Bigot Learns It’s Extremely Easy To Lose A Libel Lawsuit. All You Have To Do Is Engage In Libel.

Defamation

from the best-con-job-is-the-con-job-you-give-yourself dept

Definitely loving all of this. And right up front (just in case the defendant thinks she can rob Peter Techdirt to pay Paul Eric Posey), I’ll make it clear this post will be filled with colorful expression, hyperbole, highly opinionated takes on the lawsuit, and… possibly… archaic slang.

A lot of people (especially the most awful ones) think libel laws in this country are too restrictive. They claim it’s almost impossible to rifle through someone’s wallet via court order because someone said something about them they didn’t like. In most cases, those people are like the defendant here — someone who probably thought it was impossible to get successfully sued for libel in the United States.

You know these people. They’re the ones who cry libel every time one of their own is insulted but say dumb shit like “facts don’t care about your feelings” when other people complain about the garbage flowing out their social media accounts.

The saddest thing about this case is that this person continued to do the libel even after she knew what she was saying on social media was definitively not true. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy)

A jury has awarded more than $1.1 million in damages to the drag performer who sued a blogger for defamation.

The unanimous verdict was returned Friday. The jury found that blogger Summer Bushnell defamed Post Falls resident Eric Posey when she accused him of exposing himself to the crowd while he performed in drag at the Coeur d’Alene City Park bandshell in June 2022.

That’s hilarious. Not so much for Eric Posey, who was falsely accused of exposing himself. He sued the blogger in 2022 for claiming something had happened that actually hadn’t happened.

And, of course, the posting Posey sued Bushnell over was motivated by her own bigotry. It was also an attempt to rouse a rabble that rarely needs an excuse to be roused.

The day of Posey’s performance, June 11, 2022, Bushnell posted a video of herself discussing the mass arrest of Patriot Front members near City Park, as well as footage from Posey’s performance.

“Why did no one arrest the man in a dress who flashed his genitalia to minors and people in the crowd?” she said in the video. “No one said anything about it and there’s video. I’m going to put up a blurred video to prove it.”

Yes, this is the kind of person who thinks posting an edited video can “prove” anything. However, it did prove this: there are plenty of suckers in Idaho and some of them wear government-issued uniforms. After racking up a few thousand views on social media, the edited video generated national news coverage as well as a local police investigation. Fortunately, the criminal charges were dropped after prosecutors took a look at the unedited video.

City prosecutors ultimately declined to file charges and stated publicly that the unedited video showed no exposure.

Here’s what Bushnell posted, as included in Posey’s lawsuit [PDF] against the blogger:

Here’s the same shot in unedited form:

After being sued by the drag performer, the blogger claimed this was all just an unfortunate misunderstanding. The video had been passed on to her by another person who had blurred the crotch area and Bushnell was just passing along this information.

But that excuse only lasted until she was called to the stand to testify.

Wendy J. Olsen, legal counsel for Posey, questioned Bushnell about Facebook messages she sent to multiple friends, including ones in which she references being able to see Posey’s genitals in an unedited video.

“And you knew at the time it was false,” Olsen said.

“It was not accurate,” Bushnell replied.

“You knew that at the time,” Olsen said.

“Correct,” Bushnell said.

That’s libel, folks. That’s fully admitted defamation by the defamer on the record in court during a jury trial. That can’t be undone. That’s how you lose a libel case in the United States. You say something defamatory, knowing it’s not true.

Bushnell’s lawyer, despite the $1.1 million damages award and despite his client’s own admission she had lied to people about the drag performer, continues to engage in self-delusion of his own.

Attorney Colton Boyles, who represents Bushnell, told jurors that his client’s allegations were “close to the line” but did not cross the line into defamation. He maintained that Bushnell’s “honest belief” is that Posey exposed himself, though she admitted on the witness stand that she never saw the “fully exposed genitals” she described to others.

“That remains her steadfast testimony to this day,” Boyles said.

There’s a very good reason Colton Boyles would represent someone like Bushnell. And it’s not because he’s such a great litigator. No, this is all ideological. Colton’s decision to take this case was likely motivated by his own personal animus against people like drag performer Eric Posey.

Boyles, whose full name is Dennis Colton Boyles, was recently retained by the Community Library Network – the group of Kootenai County libraries outside of Coeur d’Alene – whose board members have ambitions of restricting books and services.

He defended former Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin when she lost a public records lawsuit to the Idaho Press Club.

Boyles pleaded guilty to a driving under the influence misdemeanor late last year and is on unsupervised probation until Dec. 12.

He has appeared as a guest on far-right internet shows, such as “The Pete Santilli Show.” Pete Santilli was a vocal supporter of anti-government activist Ammon Bundy during the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Ammon Bundy’s governor campaign paid Boyles’ firm $5,000 in 2022 for legal advice.

In an Epoch Times documentary, Boyles pushed deep state conspiracy theories about Child Protective Services.

“I would say it is a state- and federal-funded kidnapping system,” Boyles said.

[…]

In 2021, Boyles donated $500 to Post Falls School Board candidate David Reilly, a former radio host who has expressed antisemitic views and attended the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

With competent representation, the blogger may have been able to secure a settlement in the low thousands. She might have been able to walk away with nothing more than a public apology. But she chose to retain a showboating rube. I hope he can explain to Bushnell how he just cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars and makes it clear that no matter how many libs the two have collectively “owned,” being stupid on social media can’t really be considered a stable revenue stream.

Filed Under: colton boyles, defamation, drag show, Eric posey, idaho, lawsuit, libel, rubes, summer bushnell

Free Speech Absolutist Elon Musk Removes Tweets Revealing Ted Cruz Fundraising Notes

Free Speech

from the ah,-there-he-goes-again dept

If ExTwitter is the bastion of free speech, you would think that it would allow for the publishing of newsworthy documents revealing a politician’s funding briefings, right? Apparently not when that politician is politically aligned with Elon Musk, whose commitment to open discourse appears to be about as floppy as the Cybertruck’s giant windshield wiper.

It’s been a little while since we’ve had one of these posts, but it remains important: Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” and repeatedly insists that he bought Twitter and turned it into ExTwitter to “bring back” free speech. However, over and over again we see him delete speech, often on ideological grounds.

Remember, Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist.”

He also claims, bizarrely, that free speech means “that which matches the law” (which seems to contradict his claims above about disobeying orders from governments to block certain speech).

He also repeatedly claims that ExTwitter “will fight for your freedom to speak” and that “Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Without it, America ends.”

But, of course, the second someone semi-powerful whom Elon agrees with is aggrieved, well, down go the tweets. Witness the situation faced by reporter Pablo Manriquez, who ended up with the briefing notes that some poor schlub of a Ted Cruz staffer accidentally left somewhere to be picked up.

Manriquez went to ExTwitter, home of “free speech,” to report on what he got his hands on in a nice thread of posts with images of all the documents. Or maybe not:

Yeah, that image is the current entirety of Pablo’s nine post thread. Only the first and last tweets are shown, and all seven in the middle — the ones that at one point showed the documents in question — have been removed because, the screenshot shows, “This Post violated the X Rules.”

I went through “The X Rules” and couldn’t find anything this credibly violated. The closest would have to be the rule against publishing “private information.” But that rule describes private information as things like “home phone number and address.”

Going through the more detailed policy on private information, I still don’t see anything that could possibly qualify with this data dump. It also claims that the company takes into account what type of info is being shared, who is sharing it, and why. All of those would suggest this did not violate the policy, as it’s information in the public interest, being shared in a reporting fashion, in a manner that does not really violate anyone’s privacy, nor put anyone at risk (except of embarrassment).

Now, it is true that a few of the documents show the phone number of the Cruz staffer who will be tagging along for the meetings. So, arguably, you could say that would trigger a privacy violation as well. But not all of the removed tweets had that. And I just did a quick search on the staffer’s name and “phone number”, and the top Google result shows the exact same phone number. So it’s not exactly “private” information. Some of the docs also show some other phone numbers, or the names of family members, but nothing that seems particularly sensitive. Indeed, much of it appears to be copied from public bios that mention the family members.

But, fine, if Musk/Cruz defenders want to insist that this is obviously still a violation of the policy on private information then… wouldn’t the same be true of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

I can see no world in which the information from Hunter Biden’s laptop is not more private than some briefing notes regarding Ted Cruz being told to ask Ron Lauder to donate the maximum possible, a combined $119,200 to his various campaign and political PACs. It’s a nice way to “legally” donate way more than what the public believes are the official limits on individual campaign donations.

Anyway, Musk’s attempt to block these tweets from being shared didn’t work very well. The ThreadReader app captured them all, and I’ll include them below as well (though I’ll blur out some info to be nice, not because I think it needs to be blurred). Meanwhile, both Newsweek and Business Insider reported on the details of the documents, highlighting how newsworthy they are.

To be clear: there’s nothing nefarious in these docs. I can guarantee that every Senator has similar briefing notes revealing similar requests for money. It is, however, revealing to the public how the fundraising game is played, as the Business Insider piece notes. And that makes it extremely newsworthy.

Publishing these docs may be embarrassing, but they break no laws. So, Musk’s claims of his definition of free speech matching the laws is already shown to be bullshit.

And, of course, as we’ve always said, it’s Musk’s platform. He is absolutely free to have whatever rules in place he wants and to delete whatever content he thinks should be deleted. That’s part of his own free speech rights.

But the same was true of Twitter before Musk took it over. It wasn’t an “attack on free speech” when Twitter removed some content that violated its rules, nor is it one when Musk does it.

It would just be nice if Musk and/or his fans would recognize that he’s no more of a “free speech” warrior than the old Twitter was. Indeed, as we’ve highlighted, the old Twitter was actually willing to stand up to more government demands and push back on real attacks on free speech way more often than Musk’s ExTwitter has.

Filed Under: briefing docs, elon musk, free speech, free speech absolutist, fundraising docs, journalism, pablo manriquez, ted cruz

‘Today We Save Our Children’ Says Governor Hochul, Signing Bill That Will Not Save Anyone

Stupidity

from the legislating-by-grandstanding-moral-panics dept

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not to figure out why the 911 dispatcher who answered the first call about the shooting hung up on the caller after getting mad at them for whispering.

No, it was to blame the internet.

Blaming the internet is a very convenient scapegoat for politicians who are in over their heads with societal-level problems.

On Thursday, Hochul became the living embodiment of the “won’t someone please think of the children” meme. She gleefully signed an easily unconstitutional bill that will not protect children, and which will likely do real harm. She signed the SAFE For Kids Act, which bans algorithmic feeds for kids. In signing the bill she literally said:

“Today, we save our children.”

There are just a few problems with this, all of which Hochul’s office (and the sponsors of this bill) have been told about, only to be dismissed as “talking points from big tech.”

Problem 1: There remains no study showing that algorithmic feeds are somehow “addictive” or even a problem. It’s all based on vibes (and adults who seem unable to put down their own phones).

Problem 2: What actual studies show is that if you force chronological feeds on people, a few things happen, none of which “save our children.” First, users get annoyed because they see less of the stuff they go to social media for. This doesn’t make them use less social media, it just makes them switch to other social media. It also exposes those on the chronological feed to more untrustworthy content and disinformation. I’m not sure why Kathy Hochul thinks that exposing kids to more disinformation is “saving our children,” but someone should ask her.

Problem 3: This bill requires age verification, which has already been ruled to be unconstitutional by multiple courts. It is also a privacy nightmare, as has been described multiple times in the past. Creating a world that puts kids’ private data at risk is not “saving our children.”

Problem 4: The requirement about how websites can order content is just a blatantly obvious First Amendment infringement. I mean, just imagine if the NY legislature told a newspaper that it could no longer prioritize some headlines over others and had to lay out the newspaper in the order the stories were written? Everyone would immediately recognize the First Amendment problems with such a law. But this is no different.

Problem 5: Algorithms are a hugely important tool in keeping kids safe online, by minimizing or hiding more harmful or problematic content. And Hochul and the NY legislature are telling social media companies that such tools must be removed from their arsenal.

Hochul told a reporter, “we’ve checked to make sure, we believe it’s constitutional.” And, that’s just laughable. Checked with whom? Every attempt I saw to call out these concerns was brushed off as “just spewing big tech’s talking points.”

The Constitution is not a “big tech talking point.” What the actual research shows is not a “big tech talking point.”

I’m not against chronological feeds as a general concept. They’re great for those that want them. Lots of services already offer them as an option. But mandating them, and especially mandating them for certain ages (necessitating dangerous age verification), doesn’t solve any legitimate problem and makes it harder for trust & safety teams to actually help protect kids.

I recognize that this signing happened the same day that Hochul’s approval ratings and favorability hit all-time lows. So, it’s no surprise that she’s trying populist nonsense and embracing moral panics. But perhaps she should try actually doing things to actually help, rather than things already proven harmful?

Filed Under: algorithmic feed, algorithms, kathy hochul, new york, protect the children, safe for kids act

Daily Deal: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy on Steam

Deals

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

Fire up a wild ride across the cosmos with a fresh take on Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. In this third-person action-adventure game, you are Star-Lord, and thanks to your bold yet questionable leadership, you have persuaded an oddball crew of unlikely heroes to join you. Some jerk (surely not you) has set off a chain of catastrophic events, and only you can hold the unpredictable Guardians together long enough to fight off a total interplanetary meltdown. Use Element Blasters, tag-team beatdowns, jet boot-powered dropkicks, nothing’s off-limits. It’s on sale for $24.

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

Oh Look, Some Cop Just Got Busted For Abusing Access To Clearview AI

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the it's-the-thing-everyone-knew-would-happen dept

The inevitable is upon us: a police officer has been caught using Clearview AI for non-law enforcement purposes. That wouldn’t mean anything if the officer had private access to the most ethically dubious player in the facial recognition tech market. But he didn’t. He was using access purchased by his employer, so it wasn’t only a violation of department policy, but a clear, non-law enforcement-related violation of the privacy of those on the other end of these searches.

An officer with the Evansville Police Department has resigned following an investigation of misusing the department’s A.I. technology.

Evansville Police Chief Philip Smith said Tuesday that Officer Michael Dockery, a five-year member of the police department, resigned before the Police Merit Commission could make a final determination for termination.

The fact that Officer Dockery decided to resign rather than be disciplined (further) or fired is equally unsurprising. If you can get out before the hammer falls, you can just go ply your wares at another law enforcement agency since you won’t have anything on your permanent record. (And that’s if the new employer cares to look at your permanent record. Most law enforcement either don’t bother to check incoming officers’ pasts, or just don’t consider causes for concern to be cause for concern.)

The more surprising aspect of this incident was how it was discovered. The chief was performing an audit of the software prior to the PD’s renewal of its contract. And that’s when he came across the improper searches. He suspended Officer Dockery for 21 days, at which point Dockery decided to call it quits.

This is more of the same bullshit we’ve come to expect from cops who have access to other people’s personal information. Officers have been caught running personal searches on drivers license databases and other repositories of personal data collected by government agencies.

Dockery didn’t play by the rules established by his employer. But he was pretty much completely aligned with Clearview’s ethically dubious marketing tactics in which it encouraged potential customers (including law enforcement agencies) to run personal searches utilizing its AI and millions (now more than 30 billion) of images it had scraped from the web.

[I]n a November email to a police lieutenant in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a company representative encouraged a police officer to use the software on himself and his acquaintances.

“Have you tried taking a selfie with Clearview yet?” the email read. “It’s the best way to quickly see the power of Clearview in real time. Try your friends or family. Or a celebrity like Joe Montana or George Clooney.

“Your Clearview account has unlimited searches. So feel free to run wild with your searches,” the email continued.

Maybe this seems like a one-off. I guarantee this isn’t. This is someone who got caught. Plenty of agencies have access to facial recognition tech. The number of agencies that engage in periodic audits is undoubtedly far less than the number of agencies using the tech.

The only thing anomalous about this is that the agency moved quickly to discipline the officer who violated department policy. Once again, I can guarantee lots of other violations have occurred and at least some of those have been discovered. But a discovery followed by immediate (or any!) discipline is an actual unicorn.

There will be more in the future. And as for (at the moment) former officer Michael Dockery, he’d better hope his next employer is a regression to the mean in terms of police accountability if he wants to keep his job.

Filed Under: evansville police, facial recognition, michael dockery, police misconduct, privacy, surveillance
Companies: clearview, clearview ai

A Sinclair Exec Bought The Baltimore Sun And Is Turning It Into A Right Wing Propaganda Mill

Journalism

from the fake-news dept

Back in 2018 (pre-brunchlord owned) Deadspin posted the definitive video on Sinclair Broadcasting, highlighting in less than two and a half minutes how the local broadcaster is a right wing propaganda mill pretending to be a local news organization and the poster child for why media consolidation limits still matter:

Like Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Daily Caller, Breitbart, Daily Wire, and other parts of the ever-growing right wing disinfo machine, Sinclair publishes a rotating crop of shallow infotainment, peppered with oodles of misleading fear-mongering over crime, homelessness, and immigration.

Sinclair executive Chairman David Smith recently purchased what’s left of the Baltimore Sun (much to the chagrin of ex-staffer David Simon), and it’s going just about as you’d expect. It’s only been a few months, but staffers there are already becoming angry about the fact that the paper is now publishing anti-immigrant and anti-trans right wing propaganda dressed up as serious news and analysis.

A statement by the Baltimore Sun Guild says the paper’s “ethical standards have been tossed aside under new ownership,” and points to a May editorial by new Sun co-owner Armstrong Williams that called the transgender movement a “cancer”:

“It was not the first time that The Sun’s ethical standards have been tossed aside under new ownership. In the opinion pages, co-owner Armstrong Williams has used offensive language to describe transgender people, flouting the best practices once adhered to by The Sun. In a May 8 column, he likened the “transgender movement” to a “cancer,” and used the terms “biological male” and “biological female” to exclude transgender people, which AP style instructs journalists to avoid.”

The Conservative movement’s not subtle goal is to buy up what’s left of traditional journalism (and once popular social media companies) and fill it with propaganda that consistently tells right wingers exactly what they want to hear: namely that all of their ugliest impulses are, in fact, correct. And, more importantly, that minorities, women, Jews, and immigrants are to blame for the entirety of societal ills.

You could argue that what happens to a dying newspaper isn’t worrying. But it’s part of a broader trend, and in response to fascism, the U.S. journalism editorial Overton window is clearly shifting steadily rightward.

Most of the money in media right now is in either feeding this fact-optional Conservative victimization and outrage complex (see: Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Russell Brand, etc. etc.), or in creating sloppy “AI”-powered engagement chasing news infotainment simulacrum that distracts and defunds real reporting. Sometimes a fusion of both.

Both the Washington Post and Daily Beast recently hired right wing UK tabloid executives. Both old and new Politico top executives whine about “wokeness.” Conspiratorial opportunists like Vivek Ramaswamy want to own companies like Buzzfeed. CBS and CNN under Zaslav have cozied up with Trumplicans for ratings. That’s before you even get to what Elon Musk has done to Twitter.

These trends are all sanctioned by billionaire media owners threatened by the kind of hard-nosed journalism that meaningfully critiques wealth, power, and systemic discrimination. Their goal is to take the brand corpse of what used to be U.S. journalism, fire all the real journalists, and stock them with bobble-headed sycophantic center-right propagandists whose sole purpose is to create a giant, automated, gushingly pro-greed, ad-engagement outrage circlejerk masquerading as news.

The U.S. is not really doing the kind of things needed to counter this trend at any real scale, whether it’s funding and shoring up education standards, crafting media consolidation rules and policies, maintaining search engine quality, funding and protecting local libraries, academia, or disinformation research, or finding creative new funding models for independent (especially local) journalism.

There has been a welcome shift toward worker-owned journalism outlets and direct-to-consumer newsletters (the ones not being written by Nazis, anyway), but it’s not clear these efforts can survive billionaire lawsuits, much less counter the problem at scale. If you’ve read global history books, it’s all enough to make you nervous.

Filed Under: consolidation, immigration, media, news, propaganda, reporting, trans, transgender
Companies: baltimore sun, sinclair

Bethesda Reignites The Paid Mods Controversey With ‘Starfield’ Creation Kit

Failures

from the deja-vu-all-over-again dept

As the line from the Bill Murray movies goes, “It’s Groundhog Day… again.” Back in 2015, Valve launched its “Paid Creations” platform on the Steam client, through which those who made game mods could list them in a marketplace for a cost. This was done at least in coordination with, if not at the behest of, Bethesda. The backlash was both swift and severe, with a gaming community, that was used to mods made by hobbyist, suddenly had to contend with fees for these mods determined by the modder themselves. It got so bad that Valve nixed the platform shortly after.

But Bethesda never really gave up on the concept. Instead, it released the Creation Club modding in-game store in 2017, but insisted that platform would not incorporate paid-for mods. Then, in 2023, Creation Club was supplanted by the Verified Creations platform, which functioned similarly but brought back paid-for mods for titles like Skyrim. That game is nearly 15 years old and the paid mods program is still controversial for it.

And now Bethesda is kicking the controversy back into high gear, having just released the Creations program for Starfield.

A recent update heralding the release of the Starfield Creation Kit included a new mission that enables players to become bounty hunters for the Trackers Alliance faction, with the promise of future Trackers Alliance missions coming in subsequent updates. But the second Trackers Alliance mission, The Vulture, is only available as a paid add-on costing 700 Starfield Creation Credits—the equivalent of $7, which in reality is $10 because that’s the smallest amount of credits you can purchase to cover the cost.

The move was not well received. Unhappy players immediately recalled Bethesda’s disastrous attempt to launch paid mods for Skyrim in 2015, and of course the infamous Oblivion Horse Armor DLC from 2006. The mission also received unfavorable comparisons to the Starfield premium edition upgrade, which includes the full Shattered Space expansion, the Constellation skin pack, digital art book, soundtrack, and 1,000 Creation Credits for $35: “Is Shattered Space actually just two quests in a trenchcoat?” one redditor rhetorically asked. Steam user reviews, predictably, took a nosedive.

Okay, so there are really two things going on here, rather than one. There are still a lot of unhappy folks out there seething at the concept of paid-for mods generally, including from third party modders. It’s the same problem as with Skyrim and with Valve’s release before. The modding ecosystem with most games most of the time is one in which players do not expect to pay for mods, as those mods are typically produced by hobbyists and distributed for free. While I don’t hate the idea of modders getting something for their work inherently, it’s a massive shift in the ecosystem which isn’t going to be embraced readily.

And then there’s what Bethesda is charging itself for mission mods, which is what the above quote is referring to. The cost to value ratio players are doing in their heads is obviously not sitting well, and it’s not hard to understand why. $7 for essentially a single game mission and some in-game accessories isn’t a great look. The result of all this is fairly predictable as well.

That “feedback” continues to be reflected in Steam reviews, which are now down to “mostly negative” over the past 30 days thanks primarily to the paid mission—which some players find especially egregious given the sense that Starfield itself was a disappointment.

But while adjustments may be in order, Howard emphasized the importance of enabling content creators to monetize their work, which he said was a big part of ensuring the long-term health of the community—and for the most part, he said players dig it.

The mission in question certainly does have plenty of buyers, it seems, but there is also a ton of negative chatter in the community about it. And, while I have to admit that I bought and loved Starfield, and didn’t really agree with much of the criticism around it, the fact is that the game was considered disappointing by a large portion of the customer base. To suddenly have what feels like overpriced singular missions thrown into the mix only adds insult to injury for those folks.

And the really frustrating part is some of the comments by the Bethesda team, including from Executive Producer Todd Howard.

“We hear the feedback,” Howard responded when asked whether Bethesda will change how it releases content like The Vulture in the future. “We need to evaluate both pricing, what we put out for free, how we communicate what’s in something, and really hear from the community there.”

Frankly, this could have been copied and pasted as a response from any of the other responses to the backlash from the other times Bethesda has done this sort of thing, as we’ve noted in this post. Going all the way back to the infamous horse-armor running joke.

Bethesda may be hearing the feedback, but they seem to be ignoring it and making the same customer-angering decisions over and over again.

So it’s Groundhog Day… again.

Filed Under: mods, paid add ons, paid mods, video games
Companies: bethesda

Fitbit Plumbs New Depths Of Bottomless Suckiness After Google Acquisition

Failures

from the first-do-no-harm dept

Shortly after the company’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit in 2019, Google Senior VP Rick Osterloh wrote a blog post proclaiming that the merger would result in better and cheaper fitness tracking tech:

“We’re confident the combination of Fitbit’s leading technology, product expertise and health and wellness innovation with the best of Google’s AI, software and hardware will drive more competition in wearables and make the next generation of devices better and more affordable.

Fitbit users don’t seem to agree.

Three years after the deal closed and users increasingly argue that Google’s acquisition has made Fitbit products worse. There have been constant complaints of quality control issues, and the elimination of a long list of functionality, including social features, the ability to sync with computers, and the browser-based SDK for developing apps. And what basic features remain are increasingly being hidden behind subscription paywalls.

Last week, Google announced that it was also shutting down the Fitbit web app, which included many features not available on the mobile app:

“Dumping the web app leaves a few holes in Fitbit’s ecosystem. The Fitbit app doesn’t support big screens like tablet devices, so this is removing the only large-format interface for data. Fitbit’s competitors all have big-screen interfaces. Garmin has a very similar website, and the Apple Watch has an iPad health app. This isn’t an improvement.”

Users at Reddit are…not pleased, listing a variety of the functionalities they’ll be losing as Google takes Fitbit app only. And Reddit is absolutely packed with similar threads about deteriorating quality.

As the Ars comment section notes, this is driving many users to Apple or to Garmin, which tends to offer more functionality and doesn’t bury features behind a subscription paywall. To hear Google tell it, they’re primarily focused on Fitbit as an app for its own watches, but despite promises of looming “AI” integration,” it’s not remotely clear that anything about the strategy is resulting in better product.

None of this really helps blunt the criticism of antitrust reformers that say large tech companies are increasingly interested less in innovation, and more in stock-bumping, tax-cut generating catch and kill acquisitions whose primary function is to slowly strangle anything deemed a competitive threat to the company’s current or future products.

Filed Under: acquisitions, fitbit, fitness tracker, health, mergers, smart watch
Companies: fitbit, google

With Criticism Of Its Tech Going Federal, ShotSpotter Fires Back With Inconsistent Assertions

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the throwing-from-the-back-foot dept

ShotSpotter isn’t having a great year. Or two.

Its tech has been called into question — both for its ability to truly detect gunshots and for its contribution (if any) to public safety.

What is known about ShotSpotter isn’t great. The most in-depth examination of the tech was performed by the Inspector General of the city of Chicago. The report produced by the IG was anything but flattering. It found that mics were clustered heavily in neighborhoods predominantly occupied by people of color. It also found the tech wasn’t doing much to help cops tamp down on gun crime in Chicago. Not only did reports rarely produce suspects, much less evidence that would be useful in investigations, it tended to re-route cops from productive patrolling to wandering around streets looking for bullet casings or whatever.

As the tech’s shortcomings became more apparent, more and more cities have chosen not to do business with ShotSpotter. Some terminated their contracts or chose not to renew them. Some reviewed the tech but decided to spend money elsewhere.

Other controversies reared their heads as well. Multiple accusations surfaced claiming ShotSpotter analysts were altering gunshot reports to fit police officers’ narratives or justify questionable stops and arrests. ShotSpotter made things worse by trying to sue journalists who reported on these accusations, even when they did nothing more than report on the contents of court documents.

Presumably, this collective shitstorm was the impetus for ShotSpotter’s re-branding. It now refers to itself as SoundThinking, but underneath the new letterhead, it’s still just ShotSpotter.

The latest broadside was issued by the federal government. Multiple legislators asked the DOJ to look into recipients of grants from the department to ensure they weren’t being spent on tech that was being deployed in contravention of the Civil Rights Act. ShotSpotter was named specifically, due to its omnipresence in neighborhoods primarily occupied by minorities.

ShotSpotter is fighting back. But its efforts haven’t been all that successful, much less coherent. It erected a “save ShotSpotter” page in hopes of peppering Chicago alderpersons with requests that the city not end its contract with the company later this year.

Now, it’s firing back against statements made by federal legislators and the ACLU of Massachusetts. Certainly, one would expect nothing less from a company that is now aware its back is against the wall.

But you’d expect a better effort to be made, especially when it’s not being made by some PR intern, but by company executives. It has hired Boston PR firm Regan Communications Group to assist in its pushback, but the ROI of that disbursement isn’t immediately observable here:

“[I]n incidents where lives may hang in the balance and every second counts, the ShotSpotter system alerts police to virtually all gunfire in a community’s coverage area within 60 seconds,” the company’s president and CEO Ralph A. Clark, wrote in a 35-page, heavily footnoted letter to the lawmakers.

“The fast response made possible by this technology ultimately helps save lives, locate suspects, and collect critical evidence,” he said.

The ShotSpotter response team needs to get on the same page. Earlier this month, the company insisted people complaining about the tech’s uselessness in criminal investigations were looking at the wrong metric for measuring success. Instead, it claimed the tech’s true value was providing fast response to reported gunshots to save victims of shootings.

But in this statement, the company tries to have it both ways. Even if it’s true ShotSpotter creates better response times for medical professionals, very few law enforcement agencies are going to pay millions for tech that does little more than scramble ambulances faster. So, the company continues to insist — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary — that the tech is a meaningful contributor to criminal investigations and public safety.

“We are proud of the value that ShotSpotter delivers to law enforcement to help address criminal gunfire and save lives,” Clark wrote.

Are you really? The “value” you speak so highly of hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated anywhere. When officials have taken a close look at the tech, those close looks are often followed by contract terminations.

The company also responded to the ACLU’s accusations that its tech — at least as deployed by most law enforcement agencies — violates the Civil Rights Act. And again, a company executive was on hand to deliver an inconsistent statement that claims the tech is good for things (1) no one has asked it to be good at (locating gunshot victims) and (2) stuff it has been shown on multiple occasions it’s actually bad at.

“If you read headlines across the country and you can subtract out those pieces that are merely opinion, what you will see reflected over and over again is ShotSpotter locating gunshot wound victims, leading police to arrest offenders,” said Tom Chittum, SoundThinking’s senior vice president of analytics and forensic services.

“And it’s not because this technology simply gets lucky. It’s because it really works,” he said.

While it’s disappointing to learn Tom Chittum isn’t reading my headlines, the real problem here is the claims the company is making. Recently, the company has begun insisting the real value of the tech is locating gunshot victims, rather than locating criminals — a new PR spin that seems to have been adopted because so much data shows the tech isn’t doing much to locate suspects, close investigations, or deliver criminal convictions.

Now, every statement says two things: we save lives and we stop crime. The latter clearly isn’t an accurate portrayal of the tech’s contribution to law enforcement. And the former is something that can’t clearly be determined because absolutely no one is tracking data on EMS response times in relation to ShotSpotter reports.

Obviously, statements issued by companies on the defensive will be extremely self-serving. But no one should be duped by this desperation play from SoundThinking. If the company wants us to believe it saves lives, it should make an effort to compile data that demonstrates it, at the very least, can make this contribution to public safety. And while it does that, we’re free to draw inferences from existing data on its law enforcement utility, which appears to be almost nil.

Filed Under: gunshot detection, pr speak
Companies: aclu, shotspotter, soundthinking

500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library

Culture

from the a-modern-book-burning,-courtesy-of-the-publishers dept

If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the library for damages, wouldn’t you think that would be a major news story? Wouldn’t you think many people would be up in arms about it?

It’s happening right now with the Internet Archive, and it’s getting almost no attention.

As we’ve discussed at great length, the Internet Archive’s Open Library system is indistinguishable from the economics of how a regular library works. The Archive either purchases physical books or has them donated (just like a physical library). It then lends them out on a one-to-one basis (leaving aside a brief moment where it took down that barrier when basically all libraries were shut down due to pandemic lockdowns), such that when someone “borrows” a digital copy of a book, no one else can borrow that same copy.

And yet, for all of the benefits of such a system in enabling more people to be able to access information, without changing the basic economics of how libraries have always worked, the big publishers all sued the Internet Archive. The publishers won the first round of that lawsuit. And while the court (somewhat surprisingly!) did not order the immediate closure of the Open Library, it did require the Internet Archive to remove any books upon request from publishers (though only if the publishers made those books available as eBooks elsewhere).

As the case has moved into the appeals stage (where we have filed an amicus brief), the Archive has revealed that around 500,000 books have been removed from the open library.

The Archive has put together an open letter to publishers, requesting that they restore access to this knowledge and information — a request that will almost certainly fall on extremely deaf ears.

We purchase and acquire books—yes, physical, paper books—and make them available for one person at a time to check out and read online. This work is important for readers and authors alike, as many younger and low-income readers can only read if books are free to borrow, and many authors’ books will only be discovered or preserved through the work of librarians. We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers.

But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing.  

The Archive also has a huge collection of quotes from people who have been impacted negatively by all of this. Losing access to knowledge is a terrible, terrible thing, driven by publishers who have always hated the fundamental concept of libraries and are very much using this case as an attack on the fundamental principle of lending books.

Tran D. A., Ha Tinh, Vietnam: It hampers my ability to look up data sources. Books in Vietnam are significantly less accessible and my economic background doesn’t allow me to afford these things.

R.F., Surrey, Canada: As a Wikipedia editor, the Internet Archive is one of the most useful tools to find citations and verify facts. By removing books from the Internet Archive, it hinders the ability to find sources for an open encyclopedia.

Meilan S., Washington, DC, USA: As the online history editor at a national magazine, I use the Internet Archive on an almost daily basis. It’s an invaluable tool for accessing books cited by my writers, conducting research for articles I’m writing, and fact-checking quotes and other information. I regularly link to the Internet Archive in our published content, as I believe we should be as transparent as possible regarding sourcing, in addition to offering readers links to sites where they can learn more about a given topic. It has been disheartening to find the majority of books I need to access for work now listed as “removed.” The removal of this content makes it more difficult for me to include diverse, in-depth and reliable sources in my writing and editing.

Tamia T., Montreal, Canada: Internet Archive gives me access to scholarly information that is not afforded to those outside of the post-secondary education system. The Internet Archive helps bridge the gap when it comes to literacy, comprehension of history, and the discovery of new works that are otherwise gate-kept from the average person.

None of this will stop false stories making the rounds that the Open Library is a form of “piracy.” But it needs to be clearly communicated that this lawsuit is 100% about killing the very concept of libraries.

And, why? Because copyright and DRM systems allow publishers to massively overcharge for eBooks. This is what’s really the underlying factor here. Libraries in the past could pay the regular price for a book and then lend it out. But with eBook licensing, they are able to charge exorbitant monopoly rents, while artificially limiting how many books libraries can even buy.

I don’t think many people realize the extreme nature of the pricing situation here. As we’ve noted, a book that might cost $29.99 retail can cost $1,300 for an eBook license, and that license may include restrictions, such as having to relicense after a certain number of lends, or saying a library may only be allowed to purchase a single eBook license at a time.

The ones who changed the way libraries work is not the Internet Archive. It’s the publishers. They’re abusing copyright and DRM to fundamentally kill the very concept of a library, and this lawsuit is a part of that strategy.

Filed Under: book lending, controlled digital lending, copyright, ebooks, libraries
Companies: hachette, internet archive