-this? dept

For years now, the UN has been trying to strike a deal on a “Cybercrime Treaty.” As with nearly every attempt by the UN to craft treaties around internet regulation, it’s been a total mess. The concept, enabling countries to have agreed upon standards to fight cybercrime, may seem laudable. But when it’s driven by countries that have extremely different definitions of “crime,” it becomes problematic. Especially if part of the treaty is enabling one country to demand another reveal private information about someone they accuse of engaging in a very, very broadly defined “cybercrime.”

The UN structure means that the final decision-makers are nation-states, and other stakeholders have way less say in the process.

And, on Thursday, those nation-states unanimously approved it, ignoring the concerns of many stakeholders.

Some history: two years ago, we warned about how the proposed treaty appeared to be perfect for widespread censorship, as it included considering “hate speech” as a form of cybercrime it sought to regulate. Last year, we checked in again and found that, while updated, the proposed treaty was still a total mess and would lead to both the stifling of free expression and increased surveillance.

No wonder certain governments (Russia, China) loved it.

While the final treaty made some changes from earlier versions that definitely made it better, the end product is still incredibly dangerous in many ways. Human Rights Watch put out a detailed warning regarding the problems of the treaty, noting that Russia is the main backer of the treaty — which should already cause you to distrust it.

The treaty has three main problems: its broad scope, its lack of human-rights safeguards, and the risks it poses to children’s rights.

Instead of limiting the treaty to address crimes committed against computer systems, networks, and data—think hacking or ransomware—the treaty’s title defines cybercrime to include any crime committed by using Information and Communications Technology systems. The negotiators are also poised to agree to the immediate drafting of a protocol to the treaty to address “additional criminal offenses as appropriate.” As a result, when governments pass domestic laws that criminalize any activity that uses the Internet in any way to plan, commit, or carry out a crime, they can point to this treaty’s title and potentially its protocol to justify the enforcement of repressive laws.

In addition to the treaty’s broad definition of cybercrime, it essentially requires governments to surveil people and turn over their data to foreign law enforcement upon request if the requesting government claims they’ve committed any “serious crime” under national law, defined as a crime with a sentence of four years or more. This would include behavior that is protected under international human rights law but that some countries abusively criminalize, like same-sex conduct, criticizing one’s government, investigative reporting, participating in a protest, or being a whistleblower.

In the last year, a Saudi court sentenced a man to death and a second man to 20 years in prison, both for their peaceful expression online, in an escalation of the country’s ever-worsening crackdown on freedom of expression and other basic rights.

This treaty would compel other governments to assist in and become complicit in the prosecution of such “crimes.”

EFF also warned of how the treaty would be used for greater governmental surveillance:

If you’re an activist in Country A tweeting about human rights atrocities in Country B, and criticizing government officials or the king is considered a serious crime in both countries under vague cybercrime laws, the UN Cybercrime Treaty could allow Country A to spy on you for Country B. This means Country A could access your email or track your location without prior judicial authorization and keep this information secret, even when it no longer impacts the investigation.

Criticizing the government is a far cry from launching a phishing attack or causing a data breach. But since it involves using a computer and is a serious crime as defined by national law, it falls within the scope of the treaty’s cross-border spying powers, as currently written.

This isn’t hyperbole. In countries like Russia and China, serious “cybercrime” has become a catchall term for any activity the government disapproves of if it involves a computer. This broad and vague definition of serious crimes allows these governments to target political dissidents and suppress free speech under the guise of cybercrime enforcement.

Posting a rainbow flag on social media could be considered a serious cybercrime in countries outlawing LGBTQ+ rights. Journalists publishing articles based on leaked data about human rights atrocities and digital activists organizing protests through social media could be accused of committing cybercrimes under the draft convention.

The text’s broad scope could allow governments to misuse the convention’s cross border spying powers to gather “evidence” on political dissidents and suppress free speech and privacy under the pretext of enforcing cybercrime laws.

That seems bad!

EFF also warned how the Cybercrime Treaty could be used against journalists and security researchers. It creates a sort of international (but even more poorly worded) version of the CFAA, a law we’ve criticized many times in the past for how it is abused by law enforcement to go after anyone doing anything they dislike “on a computer.”

Instead, the draft text includes weak wording that criminalizes accessing a computer “without right.” This could allow authorities to prosecute security researchers and investigative journalists who, for example, independently find and publish information about holes in computer networks.

These vulnerabilities could be exploited to spread malware, cause data breaches, and get access to sensitive information of millions of people. This would undermine the very purpose of the draft treaty: to protect individuals and our institutions from cybercrime.

What’s more, the draft treaty’s overbroad scope, extensive secret surveillance provisions, and weak safeguards risk making the convention a tool for state abuse. Journalists reporting on government corruption, protests, public dissent, and other issues states don’t like can and do become targets for surveillance, location tracking, and private data collection.

And so, of course, the UN passed it on Thursday in a unanimous vote. Because governments love it for all the concerns discussed above, and human rights groups and other stakeholders don’t get a vote. Which seems like a problem.

The passage of the treaty is significant and establishes for the first time a global-level cybercrime and data access-enabling legal framework. 

The treaty was adopted late Thursday by the body’s Ad Hoc Committee on Cybercrime and will next go to the General Assembly for a vote in the fall. It is expected to sail through the General Assembly since the same states will be voting on it there.

The agreement follows three years of negotiations capped by the final two-week session that has been underway. 

And then they gave themselves a standing ovation. Because it’s not them who will get screwed over by this treaty. It’s everyone else.

For the treaty to go into force, 40 nations have to ratify it. Hopefully the US refuses to, and also pushes for other non-authoritarian countries to reject this treaty as well. It’s a really dangerous agreement, and these kinds of international agreements can cause serious problems once countries agree to them and they enter into force. Terrible treaties, once ratified, are nearly impossible to fix.

Filed Under: cfaa, computer crimes, cybercrime, cybercrime treaty, data access, russia, surveillance, un

8th Circuit Says Iowa Can Keep Its LGBTQ-Targeting Book Ban

Free Speech

from the reviving-irrational-hate dept

In one of several ongoing campaigns of hate in our country, the Iowa legislature passed a law that not only changed what schools could teach, but what students could be allowed to read.

First, let’s get to the changes to the state’s health curriculum, which is nothing less than the erasure of HIV/AIDS sufferers.

The health curriculum shall include the characteristics of communicable diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

[…]

The health curriculum shall include age-appropriate and research-based information regarding the characteristics of sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV and the availability of a vaccine to prevent HPV, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

That’s what’s being deleted from school health curriculum — a state-enforced vanishing of information about a communicable disease that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the nation and tens of millions around the world. The state legislature believes students should have to seek out information about this disease on their own, outside of school rooms, and of their own initiative.

This is nothing more than the government expressing a disdain for anyone non-heterosexual. The state pretends this is about giving parents more control over what their children are taught, but the law only allows the state to decide what children are taught. There’s nothing in the law that allows parents to decide they want their children to be taught about HIV/AIDS. There’s only the removal of that particular part of the curriculum.

The other part of the law governs the content of books carried by school libraries. It’s more of the same, with the law targeting “depictions of sex acts” in books. Of course, the law contains an exception for “religious texts,” which (also of course) only means the Bible and its depictions of incest, rape, and sodomy.

The law was immediately challenged by pretty much every rights group and book publisher late last year. One lawsuit was spearheaded by the ACLU and a ton of parents and students rights groups. The second lawsuit was headed up by book publisher Penguin, along with a long list of authors and other, smaller publishers. That lawsuit also notably featured a powerhouse in the educational arena: the Iowa State Education Association, the union representing most of the state’s educators.

Less than a month later, these lawsuits managed to secure an injunction forbidding the law from being enforced. The federal court handling the lawsuits saw nothing remotely redeemable about the new law and made its point forcefully in its decision:

The law is incredibly broad and has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault. The sweeping restrictions in Senate File 496 are unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny and thus may not be enforced while the case is pending. Indeed, the Court has been unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.

As if that wasn’t enough already, the federal court added this while discussing the restrictions on in-class instruction:

The law forbids programs, promotion, and instruction to students in those grades relating to “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” but those terms are defined a neutral way that makes no distinction between cisgender or transgender identity or gay or straight relationships. Meaning: on its face, the law forbids any programs, promotion, or instruction recognizing that anyone is male or female or in a relationship of any sort (gay or straight). The statute is therefore content-neutral but so wildly overbroad that every school district and elementary school teacher in the State has likely been violating it since the day the school year started. This renders the statute void for vagueness under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the State will have unfettered discretion to decide when to enforce it and against whom, thus making it all but impossible for a reasonable person to know what will and will not lead to punishment.

That (mostly) killed off the new law. The only part that remained was the part of the law that required administrators to notify parents if their students requested “accommodations relating to gender identity,” including the use of preferred pronouns. And the only reason that part of the law survived was that no plaintiff could plausibly claim to be harmed (potentially or otherwise) by this particular mandate.

You’d think that decision would have stood. It was clear and forceful, and detailed everywhere the law violated Constitutional rights. But the Eight Circuit Appeals Court says otherwise. Its decision [PDF] is extremely short and barely interacts with the lower court’s decision, other than to say its initial reading of the law was incorrect.

It does agree some of the plaintiffs can still pursue their First Amendment claims (albeit not exactly in the way they’ve pursued them here) because curation of school library content by librarians and schools cannot truly be considered “government speech” — something that does not implicate the First Amendment.

[I]t is doubtful that the public would view the placement and removal of books in public school libraries as the government speaking. Take routine examples of historic tomes on political science. A well-appointed school library could include copies of Plato’s The Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels’ Das Kapital, Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As Plaintiffs noted, if placing these books on the shelf of public school libraries constitutes government speech, the State “is babbling prodigiously and incoherently.”

But granting that part of the argument to the plaintiffs (and only some of the plaintiffs) isn’t enough to keep the injunction intact. It says the lower court applied the wrong standard, replacing what the plaintiffs were actually engaging in (a facial challenge to the law) with something a bit more subjective.

We note that the district court concluded that the Library Provision is a viewpoint-neutral, content-based, age-appropriate restriction on the content of public school libraries, and we agree. The purpose of public school libraries is to advance the school curriculum—that is, to facilitate the pedagogical mission of the school, which may involve some limitation of expression.

[…]

Given the pedagogical mission and the policy making authority possessed by Iowa, it is important in conducting a review and analysis to bear in mind that Iowa is not required to tolerate speech that undermines or is inconsistent with its central mission of educating Iowa children.

Meanwhile, the district court insisted the Instruction Section could only be interpreted in an “absurd” manner, an interpretation not shared by the defendants and even some of the Plaintiffs. The district court imparted its interpretation without referencing several canons of construction that may have revealed a narrower, reasonable interpretation, such as the canons of constitutional-avoidance, noscitur a sociis, and Iowa’s admonition to interpret its laws reasonably and in a manner feasible of execution, Iowa Code § 4.4(3)-(4). Other interpretive methods should be discussed and exhausted before concluding the only textual interpretation is an absurd one because the resulting interpretation inevitably bears on whether the law’s applications are constitutional or not.

This means the state can go back to banning books from school libraries while the First Amendment challenges are more fully-developed in the lower court. But no facial challenges to the law survive. Anything that has a chance of moving forward will have to use the “as applied” standard, which means book bans can be challenged on a case-by-case basis, and litigants will have to do some dividing before they can conquer. And they’ll have to decide whether any single challenge is worth pursuing since it seems clear the Appeals Court won’t be handing out injunctions for anything broader than the injury particular to each individual plaintiff.

And that sucks. It means a lot more time and money will need to be spent to protect Iowans from their own government. All the state has to do is continue to tell students they can’t read this or they can’t learn about that.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 8th circuit appeals court, book bans, censorship, iowa, lawsuit, libraries

Daily Deal: The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA

Deals

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

The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA has 15 courses to help you prepare for various CompTIA certification exams. Courses cover everything from the fundamentals to cloud essentials to cybersecurity. The bundle is on sale for $49.97.

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

Fire In A Crowded Newspaper: Misinforming Readers About Free Speech Isn’t Helping

Free Speech

from the that's-not-how-anything-works dept

It seems to be a rather common phenomenon, but various major newspaper opinion columnists love opining on the First Amendment and free speech without ever bothering to, you know, understand them.

Edward Luce, a long-term journalist and commentator, and scion of an aristocratic British family, is currently the “chief US commentator” (what a title!) for the Financial Times. On Friday he published a piece claiming that Elon Musk is a danger to democracy. And that might well be true (or might not). But the column is so full of wrongness that you won’t learn much about it one way or the other.

It is true that the UK government and Elon Musk have been engaged in a stupid battle of words over Elon’s propensity to promote and spread bigoted nonsense that is encouraging violence. As I’ve written elsewhere, this whole approach seems entirely counterproductive and only plays to Musk’s advantage.

But Luce is quite sure the problem is really American free speech laws. Or, at least, as he totally misrepresents them. On top of that, he tries to distinguish Musk pushing his political views via ExTwitter from other billionaires who own media empires pushing their own views, which makes no sense:

The key question is what, if anything, democracies can do to address the danger from Musk. It is one thing having a newspaper proprietor, or the owner of a television station, pushing their biases in their outlets. This has always happened and it is protected speech. Depending on the democracy, there are also laws against concentration of media ownership. Musk has freest legal rein in the US, where the First Amendment protects almost all speech. Moreover, internet publishers are exempt from liability under the notorious Section 230 of the misleadingly named Communications Decency Act. But even in America you cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theatre.

The difference between X and say the right-leaning GB News in the UK, or whatever platform the far-right radio host Alex Jones is using in America, is that the latter two are siloed channels. X claims to be the public square. In some respects, people are right to point out that “Twitter is not real life”. It isn’t. But when racist thugs falsely learn on X that refugees are child killers then gather to burn down refugee hostels — the site becomes all too real. At critical moments, X has become a key vector for potentially lethal untrue assertions. That its owner would endorse some of them ought to be a matter of public interest.

But, of course, almost everything in these two paragraphs is wrong. Biased newspaper owners used their own publications to push all sorts of false and misleading journalism to shape their own interests for decades. What Musk is doing is honestly no different than what Rupert Murdoch has done, or others like William Randolph Hearst have done. Henry Ford bought a newspaper just to push antisemitic nonsense. It’s just that Musk is dumber, more gullible, and has more sycophantic fans.

Still, more to the point, almost all the claims in the first paragraph are wrong. Using the “fire in a crowded theater” line should disqualify anyone from being taken seriously on any discussion about free speech. There is a pretty short, and pretty well-defined set of classes of speech that are not protected. But, when people are using the “fire in a crowded theater” line, they are almost universally saying “well, because this other speech is not protected, surely it’s fine to add in this other speech I dislike to make it unprotected.

But, in this case, everything else is still wrong. Some of the concern about the speech on ExTwitter is that it’s incitement to violence. And we do have an exception to the First Amendment for incitement to imminent violence. Arguably, some of the comments that have been of most concern may apply there.

Still, the comment about Section 230 is wholly out of place. Elon owns ExTwitter. The company receives no Section 230 protections for Elon’s speech because it’s seen as the company’s speech itself. So Section 230 has literally nothing to do with what Elon is saying. The whole point of Section 230 is that you put the liability on the proper party — the speaker, rather than the platform. But when the speaker and the platform are the same, there can absolutely be liability.

This could have easily been explained to Luce or the FT’s fact checkers or editors, if anyone had bothered to ask an actual expert.

(And we won’t even spend much time on his “misleadingly named” quip, because it also shows a stunning ignorance of the history of Section 230. Section 230 was an entirely separate bill that was added to the blatantly unconstitutional Communications Decency Act in a weird attempt to appease critics of the CDA. The rest of the CDA was found unconstitutional in a case that maybe Luce should have read, leaving just Section 230, which was never actually intended to be a part of the CDA.)

The second paragraph is perhaps slightly less egregious, but still problematic. That Elon likes to declare ExTwitter to be “the public square” has no impact whatsoever on reality. It is not the public square. It is a private shop on one corner of the actual modern public square, which is the wider internet. But so too are the various media properties and nonsense peddlers that Luce is trying to claim are different.

“Racist thugs” can just as easily “falsely learn” racist nonsense in a wide variety of UK newspapers from the Sun, to the Daily Mail, to the Telegraph and beyond. You could just as easily repeat this sentence about the people behind much of the UK tabloid media: “At critical moments, [insert UK tabloid] has become a key vector for potentially lethal untrue assertions. That its owner would endorse some of them ought to be a matter of public interest.”

Yes, Elon is a gullible fool and it’s ridiculous that he is so easily used as a pawn in the disinformation spreading campaigns of those seeking to cause chaos. But it doesn’t help when people like Luce spread disinformation themselves. It certainly does not bring us any closer to think through how society deals with such nonsense.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, edward luce, elon musk, free speech, section 230, uk
Companies: twitter, x

Like Clockwork, Paramount/CBS Cuts 18% Of Workforce After Skydance Merger

Failures

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism and Comedy Central history as part of their ongoing and utterly mindless “cost saving” efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent people imaginable.

We’ve noted how with streaming subscriber growth slowing, quarterly returns have stagnated. So media giants (and the incompetent brunchlords who usually fail upward into positions of unearned power within them) have turned their attention to all the usual tricks: layoffs, pointless megamergers, price hikes, and more and more weird and costly consumer restrictions.

That of course includes Paramount, recently announced a major merger with Redbird/Skydance. As usual, executives promised that the resulting union would be transformative for the company:

“It’s a new Paramount; it’s not just a catchphrase,” said RedBird’s Jeff Shell, former CEO of NBCUniversal, on a call with investors Monday. “We think it’s going to be a new day for these combined assets.”

In reality, this kind of consolidation serves no real world function outside of temporarily goosing stock valuations, nabbing a few tax cuts, and flimsily justifying outsized compensation for major media executives. The AT&T, Time Warner, and Discovery mergers did a particularly stellar job demonstrating the chaotic pointlessness of this “we’re completely out of ideas so let’s consolidate” mindset.

Much of the headaches are due to the decline of the traditional TV business, which wouldn’t have been quite so painful if executives had adapted to the streaming transition earlier and more smoothly (remember they all wasted the better part of a decade insisting that cord cutting was a fad that would stop once Millennials started procreating).

Wall Street’s insatiable need for endlessly improved quarterly returns at impossible scale means these companies can’t just make a quality, affordable product that people like. So instead their only solution is to grow larger and larger — while making more and more cuts that sacrifice employees, product quality, customer service, and consumer satisfaction.

The folks that make all the terrible decisions that wind up running these companies into the ground (like Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav) almost never see real accountability. Instead all the costs of their incompetence are borne by either consumers in the form of higher prices (to pay off merger debt) and lower quality product, or by lower level employees in the form of reduced pay or benefits, and layoffs.

It took less than a week for Paramount’s three current and still-employed CEOs (CBS CEO George Cheeks, Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon CEO Brian Robbins, and Showtime/MTV CEO Chris McCarthy) to announce they would be axing about eighteen percent of the company’s workforce. For, you know, synergies:

“The entertainment conglomerate behind Paramount Pictures is to cut about 2,000 jobs in a bid to reduce costs ahead of a merger with the independent film studio Skydance.”

Again, the promise here is that this results in a better, leaner company, but when it comes to media deals like this, that’s rarely the case. There’s hardly a single major media merger in the last twenty years that genuinely improved the fortunes of employees or consumers.

It’s a pointless doom loop that’s infected both entertainment media and traditional journalism. By the time any sort of check comes due for executive incompetence, they’ve either retired on the back of outsized compensation, or are off to another company to repeat the entire process all over again, having been financially disincentivized from learning absolutely anything from the experience.

Filed Under: consolidation, enshittification, journalism, layoffs, m&a, media, mergers, streaming, video

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the did-you-hear dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous piece-by-piece response to a comment questioning the truth about what happened with GARM:

I don’t think this theory of “brand safety” makes sense.

And yet plenty of advertises subscribed to it. Even if they are wrong, telling (using governmental power) them they can’t talk about their view is… Ethically reprehensible. And a violation of the First Amendment.

An advertising cartel isn’t really the answer to that though, nor is it appropriate.

Sure. But GARM was not a cartel. There was no coercion. No “price regulation”. No “forcing out of business” (unless you count people not wanting to do business with you… but in that case you would be an entitled asshole, or a thief).

We as a society can talk through issues like this without a house brand which sells soap reckoning that they know better on moderation issues. We can also do moderation for normal sites, not tailored specifically to kids, without adding padding to everything.

Does “best practices” not mean anything to you? There was no direct control of moderation. Just standards and best practices so the advertises (the ones that valued the standards and practice GARM suggested) could field comfortable advertising there.

In second place, it’s Guiltypanacea with a related comment about Elon’s lawsuit:

Pretty cute to claim GARM violated antitrust laws while also claiming Twitter is the singular “global town square.”

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another anonymous comment on the subject:

This isn’t about moderation, though. It’s about advertising. This is about companies realizing that advertising alongside polarizing content is going to lose them customers, because their brand is going to be associated with that content.

These companies don’t want to offend potential customer bases. And that’s a perfectly reasonable business decision. Not to mention well within their rights of freedom of association.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about why big companies face antitrust scrutiny even when they have competitors:

That’s the wrong question. Yes, a company can have a monopoly simply by being the best. That’s not illegal; but, once in that position, they come under additional legal scrutiny. Thus, the monopolist is prohibited from doing things (“abusing their monopoly”) that their smaller competitors legally could do. It’s probably legal for Kagi or DuckDuckGo to make “tying” deals with Mozilla and Apple, exactly the same as what was found illegal for Google to do.

And as for “solutions”, this is hardly the only situation in which there’s nothing obvious for a court to do. Convicting or acquitting someone of murder doesn’t solve anything either, for example, but a court still makes that determination. Sometimes with negative effects to other people, such as the convict’s family, balanced by nothing but a vague sense of justice.

While I’m not entirely sure whether it’s right for Google’s payments to be considered illegal, requiring Google to stop buying market share, and go back to earning it, doesn’t strike me as crazy. With their market dominance, they can afford payments their competitors can’t, effectively locking out those competitors. Unless and until the competition becomes so good it can’t be ignored, which is hard to do while Google is tilting the playing field. That seems similar to “payola” which was found to be illegal in the music market; or to Standard Oil paying railroad companies to favor their shipments, also found illegal.

Over on the funny side, both our winners also come in response to Elon’s lawsuit against GARM. First, it’s That One Guy with a summary of events:

The Republican First Amendment(tm) strikes again

Elon: Fuck off, we don’t need or want you around!

Advertisers: Alright, we will indeed ‘fuck off’ then and take our money with us.

Elon: RICO! Blackmail! How dare those advertisers do exactly what I told them to do and stop giving me money?!

In second place, it’s an anonymous prognostication:

Sometime in the future…

3rd act twist: GARM members are jointly and severally responsible for the damages.

• X/Twitter is a member
• X/Twitter bears the costs for damages

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about a Michigan prosecutor complaining about the need to convict people for asset forfeiture:

“Now that we have to convict people, it will be harder to convict people”
─Person whose job it is to convict people

Finally, it’s David on last week’s comments post, responding to the previous winning comment about Donald Duck making a better president than Donald Trump, and taking a long walk to get to a very silly joke:

He’d be called a lame duck even before assuming office. Also Arthur Byron Cover would be a shoe-in for vice president: just imagine the impact of an election campaign that can proudly proclaim: “Your best choice for this election: Duck and Cover!”

That’s all for this week, folks!