Internal Twitter Video Reveals Twitter Bent Over Backwards To Protect Trump And Pro-Trump Insurrectionists

Content Moderation

from the still-won't-convince-the-gullible dept

I don’t know how many times it needs to be said, but since so many are still insisting the opposite is true, I guess many more times: Twitter’s moderation policies were not driven by some anti-conservative bias, nor were they pushed by the government to block Trump or his supporters. We have, of course, discussed all this before, but now the Washington Post got its hands on a video recording of an internal Twitter meeting right before the January 6th attack on the Capitol, in which they discussed how to handle the growing calls for violence.

Nothing in the video is surprising, as it all confirms what’s been said before, but it does provide more evidence. The video, and testimony from some people involved in this and related meetings, were part of why the January 6th Committee highlighted just how far Twitter staff bent over backwards to protect Trump and conservatives on the platform.

And, it’s confirming what a former Twitter trust & safety employee testified under oath, about how when they saw a tweet by Donald Trump that clearly violated the site’s policies, the decision Twitter’s leadership made was to rewrite the rules to effectively exempt Trump’s tweet.

That’s not even getting into the many studies, both internal and external to Twitter, that showed no evidence of anti-conservative bias in Twitter’s moderation policies. In fact, Twitter’s own research showed that it favored conservative tweets, with its algorithm promoting them more than non-conservative tweets.

And the new video, again, shows that the company wanted to give every possible leeway to Trump’s supporters, even as some were advocating violence (some of which later occurred):

On Jan. 5, 2021, the lawyers and specialists on Twitter’s safety policy team, which set rules about violent content, were bracing for a day of brutality in Washington. In the weeks since President Donald Trump had tweeted a call for his supporters to gather in the nation’s capital for a protest he promised would be “wild,” the site had erupted with pledges of political vengeance and plans for a military-style assault.

“I am very concerned about what happens tomorrow, especially given what we have been seeing,” one member of the team, Anika Collier Navaroli, said in a video call, the details of which are reported here for the first time. “For months we have been allowing folks to maintain and say on the platform that they’re locked and loaded, that they’re ready to shoot people, that they’re ready to commit violence.”

Some participants in the call pushed the company to adopt a tougher position, arguing that moderators should be able to remove what they called “coded incitements to violence” — messages, such as “locked and loaded,” that could be read as threats. But a senior manager dismissed the idea, saying executives wanted them to take action against only the most flagrant rules violations, adding, “We didn’t want to go too far.”

I think this is actually a fully defensible position, especially as it wasn’t entirely clear how far all the talk would go. But it also blows a big hole in the idea that Twitter was actively seeking to suppress such voices.

The same records that the Post obtained show that Twitter was also very reluctant to suspend Trump:

But the records reveal a company that fought until the end to give some of Trump’s most belligerent supporters the benefit of the doubt, even as its internal teams faced an overwhelming volume of tweets threatening retribution in line with Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

They also show that Twitter’s leaders were reluctant to take action against Trump’s account two days after the insurrection, even as lawyers inside the company argued that his continued praise of the Capitol rioters amounted to “glorification of violence,” an offense punishable then by suspension under Twitter’s rules.

And, one more thing: the records suggest that the narrative about the Biden administration (or, at the time, campaign and then transition team) having anything to do with the Trump suspension is false:

None of the records obtained by The Washington Post — including the 32-minute video, a five-page retrospective memo outlining the suspension discussions, and a 114-page agenda document detailing the safety policy team’s meetings and conversations — show any contacts with federal officials pushing the company to take any action involving Trump’s account.

Again, none of this should be a surprise to you if you’ve been following the actual details. Versions of all of this information have come out, repeatedly. Though, these new records provide some more details on what actually happened inside of the company:

On the night of Jan. 6, after law enforcement officials had fought to regain control of the Capitol grounds, Twitter briefly suspended Trump’s account but said it would allow him to return after 12 hours if he deleted three tweets that broke Twitter’s “civic integrity” rules against manipulating or interfering in elections. One tweet included a video in which he called for peace from the “very special” rioters who he said had been “hurt” because the “fraudulent election … was stolen from us.”

The former Twitter executive said the company sent Trump’s representatives an email on Jan. 6 saying that his account would face an immediate ban if he broke another rule and that the executives hoped, with a 12-hour timeout, Trump would “get the message.”

Trump deleted the tweets and, on Jan. 7, posted a conciliatory video in which he said that “this moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” The next day, however, he tweeted a more fiery message about how the “American Patriots” who voted for him would “not be disrespected” and announced that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The documents then discuss the internal back and forth (some of which we’ve already talked about with regards to the — widely misinterpreted — Twitter Files) between employees at Twitter about what to do in response to Trump’s account potentially inspiring violence. As we’ve heard before, and the notes obtained by the Post confirm, there was a somewhat passionate debate internally, with many arguing that his tweets did not go so far as to incite violence, while others argued that Trump’s messages were clearly coded to encourage the January 6th insurrectionists to continue to attack our Democratic institutions.

And, again, there seemed to be back and forth debate, not driven by any political ideology, or with any input from anyone outside the company, debating how to handle the account:

Still, some Twitter executives voiced hesitation about taking down Trump’s account, arguing that “reasonable minds could differ” as to the intentions of Trump’s tweets, according to Navaroli’s document. Twitter had for years declined to hold Trump to the same rules as everyone else on the basis that world leaders’ views were especially important for voters to hear.

At a 2 p.m. video call on Jan. 8, which was described in the document but not viewed by The Post, top officials in Twitter’s trust and safety team questioned the “glorification of violence” argument and debated whether the company should instead wait to act until Trump more blatantly broke the platform’s rules.

Navaroli argued that this course of inaction had “led us to the current crisis situation” and could lead “to the same end result — continued violence and death in a nation in the midst of a sociopolitical crisis,” the document shows.

In another call, around 3:30 p.m., after safety policy team members had compiled examples of tweets in which users detailed plans for future violence, Twitter’s top lawyers and policy officials voiced support for a “permanent suspension” of Trump’s account. One note in the safety policy agenda document read that there was a “team consensus that this is a [violation]” due to Trump’s “pattern of behavior.”

Their assessment was sent to Dorsey and Gadde for final approval and, at 6:21 p.m., Twitter’s policy team was notified over Slack that Trump had been suspended. A company tweet and blog post announced the decision to the world shortly after.

There’s a lot more in the Post’s story, which covers a ton of background info as well. Anyone who is discussing this stuff owes it to themselves to read the whole thing. But it gives yet another stack of evidence confirming what all of the earlier evidence had shown: that Twitter bent over backwards to keep Trump on the platform, that the decision to remove him was deeply debated and focused on issues around fears of actual violence, not political ideology, and that there was no evidence of any interference or involvement from anyone outside of Twitter, let alone anyone associated with the Biden transition team.

And yet, there are still some extremely motivated, ignorant, and/or gullible people out there who believe the opposite is true.

I’m assuming that this new evidence won’t convince them, because they seem to brush off and ignore any evidence that debunk their hallucinations. But, for everyone else, it’s useful reinforcement for what has already been shown to be true.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, content moderation, donald trump, january 6th, violence
Companies: twitter

Biden Falsely Claims That Removing Section 230 And Forced Transparency Will Stop Hatred; He’s Dangerously Wrong

Free Speech

from the stop-it dept

On Thursday, the White House hosted the United We Stand summit, to bring together people to take action against what they refer to as “hate-fueled violence.” This seems like a good idea for a summit, at a time when so much of politics is focused on grievances and culture wars that seem to inevitably lead to bigotry and violence. It’s good to see that the White House can actually talk about some of this and take a stand, rather than cowering behind traditional platitudes.

Indeed, in addition to the summit, the White House announced a bunch of initiatives that… actually sound pretty good, in general. More funding for education, and for community organizations that combat violence and hate, and more tools for helping digital literacy. I’m perhaps less convinced that some of the other plans make sense, including funding for law enforcement (which has been a bastion of hatred itself lately) and efforts to “increase school security,” which seem to be about turning schools into prison-like atmospheres with security theater that makes children less safe.

As part of the summit, a bunch of the big social media platforms announced new policies to be more aggressive towards hatred, and most of those sound pretty reasonable.

YouTube is expanding its policies to combat violent extremism by removing content glorifying violent acts for the purpose of inspiring others to commit harm, fundraise, or recruit, even if the creators of such content are not related to a designated terrorist group. YouTube will also launch an educational media literacy campaign across its platform to assist younger users in particular in identifying different manipulation tactics used to spread misinformation – from using emotional language to cherry picking information. This campaign will first launch in the U.S. before expanding to other countries over time. Finally, YouTube will support the McCain Institute and EdVenture Partners’ Invent2Prevent program with ongoing funding and training. The program challenges college students to develop their own dynamic products, tools, or initiatives to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.]

Twitch will accelerate its ongoing commitment to deterring hate in the livestreaming space this year by releasing a new tool that empowers its streamers and their communities to help counter hate and harassment and further individualize the safety experience of their channels. Twitch will also launch new community education initiatives on topics including identifying harmful misinformation and deterring hateful violence.

Microsoft is expanding its application of violence detection and prevention artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools and using gaming to build empathy in young people. The company has developed AI/ML tools with appropriate privacy protections that can help detect credible threats of violence or to public safety, and is making a basic, more affordable version of these tools accessible to schools and smaller organizations to assist in violence prevention. Microsoft is also developing a new experience on Minecraft: Education Edition to help students, families and educators learn ways to build a better and safer online and offline world through respect, empathy, trust and safety.

Meta is forging a new research partnership with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism to analyze trends in violent extremism and tools that help communities combat it. Meta will also partner with Search For Common Ground to provide trainings, workshops, and skill-building to equip community-based partners working locally to counter hate-fueled violence with tools to help amplify their work.

And… that’s all good? But, it’s weird, because part of what enables all of the above companies to do this sorta stuff is the fact that they know they have Section 230 which, along with the 1st Amendment, helps protect them against frivolous lawsuits over their content moderation decisions.

And even though it’s Section 230 that helps enable sites to do this… in his own speech, Biden lashed out at the tech companies and Section 230.

I think most of the speech is actually pretty good, honestly. But, not for the first time, Biden gets weirdly focused on internet companies and Section 230, as if they’re the problem. At minute 22:40 in the video above he says:

And hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hate and fueling violence.

{crowd gives standing ovations}

And I’m calling on Congress to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements on all of them.

This is all extremely confused and ridiculously counterproductive. We’ve explained this before, and have even had Biden advisors insist that they understand these issues, but it appears that no one is able to explain it to the President.

First of all, if you want social media companies to figure out the best ways to deal with hate and fueling violence, you need Section 230, because it’s what allows them the freedom to experiment and put in place the other ideas mentioned above. It allows them the ability to test different ideas, and not face crippling liability for mistakes. It allows them to see what actually has an impact and what works.

Removing Section 230 goes against all of those wishes. Because of the nature of the 1st Amendment, without Section 230, many websites are more likely to take a totally hands off approach to moderation. Because they only liability they can face under the 1st Amendment standards endorsed by the courts is if they have actual knowledge of law-violating content on their site. The easiest way to avoid that is not to look and not to moderate much at all.

In other words, this call to remove Section 230 will encourage many sites to do less moderation and to allow more hatred to roam free.

Biden seems to falsely believe that removing Section 230 will magically make hate illegal, and create a cause of action with which people can sue websites. That’s just fundamentally wrong. Whether we like it or not, such hate speech remains protected under the 1st Amendment, so there’s no direct legal liability anyway. Removing Section 230 doesn’t change that. And, again, even if the content somehow reaches a level that it does break the law, the website cannot be held liable for it under the 1st Amendment unless they had knowledge that it was illegal.

Getting rid of Section 230 makes things worse, not better.

Second, Biden is simply lying when he says it’s a “special immunity for social media.” It is not. He’s wrong. Very wrong. Section 230 protects smaller companies way more than it helps the big companies, and it protects users and their own speech way more than it protects any company (by enabling sites to host third party content in the first place). Indeed, getting rid of it would do more to harm the most marginalized than protect them.

It’s bizarre that the President still gets this so wrong.

Finally, on the claims of “transparency,” once again, this is extreme ignorance. Forcing websites to be transparent about their content moderation practices makes it harder to stop malicious actors because you’re giving them the roadmap to how to game the systems. It also makes it that much more difficult for websites to adjust and adapt to the dynamic and ever-changing methods of malicious actors (i.e. those wishing to spread hate on the platform).

So, both of these proposals would almost certainly increase the amount of hateful speech online. And I know that people in the Biden administration know this. And yet they let the President continue to spread this counterproductive nonsense.

It’s all really too bad. A summit like this is a good thing. Countering hatred and violence is a good thing. Many of the programs announced at the summit sound quite helpful.

But the attacks on the 1st Amendment and tech (ironically at the same time that so many tech companies announced new programs) is not just silly, it’s actively counterproductive to the overall goal.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, hatred, joe biden, section 230, summit, transparency, violence

Whistleblower: Police Officers Celebrated Shooting People With Badge-Bending, BBQs

Legal Issues

from the jesus-fucking-christ-can-you-try-not-being-awful-just-for-a-moment dept

There’s a lot of competition for Worst Police Force in America. The NYPD is known for its casual approach to human life and its antagonistic approach to public records requesters. The Chicago PD operated its own black site to separate residents from their rights while interrogating them. The Pasco County Sheriff’s Department thinks it should be in the business of turning students into criminals. The list goes on and fucking on.

Enter the Vallejo (California) Police Department — one that has apparently gamified the shooting of residents.

For a generation, a secretive clique within the Vallejo Police Department has commemorated fatal shootings with beers, backyard barbecues, and by bending the points of their badges each time they kill in the line of duty, an investigation by Open Vallejo has found. The custom was so exclusive, some officers involved in fatal shootings were never told of its existence.

First you have to shoot someone. Then the others who are in on this have to determine whether you can be trusted.

Sources say not every officer who kills is invited to participate in the Badge of Honor ritual. The vetting process is stringent, if straightforward. Those who kill meet its first requirement. Those who can be trusted not to talk fulfill the second.

Open Vallejo cites the controversial shooting of Willie McCoy as the impetus for this anonymous whistleblowing. McCoy was shot by Vallejo police officers in a Taco Bell drive-thru, where he had apparently passed out. Restaurant employees called the PD, which sent officers to perform a wellness check. Instead of seeing whether anything was wrong with McCoy, officers surrounded the car and killed McCoy when he awoke and moved one arm towards his shoulder. Vallejo officers fired 55 rounds in less than 3.5 seconds, killing McCoy.

It wasn’t the first time Vallejo cops emptied their magazines into someone they were supposed to be arresting or helping. At the tail end of a chase involving an alleged robbery suspect, Vallejo officers shot the suspect — who was carrying a knife and slowly moving towards them — 41 times.

According to Open Vallejo’s source, one of McCoy’s killers — Officer Ryan McMahon — got a bend on his “star” for this shooting. This would be his second “bend” in less than a year.

Vallejo police officers love using their guns to solve problems. Even if you doubt the anonymous whistleblower’s claims of in-house celebrations for shooting citizens, this statistic is chilling:

At the time of [Captain John] Whitney’s firing, nearly 40% of officers on the force had been in at least one shooting, Open Vallejo research shows. More than a third of those had participated in two or more. The department employs about 100 sworn personnel.

That’s well above the 27% of officers who have self-reported firing their weapons in the line of duty. This disparity begs the “chicken or egg” question. Are Vallejo cops violent because there are informal rewards for being violent? Or did this streak of violence lead to the unofficial rewarding of shooting people?

The captain namechecked in this quote was forced out of the department after opening an investigation into the shooting of Willie McCoy. Vallejo’s police culture doesn’t welcome internal or external scrutiny — like pretty much every other law enforcement agency in the nation.

Captain Whitney’s whistleblowing didn’t start there. It wasn’t just the Willie McCoy shooting. It was also the blowback from another Vallejo PD failure — one ignored off by officers and supervisors, including the then-head of the PD.

[Current police union president Mat] Mustard was the lead detective on the 2015 Denise Huskins kidnapping case Vallejo police mistakenly called a hoax.

Whitney says he was in the room when Chief Bidou allegedly instructed Lt. Kenny Park before a now infamous press conference.

“The fact that we’ve essentially wasted all of these resources for really nothing is upsetting,” said Lt. Park during the 2015 presser.

“Chief Bidou told Lt. Park to burn that b****,” said Whitney.

Huskins recorded this exclusive statement for ABC7 News: “In their eyes, if you’re a woman – you’re another “bit**” to burn; if you’re a person of color – you’re another ‘criminal’ to kill. It’s horrific, and the community of Vallejo deserves better.”

That’s the mindset of this PD, which has terrorized residents for years under the guise of preserving law and order. This is the way it has always been.

The failure to hold police officers accountable has been an issue in Vallejo for as long as anyone can remember. According to confidential city documents, twenty-five years ago one officer shot another while drinking in a bar, and wasn’t fired. A cop with a drug problem kept his job even after he was caught stealing from evidence lockers and was arrested for prescription fraud. Twenty years ago, a lieutenant told a new officer named Joseph Iacono that, when a suspect runs away, the officer should use enough force to put the man in the emergency room. To see if Iacono could fight, he was placed in a holding cell with an uncoöperative suspect. Iacono is now the department’s Lead Force Options Instructor and, according to the documents, likes to say, “It can’t be awful if it’s lawful.”

The Vallejo PD has cost city residents $16 million in the last ten years. This may not seem like much when compared to the amounts racked up by law enforcement agencies in large cities like Chicago and New York City. But when broken down to a per officer cost, Vallejo takes the lead in costing those paying their salaries the most. And — despite actions taken by the city’s insurer — police officers continue to make things worse for those that manage to survive their violence.

Police violence has cost the city so much money that, in 2018, the statewide insurance pool that helped pay its legal fees took the unprecedented step of raising Vallejo’s annual deductible, from five hundred thousand dollars to $2.5 million, prompting the city to find another insurer. Vallejo is currently facing at least twenty-four use-of-force cases, which it estimates could cost some fifty million dollars.

Even if Vallejo officers aren’t bending their badges in celebration of shooting citizens, they’re still shooting citizens far more often than cops in other departments. A lot of whistleblowing has occurred over the years in relation to this department. And so far, it hasn’t changed the culture.

The Vallejo PD is out of control. Swapping parts out isn’t going to change it. There’s a new deputy chief helping preside over Vallejo’s squad of uniformed killers but no one should be holding their breath waiting for internal reform. The “new” sub-boss is the same as the old boss: a department rehire. Joseph Kreins presided over the department as chief from 2012-2014. Dusting off someone who failed to control a department for two years doesn’t change anything. The city’s cops will continue to kill and maim until someone dares to rein them in.

And it appears no one will — at least not immediately. Between retrofitting a deputy chief and pretending state AG Xavier Becerra — the same AG who fought a new police accountability law in court — will get to the bottom of the PD’s endemic violence problem, city residents haven’t been given anything to hope for. The shootings will continue until law enforcement morale improves.

Filed Under: california, police, police brutality, shootings, vallejo, violence

Another Arrest Shows It's Pretty Much Everyone But Antifa Engaging In Anti-Government Violence

Legal Issues

from the presidential-conspiracy-theory-suffers-another-setback dept

The DOJ really wants to make El Presidente’s antifa dreams come true. The anti-police brutality protests have been cast by the administration as a leftist conspiracy to… um… demand better policing and better police officers. In addition to sending federal officers to clamp down on unrest in “Democratic” cities, the FBI has been sending analysts to crack phones taken from protesters in hopes of finding some sort of antifa org chart the feds can use to dismantle this “group.”

If you think it’s weird a free world government would be obsessed with tracking down people fighting fascism, you’re not alone. Seems like the time and effort would be better utilized to neutralize the threat posed by homegrown extremists, many of whom align themselves with white supremacist movements. But this is what this Administration is diverting resources to, even when available evidence suggests the antifa movement isn’t filled with dangerous individuals.

More evidence suggests the government might want to focus on another loose assortment of anti-government individuals: the so-called “Boogaloo Bois.” If antifa is a collective in the loosest definition of the word, the Boogaloo Bois are similarly unstructured. Small groups exist but there’s no organizational head to bring down or nationwide structure to dismantle. While the president complains about “violent” BLM/antifa protesters, real violence is being perpetrated by actual anarchists Trump has never criticized publicly.

In the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday.

[…]

Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Boerne, Texas, is charged with one count of interstate travel to incite a riot for his alleged role in ramping up violence during the protests in Minneapolis on May 27 and 28. According to charges, Hunter, wearing a skull mask and tactical gear, shot 13 rounds at the south Minneapolis police headquarters while people were inside. He also looted and helped set the building ablaze, according to the complaint, which was filed Monday under seal.

Hunter’s public social media posts helped bring him down. So did posts from other members of the group Hunter associated himself with, including Steven Carillo, who shot and killed a federal officer in Oakland, California and a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz. Hunter apparently traveled all the way from Texas to open fire on a police precinct and help set it on fire.

And, as if everything happening with protests and various self-invited interlopers wasn’t confusing enough, this particular Boogaloo Bois unit managed to mix domestic and international terrorism into a completely incomprehensible blend.

Two members of the Boogaloo Bois, including one from Minnesota, have been indicted on federal charges of attempting to provide material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization, the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday.

And this is apparently all it takes to talk a Boogaloo Boi into believing you work for a foreign terrorist organization.

In June, the FBI began receiving information about Teeter, Solomon and other Boogaloo Bois from a confidential source that the Bois believed to be a member of the terrorist organization Hamas. The source, a paid informant, had a Middle Eastern accent.

This isn’t going to stop Trump and Bill Barr from continuing their hunt for an antifa kingpin. There’s really no difference between the two, as far as Trump is concerned. Anti-THIS government is indistinguishable from anti-ALL government when you’re THIS government. But one “group” tends to be composed of white guys with guns wearing Hawaiian shirts while the other is a very loose affiliation of what Trump considers to be “leftists.” And it will always be the “leftists” that are considered more dangerous, even when its actual anarchists killing cops.

Filed Under: antifa, boogaloo bois, doj, fbi, free speech, ivan hunter, protests, violence, william barr

California Cities Voting On Ridiculous Resolution Asking Congress For Section 230 Reform… Because Of Violence At Protests?

Legal Issues

from the what-the-even-fuck-is-this? dept

I attended an Internet Archive event (virtually, of course) yesterday, and afterwards one of the attendees alerted me to yet another nefarious attack on Section 230 based on out-and-out lies. Apparently the League of California Cities has been going around getting various California cities to vote on a completely misleading and bogus motion pushing for Congress to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It was apparently put up first by the city of Cerritos, which is part of Los Angeles County (almost surprised it wasn’t started in Hollywood, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the impetus behind it was Hollywood people…). Basically, cities are voting on whether or not the League of California Cities should officially call on Congress to amend Section 230 in drastic ways… all because of some violence at recent protests about police brutality. The process, apparently, is that one city (in this case Cerritos) makes the proposal, and gets a bunch of other cities to first sign on, and then various other cities take a vote as to whether it becomes official League policy (after which they’d send a letter to Congress, which Congress would probably ignore).

And, if you just read the nonsense that the originating proposal put out there, and had no idea how Section 230, the internet, the 1st Amendment or the 4th Amendment works, it might sound like a good idea. Except that what the proposal says is utter nonsense, disconnected from reality.

This resolution states that the League of California Cities should urge Congress to amend Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) to limit the immunity provided to online platforms where their forums enable criminal activity to be promoted.

Ultimately, the policy objectives proposed under this resolution, if enacted, would incentivize social media companies to establish and implement a reasonable program to identify and remove content that solicits criminal activity.

Except that Section 230 already says there’s no immunity for platforms if they enable federal criminal activity. So this is a made up concern. Second, if you changed 230 in the manner they want, they’re simply wrong that it “would incentivize social media companies to establish and implement a reasonable program to identify and remove content that solicits criminal activity.” Because every major social media platform already has such a program. The problem is not that they don’t have incentives. The problem is that not everyone will ever agree on what the “right” moderation is.

Incredibly, the proposal handwaves away the idea that putting more liability on internet websites might lead to more censorship:

While there is certainly an argument to substantiate concerns around censorship, the use of social media as a tool for organizing violence is equally disturbing.

Tomato, tomahto.

Also, the proposal seems to blame violence that broke out at various protests this summer… on social media, claiming that’s why 230 must change.

Although the majority of protests were peaceful, some demonstrations in cities escalated into riots, looting, and street skirmishes with police. While much of the nation?s focus has been on addressing police misconduct, police brutality, and systemic racism, some have used demonstrators? peaceful protests on these topics as opportunities to loot and/or vandalize businesses, almost exclusively under the guise of the ?Black Lives Matter? movement. It has been uncovered that these ?flash robs? were coordinated through the use of social media. The spontaneity and speed of the attacks enabled by social media make it challenging for the police to stop these criminal events as they are occurring, let alone prevent them from commencing altogether.

As these events started occurring across the country, investigators quickly began combing through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram seeking to identify potentially violent extremists, looters, and vandals and finding ways to charge them after ? and in some cases before ? they sow chaos. While this technique has alarmed civil liberties advocates, who argue the strategy could negatively impact online speech, law enforcement officials claim it aligns with investigation strategies employed in the past.

So, let me get this straight. First, we should blame social media — and not police brutality and militarization — for the cases where violence has broken out at a few protests. And the way to deal with violence organized on social media is to… hold the social media platforms liable rather than those that engaged in or encouraged the violence? Are these people for real?

Also, the full proposal goes way beyond what is described regarding violence at protests. This is what it says:

1. Online platforms must establish and implement a reasonable program to identify and take down content which solicits criminal activity; and
2. Online platforms must provide to law enforcement information which will assist in the identification and apprehension of persons who use the services of the platform to solicit and to engage in criminal activity; and
3. An online platform that willfully or negligently fails in either of these duties is not immune from enforcement of state and local laws which impose criminal or civil liability for such failure.

That would be a massive and problematic change to Section 230. First, as it stands, websites already have tremendous incentive to identify and take down content which solicits criminal activity — and many of them try to do exactly that. Changing 230 will not change that — but will lead to fewer places for people to communicate and put tremendous limits on the ability to speak freely online.

The second prong has nothing to do with Section 230 and raises significant 4th Amendment concerns about when a website should have to hand over private information on someone without any warrant or judicial review. That should be frightening to everyone.

This entire proposal is horrifically authoritarian, and is questionable on both 1st and 4th Amendment grounds, but a bunch of cities are signing onto it because the proposal is extremely misleading about how the internet works, how Section 230 works, and what this all means. While I’m not sure that Congress really gives a shit what the League of California Cities has to say about Section 230, it’s yet another way in which people from all over the place are attacking the law that made the internet, because they’re mad that people they don’t like are doing stuff they don’t like.

Thankfully, at least one California city has rejected the proposal. Last night the city of Hayward rejected the proposal, despite it getting support from the local police chief and the city attorney who, I’m told, used the totally bogus “fire in a crowded theater” line, suggesting that was the law of the land (it’s not) and other wrong and misleading cliches, including “freedom of speech isn’t free.” Thankfully, some on the city council (and the mayor) seemed to recognize that this was a dangerous, half-baked proposal and voted it down. I hope other cities do the same.

Filed Under: california, cerritos, hayward, protests, section 230, violence
Companies: league of california cities

Let. The Motherfucker. Burn.

Say That Again

from the 'not-all-cops'-said-the-bucket-brigade dept

Warning: this post will contain what we in the business like to call strong language, invective, and violent content. Govern yourself accordingly.

Content warning 2: possibly exceedingly long.

ONCE UPON A TIME, A MAN GOT FUCKED

Let’s start with a story:

(Those of you who’d like to read a transcript, rather than watch this powerful performance by Orlando Jones [possibly for “Dear God, I’m still at work” reasons], can do so here.)

This is the history of black Americans. For a few hundred years, they weren’t even Americans. And even after that — even after the Civil War — black Americans spent a hundred years being shunted to different schools, different neighborhoods, different restrooms, different bus seating, different water fountains. They are not us, this land of opportunity repeatedly stated.

Integration was forced. It was rarely welcomed. Being black still means being an outsider. Four hundred years of subjugation doesn’t just end. This is how the story continues:

A hundred years later. You’re fucked. A hundred years after that. Fucked. A hundred years after you get free, you still getting fucked out a job and shot at by police.

Fucked.

That’s George Floyd. The Minneapolis resident allegedly passed a counterfeit $20 bill at a local store. The penalty was death — delivered extrajudicially by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Officer Chauvin put his knee on the neck of the handcuffed Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This continued for more than two minutes after Officer Chauvin had checked Floyd’s pulse and stated he “couldn’t find one.”

It was all captured on video:

A man was dead under Chauvin’s knee and yet he never moved. No one around him moved either. The other three officers at the scene watched Officer Chauvin kill a man, and not a single one of them did anything to prevent this from happening.

The good news is they’ve all been fired. The other news — with the “good” excised — is Officer Chauvin is being criminally charged. That’s only news. Buy your insurance now because it’s almost guaranteed Minneapolis will burn again once a jury has had a shot at this thing.

First, there’s the murder charge. We all want this but there’s little that supports it. It looks like murder, but the state has to prove things it’s probably not going to be able to prove — especially when the people doing the prosecuting aren’t all that interested in prosecuting cops.

Third-degree murder is the most minimal of murder charges and even that might not be enough to drag Officer Chauvin into the crushing wheels of the carceral state. As Scott Greenfield explains, there doesn’t appear to be enough to justify this charge in what’s been seen in multiple videos. It appears Chauvin deployed a restraint technique that’s been given a thumbs up by multiple law enforcement agencies.

Former police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with Murder 3, a not-insignificant charge even if it lacks the panache of Murder 1, with a potential sentence of 25 years in prison. Unlike intentional murder, the mens rea under Minnesota Statutes § 609.195 requires only a “depraved mind.”

609.195 MURDER IN THE THIRD DEGREE.

(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.

Yet, the complaint filed by the Hennepin County Attorney made almost no effort to assert that the elements of the charge were met, that Chauvin was “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.”

While the video clearly showed Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, which was naturally assumed, for obvious reasons, to have been the cause of death, that alone does not suffice to meet the element that it was an “act eminently dangerous.” It’s hardly an undangerous immobilization technique, but it’s also not an uncommon restraint, and is a permissible use of force in Minneapolis. That it’s only supposed to be used to restrain someone actively resisting gives rise to a departmental violation, but doesn’t elevate a lawful use of force to an eminently dangerous act.

If that falls, we’re left with manslaughter. And that probably won’t be enough to convince anyone Chauvin has been punished enough for continuing to use his knee to “restrain” Floyd for almost three minutes after a cop couldn’t detect his pulse.

Then there’s the preliminary findings by the coroner, which have a bunch of “GET OFFICER CHAUVIN OUT OF JAIL FREE” excuses already built in. But let’s start with the police officers who allowed Officer Chauvin to kill George Floyd. One officer deployed an excuse constructed by a manufacturer of “non-lethal” weapons to excuse almost any death in police custody.

“I am worried about excited delirium or whatever,” Lane said.

From that, we run into the details of the coroner’s report. These are preliminary, so they will change. But the exonerative text is already in there, ready for deployment by tough-on-crime politicians, media personnel willing to act like PD stenographers, police union officials (and the police union in Minneapolis is one of the worst), and anyone else seeking to justify Chauvin’s actions.

George Floyd didn’t die because Officer Chauvin crushed Floyd’s neck with his knee for almost nine minutes — most of which were spent with Floyd stating he couldn’t breathe. He died because he was going to die, with or without Officer Chauvin’s intercession.

The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.

George Floyd died of heart disease, you guys. It coincidentally killed him while he was having his neck compressed by a cop who checked his pulse and discovered he was likely already dead and continued to compress his neck for another two minutes. Also peep the “potential intoxicants,” which probably gave George Floyd the superhuman strength he needed to stay alive for seven of those nine minutes before succumbing to “coronary artery disease.”

If Chauvin walks, Minneapolis burns again. Multiple cities burn. Unlike other killings of black men by cops, this has prompted intense protests across the nation. This one — committed in full view of multiple phones and at least one nearby CCTV camera — shows cops do not give a fuck who is watching. They will do what they want to do and roll the dice on a favorable ruling by federal courts.

LET IT BURN. LET IT ALL BURN.

In response to this killing, Minneapolis burned. Looting accompanied the protests, as is often the case. We can argue about the positive/negative effects of looting for as long as you want in the comment threads, but let’s take a look at a couple of facts.

We have had riots in America for years. And looting. Those arguing that the destruction of businesses during these protests is counterproductive need to have their memories refreshed. This nation began with the looting of British ships. A whole offshoot of the “rule of law” party (also the “free speech” party, which is currently headed by someone seeking to directly regulate social media platforms) named itself after protesters who boarded British ships and threw their merchandise overboard.

Even if you decry the the destruction of local businesses which may not have the funds to recover from this unexpected turn of events, you cannot argue with protesters going straight to the source of the problem.

And, as a bonus, the thin blue line between us and chaos being filmed abandoning their posts and leaving us to the chaos they could never protect us from, no matter how many black men they killed.

The cops fucked this up. The cops should pay. Unfortunately, it will be taxpayers funding the rebuilding of the Third Precinct station in Minneapolis, but, by all means, burn every cop car, precinct, etc. that stands between black Americans and the respect of their rights.

The message is clear: cops are the problem, not the solution. Burn the shit that means something to them — the stuff that protects them from the people — and see where we all are at the end of the day.

Let’s take the long view. What has this accomplished? Here’s a list of riots sparked by police violence against minorities — one dating back nearly 60 years.

1965: Los Angeles
1967: Newark
1967: Detroit
1968: King assassination
1980: Miami
1992: Los Angeles
2001: Cincinnati
2014: Ferguson
2015: Baltimore
2016: Charlotte

What did that get us? Burning small parts of the system to the ground got us Nixon (who ran on a “tough on crime” platform following the riots in the 1960s) and a immensely-harmful drug war that has done nothing to slow the supply of drugs but has done everything to improve the bottom lines of PDs and prosecutors.

Cops haven’t changed. And they haven’t changed despite having every reason to. Several dozen cop shops are operating under consent decrees with the Department of Justice because they can’t be trusted to not violate rights en masse on their own. The rest are still acting like it’s a war zone out there, cladding themselves in cast-off military gear and equipment even as crime rates remain at historic lows. It’s tough to be a cop out there, say cops, even as unimpeachable data says otherwise to a bunch of impeachable cops.

But let’s just say you’re arguing that riots/protests/looting don’t solve anything. Let’s look at the data again. Here are the years where nothing happened:

1966
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2017
2018
2019

Did not attacking cops help then? Did leaving retail outlets intact make policing better? Did a lack of looting force cops to realize their systemic bias was hurting communities? Did all of this non-action bring us to a better place in terms of our relationship with law enforcement? (Those of you who are not minorities can put your hands down. Thanks.)

Short answer: it did not. The boot stamping on a human face forever is the past, present, and future. This image was personified by Officer Chauvin, who placed his knee on the neck of a human being suspected of passing a counterfeit $20 bill until he died. And continued to perform this inadvertently symbolic move for nearly another three minutes after that.

If it’s going to burn — and it should — it should start with those who have earned the flames. Cop cars are burning. Police stations are burning. Good. There is nothing wrong with this. The cops pretended to fear us whenever it was convenient. They claimed their subjective fear that someone might have a weapon justified every bullet they pumped into a person. Then they did nothing when people carrying actual guns marched on government buildings to demand access to restaurants and haircuts.

Fuck them. If you’re going to cry about the threats separating you from making it home to your family every night, at least be consistent. And if you can’t be consistent, at least restrain yourself from killing non-resistant people in the street in front of several cameras. And for fuck’s sake, if you can’t do that last part, it just means you don’t fear the public and their representatives. It means you think the courts will clear you, if not your own department and union. No public official deserves this much deference, trust, or unearned protection.

YOU OWE US.

That obligation has never changed. The only thing that has changed is the other branches of the government, which have decided — either through QI rulings or deference to police unions — that the public matters less than those sworn to serve it.

This is not me wading into a recent controversy with my eye on harvesting clicks. This is me — and this site — covering the abuses perpetrated by law enforcement agencies for years. There is nothing anomalous about this event. It just shows accountability can’t be brought solely by the mute witnesses of criminal acts by law enforcement officers. We have our cameras pointed at them. They have their own cameras. And yet, they still don’t care.

If this is how they want it, we have the power to give it to them.

Be the god of righteous hellfire. All these years of not setting fire to the possessions of an invading force intent on treating fellow citizens as enemy combatants has done nothing.

Let the motherfucker burn.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, derek chauvin, free speech, george floyd, police, police brutality, protests, racism, violence

Beto O'Rourke Joins The Silly Parade Of Confused Politicians Looking To Destroy Section 230

Legal Issues

from the the-cult-of-what-cow,-now? dept

Earlier this year it was revealed that Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow when he was a kid. To lots of folks in the tech world, this was a big deal. cDc was the original “hacking group.” And while it doesn’t sound like o’Rourke actually did that much hacking while in cDc, at the very least, it suggested that he was tech savvy and might actually understand the internet. Apparently not. On Friday, Beto revealed his plan to deal with gun violence — and apparently, that plan is to take away Section 230 protections from large internet companies.

If you’re thinking, “wait, what does Section 230 have to do with gun violence?” well, you’re correct. But apparently Beto hasn’t figured that out yet. The plan, in true Beto fashion, is quite short on details. Here’s what it says:

Hold Internet Companies Accountable for Hosting and Allowing for the Amplification of Hate Speech and Domestic Terrorism

Block terrorist content online. The New York Times reports that, since 2011, a third of white extremists responsible for attacks were inspired by others who had carried out similar attacks. Yet the internet continues to serve as a breeding ground for the rise of domestic terrorists and white supremacists. Beto is calling on internet hosting companies to follow Cloudflare?s lead to not allow 8chan back online and supports the closure of 8chan, Stormfront and other white nationalist communities housed on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Require large social media platforms to create systems designed to remove hateful activities on their sites. Beto would require large internet platforms to adopt terms of service to ban hateful activities, defined as those that incite or engage in violence, intimidation, harassment, threats, or defamation targeting an individual or group based on their actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.  These companies also would be required to put in place systems designed to identify and act on content violating the terms of service. Platforms must be transparent when they block content and provide for an appeal process in order to guard against abuse.

Amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Beto supports amending Section 230 of the CDA to remove legal immunity from lawsuits for large social media platforms that fail to change their terms of service and put in place systems as described above. Informational service providers of all sizes, including domain name servers and social media platforms, also would be held liable where they are found to knowingly promote content that incites violence.

In short, this is exactly what I noted a few weeks ago, in which our first response to mass shootings… seems to be people focusing on stripping 1st Amendment rights. Which is just weird.

Nothing in Beto’s plan makes any sense. Let’s go through it one by one.

“Blocking terrorist content online” sounds good if you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. As we’ve discussed, historical efforts to “block terrorist content” online has really only served to delete evidence of war crimes, including stopping researchers and archivists from tracking important information. Remember how the EU told the Internet Archive that the entire Project Gutenberg was terrorist content? I’m sure Beto’s buddies in cDc would be flabbergasted that he killed Project Gutenberg.

Furthermore, a recent study showed that taking down terrorist content wasn’t helping win the war on terrorism, but was often making it much more difficult for law enforcement to use open source intelligence to track, find and stop terrorists. How the hell is that going to help stop gun violence?

Finally, any non-government person can certainly express their opinion that platforms shouldn’t host sites like 8chan or Stormfront, but both of those host mostly 1st Amendment protected content, and thus a Presidential campaign really should not be saying that, because as President you literally cannot have a policy that silences 1st Amendment protected speech. That’s how the 1st Amendment works.

And, arguably, it’s not that difficult to trace a pretty direct lineage from Cult of the Dead Cow to 8chan — and, if anyone, Beto should know that.

“Require large social media platforms to create systems designed to remove hateful activities on their sites.” Are there any “large” social media platforms that don’t already ban hateful activities in their terms and have systems designed to remove that content? The answer is no. This is a pointless, meaningless policy demanding something that’s already been done.

The only thing in here that’s interesting is that it also says platforms should be transparent in why they block content and should have an appeals process. And, sure, that’s a good thing, but it’s also not exactly the government’s job to tell them how to do all of that. And while I’ve been a loud support of more transparent content moderation policies, I can guarantee you that government mandated transparency here would be a disaster, because it would not allow for the kind of experimentation and differential approaches that various platforms take. It also doesn’t seem to realize that, on certain platforms, when done poorly, “transparency” is just a guidebook for assholes on how to troll.

“Amend CDA 230.” This part also makes no sense. Removing liability for “large social media platforms” that don’t put in place the tools above. Um. They all do already, so what’s the point of this? And, really, I don’t think sites like 8chan would count as “large” anyway, so what’s he getting at here? Even worse, Beto commits the cardinal sin of not just confusing infrastructure providers and edge service providers, he deliberately lumps them together with this line:

Informational service providers of all sizes, including domain name servers and social media platforms, also would be held liable where they are found to knowingly promote content that incites violence.

There’s a lot to unpack there and the vagueness is a problem. If he’s only talking about content that is already outside the scope of 1st Amendment (which would be speech that incites imminent violence — he leaves out the important imminent part), then, that’s already not protected by 230 anyway. Federal criminal laws have always been exempted from 230. So, this is dumb? But if he’s trying to expand the classification of what would get internet platforms in trouble, he’s going to run into yet another 1st Amendment issue really, really quickly.

As we’ve noted previously, both Republicans and Democrats are gunning for Section 230, but (often without realizing it) for the opposite reasons. Senator Josh Hawley’s ridiculous anti-230 bill would block companies from being able to moderate at all. While Beto’s bill here would attempt to pressure them into moderating much more stringently. It’s unclear how you could possibly reconcile these two approaches — both of which are almost certainly unconstitutional.

Destroying Section 230 because you’re ignorant of how the internet works is not a partisan past time. Both of the major political parties seem to be embracing this nonsense.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 2nd amendment, beto o'rourke, cda 230, guns, intermediary liability, platform liability, section 230, violence