eejohttps://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/2024-01-03T16:17:41.171000ZSharedProphet♫ M,I,C / K,E,Y / C,O,M,I,C ♫2024-01-03T16:17:41.171000Zhttp://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4139<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<center><table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="740"><tr><td align="center" colspan="4"><tr><td align="center" colspan="4"><a href="http://www.qwantz.com/archive.php">archive</a> - <a href="mailto:ryan@qwantz.com?subject=technically,%20since%20Mickey%20didn't%20laugh%20in%20Steamboat%20Willie,%20his%20laugh%20isn't%20in%20the%20public%20domain%20yet.%20%20so%20uh%20I%20guess%20Mickey,%20who%20was%20in%20the%20public%20domain,%20just%20kinda%20steered%20a%20boat%20for%20a%20bit">contact</a> - <a href="http://www.topatoco.com/qwantz">sexy exciting merchandise</a> - <a href="http://www.ohnorobot.com/index.php?comic=23">search</a> - <a href="http://www.qwantz.com/about.php">about</a></td></tr></table><img class="comic" src="http://www.qwantz.com/comics/comic2-4337.png" title="his other hobby... COLD CASE MURDERS (on the investigating side, not on the supply side) (or WAS it??)" /><table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="5" width="740"><tr><td align="left" valign="top" width="100"><a href="http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4138" rel="prev">← previous</a></td><td align="center" valign="top" width="*">January 3rd, 2024</td><td align="right" valign="top" width="100">next</td></tr><tr><td align="left" colspan="3" valign="top"><p><b>January 3rd, 2024: </b>You probably shouldn't listen to me I mean T-Rex! I don't have the greatest record with <a href="https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/10/in-this-comic-squirrel-girl-author-ryan-north-faces-the-dark-truth-about-elmer-fudd/">knowing cartoon character motivations and personalities</a>.<p align="right">– Ryan</p></p></td></tr></table></center>Biden’s Conspiracy Theory About Gaza Casualty Numbers Unravels Upon Inspection2023-10-31T19:17:16.538000ZPrem Thakkerhttps://theintercept.com/2023/10/31/gaza-death-palestine-health-ministry/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p><span class="has-underline">President Joe Biden,</span> asked last week what his government planned to do to reduce the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, responded by rejecting the idea that the numbers could be trusted. “I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden <a href="https://www.wpbstv.org/watch-biden-casts-doubt-on-hamas-reported-death-toll/">said</a> on Wednesday. “I’m sure innocents have been killed and it is the price of waging war,” he added. “But I have no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using.”</p>
<p>A new analysis by The Intercept provides evidence refuting that claim.</p>
<p>Biden’s effort to delegitimize the numbers coming out of Gaza as fake news has created an opening for defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign to dismiss the crisis; they note Hamas governs Gaza, therefore runs the Ministry of Health and is inflating the figures. (Biden later clarified he meant to say he didn’t trust Hamas, not all Palestinians, according to the <a href="https://x.com/tparti/status/1717901827314696515?s=20">Wall Street Journal</a>.)</p>
<p>Biden’s claim was quickly rejected by human rights organizations that have been active in Gaza for years. The Associated Press noted that the Ministry of Health’s figures from <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-health-ministry-health-death-toll-59470820308b31f1faf73c703400b033">previous conflicts</a> have broadly matched the numbers arrived at by both the Israeli government and the United Nations. And <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-gaza-death-toll-state-department_n_653a80f3e4b0783c4ba0491f">the State Department itself</a> has long considered the numbers reliable. </p>
<p>The Gaza Ministry of Health, meanwhile, responded by publishing a list of names of 6,747 who had died as of October 26 since the bombing campaign began, including 2,664 children. The list included 2,665 children, but The Intercept found that one 14-year-old boy was listed twice, bringing its total down to 6,746. Otherwise the list does not contain duplicates.</p>
<p>Now that the Health Ministry has published a list of victims, skeptics have suggested that the list may be fabricated and that a paper with names on it proves nothing. Immediately after the publishing of these names, Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby maintained the skepticism, <a href="https://x.com/simonateba/status/1717605233000386970?s=20">saying</a> that the ministry is “a front for Hamas” and that “we can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health at face value.” </p>
<p>Pressed, Kirby acknowledged civilian casualties were rising. “We absolutely know that the death toll continues to rise in Gaza. Of course we know that. But what we’re saying is that we shouldn’t rely on numbers put forth by Hamas and the Ministry of Health,” he said. A reporter noted that independent reporting suggested “thousands” of civilians had been killed. “We would not dispute that,” <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/despite-no-confidence-palestinian-death-145844089.html?guccounter=1">Kirby said.</a></p>
<p>But is the list itself reliable? We interrogated it and were able to corroborate dozens of names on the ministry’s list through a single family. </p>
<p>Prior to the release of the list, Maram Al-Dada, a Palestinian who was born and raised in Gaza but now lives in Orlando, Florida, had told The Intercept about the deaths of seven relatives on his father’s side of the family and 30 on his mother’s side, in and around Khan Yunis. A week later, that number had risen to 46 total. (He and his family were <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/deconstructed-israel-gaza-family-interview/">featured on last week’s Deconstructed</a> podcast.)</p>
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<p>We compared the list of his relatives that began to be compiled last week — before the release of the list by officials in Gaza — to the list subsequently made public by the Ministry of Health. Al-Dada and his parents requested that last names not be published, as there is concern in Gaza that Israel has targeted journalists and their families, and might also retaliate against <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/05/13/israel-palestine-west-bank-travel-restrictions/">civilians</a> who speak to Western media. The family hopes to emerge from the war with as many relatives still alive as possible.</p>
<p>The list of those killed includes four different last names: 30 members of one branch of the family, nine from another, four from a third, and three from a fourth. </p>
<p>Of those 46 members of Al-Dada’s family so far lost in the war, 43 appear on the list, from the littlest — a baby girl not yet one — to the oldest, a 71-year-old grandmother.</p>
<p>When a building is struck, multiple generations are wiped out. “In Palestine, the society is set up differently than it is here,” Al-Dada noted. “People never leave their place. So families are huge; they all stay close to each other. For example, if you have a son, he will get married and he will build a house right behind your house and this keeps going. That’s why you will find a lot of people are getting killed from the same family.” </p>
<p>Each name on the list is the story of a profound tragedy. One family’s home had already been bombed, for instance, and so the father and two children sought refuge at his brother’s house. The wife of the family’s father was in Saudi Arabia, undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca, when she learned her husband and children had been killed in a new bombing at her brother-in-law’s house. The bombing also killed the man’s brother.</p>
<p>There have also been many close calls. On Monday, the neighbor of Al-Dada’s grandparents was bombed, killing the family living there. A small piece of shrapnel from the explosion tore through a steel grate, blasted through a white chair and destroyed the family’s refrigerator. His grandmother, who was unharmed, had been sitting in that chair just moments earlier. He shared the following photos with us.</p>
<figure class="img-wrap align-none width-auto" style="width: auto;"> <img alt="" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-449627" height="800" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/GrimmGazaTriptych2-1.jpg?w=300&resize=1200%2C800" width="1200" />
<figcaption class="caption source">A shrapnel piece, damaged plastic chair, and ruptured steel grate from the home of Maram Al-Dada’s grandparents in Khan Yunis, Gaza.<br />Image: Provided to The Intercept</figcaption></figure>
<p>A report in HuffPost also found that nearly 20 State Department reports have <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-gaza-death-toll-state-department_n_653a80f3e4b0783c4ba0491f?69t">cited</a> the ministry, and one also argued the ministry may have undercounted. “The numbers are likely much higher, according to the UN and NGOs reporting on the situation,” the U.S. State Department report read.</p>
<p>The Intercept presented the White House with our new reporting and asked if Kirby and Biden stand behind their claims. We also asked whether the administration has made any independent efforts to gauge the extent of the killing if the Health Ministry’s numbers aren’t reliable, and if, as the administration states publicly, it is concerned about civilian casualties. The White House referred us to public comments made by Kirby and State Department spokesperson Matt Miller that acknowledged civilian casualties.</p>
<p>“We don’t have any way to make an accurate assessment of our own about the number of civilians who have died in Gaza,” Miller<a href="https://www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-october-26-2023/"> told</a> reporters. “There is not an independent body that’s operating in Gaza that can provide an accurate number. But we do have skepticism about everything that Hamas says, but that said, obviously a number of civilians have died, which is why we’re working to do everything we can to minimize civilian harm and get humanitarian assistance in to the civilians in Gaza.”</p>
<p>Far from doing everything it can to minimize civilian harm,<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/10/right-now-it-is-one-day-at-a-time-life-on-israels-frontline-with-gaza"> the IDF has said</a> its “emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division of Israel’s military, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/92a31b6e-a5b7-4533-96ed-89d14e6c2b14">said recently, </a>“When our soldiers are manoeuvring we are doing this with massive artillery, with 50 aeroplanes overhead destroying anything that moves.”</p>
<p>Al-Dada said his family was firmly apolitical, with zero connections to Hamas. The October 7 attack on Israel surprised them as much as it did the world. </p>
<p>Since Biden muddied the waters on the extent of the carnage, Israel imposed a total communications blackout on Gaza, while ratcheting up its airstrike campaign and launching a ground invasion. U.S. officials have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/27/us-urging-israel-rethinkg-gaza-ground-invasion/">reportedly</a> issued private warnings to the Israeli government but have still not threatened to withdraw any military, political, or economic support. Instead, the Biden administration is putting together a $14 billion package for Israel that includes money for the Iron Dome, replenishment of weapons, and more.</p>
<p>The Ministry of Health in Gaza produced updated figures: As of Tuesday, October 31, at least 8,525 Palestinians have been killed and more than 21,543 injured since October 7.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/10/31/gaza-death-palestine-health-ministry/" rel="nofollow">Biden’s Conspiracy Theory About Gaza Casualty Numbers Unravels Upon Inspection</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theintercept.com" rel="nofollow">The Intercept</a>.</p><br><br><img src="https://theintercept.com/theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/8086163.jpg?resize=440%2C440&w=1200" /><br><br><img src="https://theintercept.com/theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/GettyImages-1047733276-ft.jpg?resize=440%2C440&w=1200" /><br><br><img src="https://theintercept.com/theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AP23299122423199.jpg?resize=440%2C440&w=1200" /><br><br><img src="https://theintercept.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/GrimmGazaTriptych2-1.jpg?fit=3300%2C2200" />Bibbidi bobbidi2023-08-10T20:14:15.391000Z/u/Drawer_Of_Drawingshttps://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/15neox5/bibbidi_bobbidi/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/15neox5/bibbidi_bobbidi/"> <img alt="Bibbidi bobbidi" src="https://preview.redd.it/pmatnhyrqahb1.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=9837dbbf180ef9b35e0765e97d91ef526874f5b1" title="Bibbidi bobbidi" /> </a> </td><td>   submitted by   <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Drawer_Of_Drawings"> /u/Drawer_Of_Drawings </a>   to   <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/"> r/comics </a> <br /> <span><a href="https://i.redd.it/pmatnhyrqahb1.jpg">[link]</a></span>   <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/15neox5/bibbidi_bobbidi/">[comments]</a></span> </td></tr></table>Elon Starts Bribing His Biggest Fans As He Admits The Company Is Still Burning Cash (Despite His Earlier Claims To The Contrary)2023-07-17T18:53:51.259000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/elon-starts-bribing-his-biggest-fans-as-he-admits-the-company-is-still-burning-cash-despite-his-earlier-claims-to-the-contrary/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
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<p>It seems to anger certain Elon Musk fans every time I mention it, but pre-Elon Twitter was generally doing okay. Not great. Not terrible. Just okay. It wasn’t printing cash like Meta or Google, but it had been <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/274568/quarterly-revenue-of-twitter/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">steadily increasing revenue</a> and was profitable in <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">16 of the previous 20 quarters</a> before Elon took over. There was a big <em>paper</em> loss in the 2nd quarter of 2020 due to a single noncash deferred tax asset, and many people see that giant loss and mistakenly think it showed the company was deep in the hole. However, you can tell it was nothing given that most analysts <a href="https://venturebeat.com/business/twitter-earnings-q2-2020/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">basically ignored</a> that single big loss and focused on the underlying advertising and user numbers.</p>
<p>Elon has admitted multiple times now that he basically <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/27/elon-musk-effectively-admits-that-he-set-fire-to-more-than-half-of-twitters-value/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">set fire to Twitter’s value</a> and what had been a growing <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/22/elon-appears-to-admit-that-hes-driven-away-40-of-twitters-advertisers/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">revenue stream</a>. So it’s little surprise that he admitted it once again over the weekend, tweeting an admission that the company had lost around 50% of its advertising revenue.</p>
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<p>The more interesting bit here, though, was him admitting that the company was “still negative cash flow.” Remember, in February, he had said the company was “<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/05/elon-musk-says-twitter-trending-to-breakeven-after-near-bankruptcy.html" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">trending to breakeven</a>” and in April had suggested that <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitter-is-roughly-breaking-even-2023-04-12/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">it was now there</a>. That April statement included him claiming that “most” advertisers had returned to Twitter, which Musk is now effectively admitting was a lie. And, his prediction that the company would be “cash flow positive” in the 2nd quarter didn’t quite pan out, I guess.</p>
<p>Of course, both of the things he complains about are <em>directly</em> due to Musk’s own terrible decisions. Advertisers have bailed because of his terrible choices, setting fire to brand safety efforts and driving away top tier advertisers (and users), and the “heavy debt load” was entirely due to his decision to finance $13 billion of the takeover with debt, on which the company how has to pay interest.</p>
<p>Both of those moves could have been easily avoided.</p>
<p>On top of that, you have to wonder how a company that was effectively breakeven before all of this is still cash flow negative when he’s (1) fired somewhere <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">around 80% of the employees</a>, (2) <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/22/apparently-elon-doesnt-think-he-needs-to-pay-rent-because-sf-is-a-shithole-so-why-should-we-pay-for-twitter/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">stopped paying rent</a> (3) <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/26/twitter-employees-sue-twitter-after-the-bonuses-they-were-promised-if-they-stuck-around-were-not-given/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">refused to pay out</a> owed <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/tech/elon-musk-twitter-employee-severance-lawsuit/index.html" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">severance packages</a> (4) not paying <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/twitter-drops-law-firm-criticized-by-elon-musk-child-exploitation-case-2022-12-14/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">lawyers</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/twitter-not-paying-pr-firms-bills-after-musk-buyout-lawsuit-2023-05-26/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">PR companies</a> or (5) <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/26/add-elons-buddy-larry-ellison-to-the-creditors-list-of-those-that-twitter-is-refusing-to-pay/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">cloud computing bills</a>. He’s also <a href="https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/report-twitter-is-shutting-down-sacramento-data-center-downsizing-atlanta-facility/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">shut down</a> one of the company’s three data centers and closed offices (or been <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/twitter-is-being-evicted-from-its-boulder-office-over-unpaid-rent/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">evicted from them</a>).</p>
<p>What expenses is he actually paying?</p>
<p>Well, it seems he’s paying out what can only be considered bribes to some of his favorite Twitter users. Back in February, Elon announced that<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/3/23584582/elon-musk-twitter-ad-revenue-share-creators-blue" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"> the company would start sharing ad revenue</a> with Twitter Blue subscribers.</p>
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<p>But since then there had been not a peep, even as some users raised questions about such payments.</p>
<p>Then, finally, late last week, some users started tweeting about how they had received their first payments, though many noticed that these payments were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">basically only going</a> to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/twitter-pays-creators-andrew-tate-krassenstein-brothers-generating-ad-rcna94330" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Elon Musk’s favorite reply guys</a>. This left some others (including some other Musk stans) pissed off that they weren’t getting their share of the cash.</p>
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<p><em>Among those in Twitter’s payout pool was Andrew Tate, who tweeted that he received $20,379 under the new program. Tate wrote that “every penny” of the proceeds will go toward his Tate Pledge charity initiatives. The former pro kickboxer, who once tweeted that women should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for being raped, last year claimed </em><a href="https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/andrew-tate-banned-traditional-masculine-values-tucker-carlson-1235352223/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>tech platforms had banned him for what he said were “traditional masculine values.”</em></a><em> Tate has 7.1 million followers on Twitter; his Twitter account had been banned in 2017 and was reinstated after Musk acquired the social network. Last month Tate was </em><a href="https://variety.com/2023/digital/global/andrew-tate-charged-rape-human-trafficking-romania-1235648936/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>charged with rape and human trafficking offenses in Romania</em></a><em>. Earlier this week, Tate and his brother Tristan sued a Florida woman and others, alleging they conspired to falsely accuse the Tates in the Romania case, the AP </em><a href="https://apnews.com/article/andrew-tate-lawsuit-human-trafficking-romania-florida-aacca97560a25848b03131d4aecd8ffe" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>reported</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p><em>Also getting Twitter payments were Brian Krassenstein ($24,305) and Ed Krassenstein ($24,877), entrepreneurs who originally rose to prominence on the platform with their relentless anti-Trump tweets. “Now I’m going to stop promoting border crossings and begin promoting Tesla vehicles,” Ed Krassenstein </em><a href="https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1679589234301124609" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>joked in a tweet</em></a><em>. “I assumed I’d would be getting paid around $500 or so for the past 4-5 months. I thought, it would be pennies on the dollar compared to what George Soros pays me (sarcasm).”</em></p>
<p><em>In 2019, </em><a href="https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/twitter-bans-ed-brian-krassenstein-brothers-fake-accounts-1203225266/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>the Krassentein brothers were banned by Twitter</em></a><em> for allegedly using fake accounts to amplify their reach (which they </em><a href="https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/twitter-bans-ed-brian-krassenstein-brothers-fake-accounts-1203225266/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>denied</em></a><em>). Following Musk’s takeover of the company last fall, </em><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/krassenstein-brothers-twitter-elon-musk-1234646852/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank"><em>Twitter reinstated their accounts in December</em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p><em>Other Twitter users who shared ad-revenue payouts included podcaster and political commentator Benny Johnson ($9,546), Ashley St. Clair, a writer for political satire site Babylon Bee ($7,153), and an anonymously run account called End Wokeness ($10,419).</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>One user, who was not included, emailed Twitter and heard back from the company confirming that those selected were <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-ads-revenue-sharing" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">not based on the criteria</a> stated in Twitter’s blog post about the program, but rather the payouts went “to a selected group of people.”</p>
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter"><img alt="" src="https://i0.wp.com/lex-img-p.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/img/d2d912b0-cdb4-4ea5-8ffc-4eec11ac9717-RackMultipart20230717-95-4ebvlq.png?ssl=1" /></figure>
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<p>That email is all kinds of hilarious. In case you can’t see the image, it says:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>Thanks for reaching out about being unable to receive your payment from Creator Ads Revenue Sharing on Twitter. We have information for you.</em></p>
<p><em>Currently, creator ad revenue sharing is only available to a selected group of people.</em></p>
<p><em>We hope this clarifies your concern.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Indeed, you do have information.</p>
<p>So… to sum up: Elon’s own decisions destroyed the company’s revenue and saddled it with way more expenses in the form of debt interest/repayment. The company is bleeding users and revenue, and despite promising a large group of users payouts if they joined his failed “Twitter Blue” program, the company is only paying that money to a small handpicked group which seems to consist almost entirely of accounts that suck up to Musk on the platform.</p>
<p>I might not be an intergalactic business genius, like many people assure me Musk is, but I fail to see how this strategy succeeds.</p>Disney Gets A Nice Fat Tax Break For Making Its Streaming Catalog Worse2023-06-06T15:38:56.206000ZKarl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/06/disney-gets-a-nice-fat-tax-break-for-making-its-streaming-catalog-worse/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/disney-gets-a-nice-f/1190:7e2830">shared this story</a>
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<p>We just got done discussing how, as the streaming video space consolidates and grows, it’s starting to <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/26/hugely-profitable-and-consolidated-streaming-platforms-suddenly-too-cheap-to-pay-residuals-and-writers-or-keep-niche-shows-online/">behave more and more like the unpopular, consolidated cable and broadcast companies</a> they once disrupted. Cory Doctorow’s theory of <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys">enshittification</a> has come to streaming, in a big way. </p>
<p>Netflix <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/01/only-8-of-netflix-password-moochers-plan-to-pay-for-their-own-subscription/">now thinks password sharing is the devil</a>. Streaming catalogs are shrinking because hugely profitable companies <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/24/hbo-max-and-sesame-street-highlight-the-stupidity-of-mindless-media-megamergers/">are increasingly too cheap to pay residuals</a>. Writers are striking because executives making <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hollywood-ceo-2022-chart-1235481300/">billions of dollars</a> don’t want to pay creatives a basic living wage. Prices and restrictions are increasing at the same time the quality of the streaming service you’re paying for deteriorates. </p>
<p>Mindless mergers and consolidation, and Wall Street’s inevitable need for improved quarterly returns at <strong>any</strong> cost (even if it profoundly harms long term company and brand health) are taking a sector that was just hitting its stride competitively and innovatively, and turning it inside out. All overseen by upward-failing execs who seem to have no idea what they’re doing (<a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/24/hbo-max-and-sesame-street-highlight-the-stupidity-of-mindless-media-megamergers/">looking at you Time Warner Discovery</a>). </p>
<p>We’ve noted repeatedly how these companies keep pulling shows from their lineups in a bid to save money. Often because they’re just <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/19/heres-why-hbo-max-is-pulling-dozens-of-films-and-tv-series-from-its-streaming-platform.html">too cheap to pay residuals</a>. Following on the heels of <s>HBO</s> Max, last week, Disney+ pulled more than 100 titles from its lineup, including some (like Willow) it had only just produced. Why? Because it <a href="https://gizmodo.com/disney-streaming-cuts-tax-writeoffs-1850502594">netted them a giant tax break</a>:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>According to an <a href="https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001744489/000174448923000107/dis-20230526.htm" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">SEC filing</a> from late Friday, Disney’s set to write off about $1.5 billion following this streaming purge. It was previously known this was a way for Disney to cut costs, and the filing notes that this will be reflected in the company’s fiscal third quarter. But if you thought this would be a one-and-done affair, that is not the case. Towards the end of the filing, the SEC wrote that Disney is “continuing its review and currently anticipates additional produced content will be removed.” Those removals equate to an additional estimated $400 million. But as far as when these removals may happen (or what canceled shows may be caught in the crossfire), that isn’t touched on in the filing, and Disney hasn’t yet said.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Users were given a week’s notice that this content would be disappearing. Media bean counters, myopically fixated on “growth for growth’s sake,” have begun the enshitification process of making you pay more money for an increasingly worse product. Even if that means harming the company’s long term success, brands, and employee and customer relationships. </p>
<p>Lost in the conversation is the fact that these companies burned through <strong>hundreds of billions of dollars </strong>on completely pointless megamergers that were supposed to deliver untold synergies, broad resiliency, and untold consumer benefits. These same companies also spent billions more on bloated executive compensation packages, or <a href="https://gizmodo.com/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-closing-walt-disney-worl-1850451229">luxury resorts</a> nobody could afford. </p>
<p>That these companies would have saved untold billions (far more money that it costs to host <em>Willow</em> on a server) by avoiding bloated executive compensation packages, leadership incompetence, or completely pointless mergers (see the <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/08/09/us-press-softsells-real-scope-atts-merger-incompetence-ensuring-it-will-happen-again/">$200 billion AT&T set on fire for its disastrous Time Warner and DirecTV deals</a>) is curiously either footnoted or not mentioned at all in the broader conversation. </p>
<p>The MBAs who defend these kinds of decisions as cold calculus, are incapable of stepping back and acknowledging that the entire process of mindless consolidation and <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys">enshittification</a> is violent, unpopular, senseless, often completely purposeless, results in untold layoffs and ill will, and actually harms these companies longer term. Because, and this is the gist, the stupidity <em>benefits them</em> personally. </p>Elon Musk Is Full Of Shit, Again. No, Federal Agencies Did Not Have ‘Full Access’ To DMs2023-04-18T18:48:30.616000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/18/elon-musk-is-full-of-shit-again-no-federal-agencies-did-not-have-full-access-to-dms/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/elon-musk-is-full-of/1190:f11594">shared this story</a>
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<p>Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-throws-out-wild-claim-in-tucker-carlson-interview" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter</a>, including DMs.</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>“The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter blew my mind,” Musk says in video posted ahead of the Monday night interview. “I was not aware of that,” Musk adds, claiming that his predecessors even allowed those agencies access to infiltrate users’ direct messages.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>From everything that’s been discussed so far, and the way that the old Twitter regime handled requests for information from Twitter (i.e., repeatedly <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2014/10/07/twitter-sues-us-government-right-to-disclose-surveillance-requests/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">fighting the government</a> in <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2017/10/24/doj-subpoenas-twitter-about-popehat-dissent-doe-others-over-smiley-emoji-tweet/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">court</a> when it <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2017/11/13/doj-still-demanding-identity-twitter-users-because-someone-they-shouldnt-have-arrested-tweeted-smiley-emoji/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">requested</a> DM <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2011/01/07/feds-subpoena-twitter-info-wikileaks-supporting-icelandic-politician/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">info</a>, and <strong>that includes</strong> when <em>Democrats</em> on the January 6th Committee <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/09/twitter-fights-back-against-january-6th-committees-dangerously-intrusive-subpoena-demands/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">subpoenaed info</a>) this sounded highly unlikely to be true. Given how frequently Twitter was seen directly and publicly challenging demands for information, and revealing how often it rejected government requests for information in its <a href="https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/countries/us.html#2021-jul-dec" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">transparency reports</a> (that <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/27/what-transparency-twitter-seems-to-have-forgotten-about-transparency-reporting/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Elon no longer issues</a>), this whole claim seemed highly questionable.</p>
<p>Certainly, none of the Twitter Files revealed anything like this.</p>
<p>Given the bizarre claim, I reached out to three separate former Twitter employees who would be in positions to know how the company handled federal government requests for information. Two out of the three actually started off their responses with swear words out of anger that Elon is flat out making shit up. All insisted he’s absolutely, categorically wrong about this claim.</p>
<p>From one:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>This is completely false. Pre-Elon Twitter worked tirelessly to protect users from overreaching government requests for information. The idea that Twitter was somehow fighting the US government in courts, while giving the US government access to DMs, is simply absurd. Moreover, it’s dangerous rhetoric.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another former exec called it a “shocking lie” and noted:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>DMs were exceedingly locked down. The FBI needed a search warrant to get that kind of content…. There were tools in place to be able to respond to valid legal process – but [it] would go through EXTREME scrutiny.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The third also noted that DMs were “specially locked down” and also pointed out that the company had made specific promises to the FTC regarding who had access to DMs (remember <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/10/does-twitter-have-any-employees-left-who-remember-that-the-company-is-under-a-strict-consent-decree-with-the-ftc/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">the consent decrees</a>?) and that execs at the company knew full well that lying to the FTC would be very, very bad.</p>
<p>Of course, I would surmise that the company’s executives <em>used to</em> know that. I doubt it’s true today. However, given Elon is making those claims publicly, I’m guessing the FTC may be sending over more requests for information.</p>
<p>Honestly, this seems like typical Elon, where he makes claims based on what he thinks his audience wants to hear rather than anything connected to reality. As per usual, he’s playing to the Fox News audience (he did the same thing when he did his BBC interview last week). But as some of the people quoted above note, this is not just absolute bullshit, it’s a dangerous lie that implies things about the former management team that are simply not true.</p>
<p>If confronted on this, I’m sure he’d claim that he meant the kind of access they got through valid legal process, which is not even remotely “<em>full access to everything that was going on at Twitter</em>.” Alternatively, as one person I spoke to noted, there’s a reading of this (that I’m sure Elon didn’t mean) that what <em>actually</em> blew his mind was that the government <strong>did not</strong>, in fact, have full access to everything. But there’s no way that’s actually what he meant.</p>
<p>Instead, he’s just making shit up without realizing the consequences. Because he’ll never face them. He never does.</p>
<p>Now, after that clip, he does talk about encrypting DMs, which <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/29/musk-does-have-some-good-ideas-encrypting-dms-would-be-huge-but/">he’s been promising for a while</a>, and which we applauded. Because it would be a big and important step. But it’s also incredibly difficult to do well, and easy to screw up. And given how things have been working at Twitter lately, I wouldn’t trust the DM encryption until it’s been audited. So, really, a lot of this seems to be Elon’s warped understanding of why he needed to encrypt DMs. Doing so definitely makes it much more difficult for government to ever get access to anyone’s DMs, but that doesn’t mean that “various government agencies” had “full access” to people’s DMs. That’s just utter bullshit.</p>Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It2023-04-07T18:35:20.221000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/mehdi-hasan-dismantl/1190:3a30ec">shared this story</a>
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<p>So here’s the deal. If you think the Twitter Files are still something legit or telling or powerful, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a597e6Wv_xg" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">watch this 30 minute interview</a> that Mehdi Hasan did with Matt Taibbi (at Taibbi’s own demand):</p>
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<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
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<p>Hasan came prepared with facts. Lots of them. Many of which debunked the core foundation on which Taibbi and his many fans have built the narrative regarding the Twitter Files.</p>
<p>We’ve <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/tag/matt-taibbi/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">debunked</a> many of Matt’s errors over the past few months, and a few of the errors we’ve called out (though not nearly all, as there are so, so many) show up in Hasan’s interview, while Taibbi shrugs, sighs, and makes it clear he’s totally out of his depth when confronted with facts.</p>
<p>Since the interview, Taibbi has been scrambling to claim that the errors Hasan called out are small side issues, but they’re not. They’re literally the core pieces on which he’s built the nonsense framing that Stanford, the University of Washington, some non-profits, the government, and social media have formed an “industrial censorship complex” to stifle the speech of Americans.</p>
<p>As we keep showing, Matt <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/20/no-the-fbi-is-not-paying-twitter-to-censor/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">makes very sloppy errors</a> at every turn, <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/22/matt-taibbi-cant-comprehend-that-there-are-reasons-to-study-propaganda-information-flows-so-he-insists-it-must-be-nefarious/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">doesn’t understand</a> the stuff he has found, and is <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/24/jim-jordan-weaponizes-the-subcommittee-on-the-weaponization-of-the-govt-to-intimidate-researchers-chill-speech/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">confused about</a> some fairly basic concepts.</p>
<p>The errors that Hasan highlights matter a lot. A key one is Taibbi’s claim that the Election Integrity Partnership flagged 22 million tweets for Twitter to take down in partnership with the government. This is flat out wrong. The EIP, which was focused on studying election interference, flagged less than 3,000 tweets for Twitter to review (<a href="https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/background-sios-projects-social-media" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">2,890 to be exact</a>).</p>
<p>And they were quite clear <a href="https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-Report.pdf" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">in their report</a> on how all this worked. EIP was an academic project to <em>track</em> election interference information and how it flowed across social media. The 22 million figure shows up in the report, but it was just a count of how many tweets they <em>tracked</em> in trying to follow how this <em>information spread</em>, not seeking to remove it. And the vast majority of those tweets weren’t even related to the ones they did explicitly create tickets on.</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>In total, our incident-related tweet data included 5,888,771 tweets and retweets from ticket status IDs directly, 1,094,115 tweets and retweets collected first from ticket URLs, and 14,914,478 from keyword searches, for a total of 21,897,364 tweets.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tracking how information spreads is… um… not a problem now is it? Is Taibbi really claiming that academics shouldn’t track the flow of information?</p>
<p>Either way, Taibbi overstated the number of tweets that EIP <em>reported</em> by 21,894,474 tweets. In percentage terms, the actual number of reported tweets was 0.013% of the number Taibbi claimed.</p>
<p>Okay, you say, but STILL, if the government is flagging even 2,890 tweets, <em>that’s still a problem!</em> And it would be if it was the government flagging those tweets. But it’s not. As the report details, basically all of the tickets in the system were created by non-government entities, mainly from the EIP members themselves (Stanford, University of Washington, Graphika, and Digital Forensics Lab).</p>
<p>This is where the second big error that Taibbi makes knocks down a key pillar of his argument. Hasan notes that Taibbi falsely turned the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS) into the government agency the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Taibbi did this by assuming that when someone at Twitter noted information came from CIS, they must have <em>meant CISA</em>, and therefore he appended the A in brackets as if he was correcting a typo:</p>
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<p>Taibbi admits that this was a mistake and has now tweeted a correction (though this point was identified weeks ago, and he claims he only just learned about it). I’ve seen Taibbi and his defenders claim that this is no big deal, that he just “messed up an acronym.” But, uh, no. Having CISA report tweets to Twitter was a key linchpin in the argument that <em>the government</em> was sending tweets for Twitter to remove. But it wasn’t the government, it was an independent non-profit.</p>
<p>The thing is, this mistake also suggests that Taibbi never even bothered to read the EIP report on all of this, which lays out extremely clearly where the flagged tweets came from, noting that CIS (which was not an actual part of the EIP) sent in 16% of the total flagged tweets. It even pretty clearly describes what those tweets were:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>Compared to the dataset as a whole, the CIS tickets were (1) more likely to raise reports about fake official election accounts (CIS raised half of the tickets on this topic), (2) more likely to create tickets about Washington, Connecticut, and Ohio, and (3) more likely to raise reports that were about how to vote and the ballot counting process—CIS raised 42% of the tickets that claimed there were issues about ballots being rejected. CIS also raised four of our nine tickets about phishing. The attacks CIS reported used a combination of mass texts, emails, and spoofed websites to try to obtain personal information about voters, including addresses and Social Security numbers. Three of the four impersonated election official accounts, including one fake Kentucky election website that promoted a narrative that votes had been lost by asking voters to share personal information and anecdotes about why their vote was not counted. Another ticket CIS reported included a phishing email impersonating the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that was sent to Arizona voters with a link to a spoofed Arizona voting website. There, it asked voters for personal information including their name, birthdate, address, Social Security number, and driver’s license number.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, CIS was raising pretty legitimate issues: people impersonating election officials, and phishing pages. This wasn’t about “misinformation.” These were seriously problematic tweets.</p>
<p>There is one part that perhaps deserves some more scrutiny regarding government organizations, as the report does say that a <em>tiny</em> percentage of reports came from the GEC, which is a part of the State Department, but the report suggests that this was probably less than 1% of the flags. 79% of the flags came from the four organizations in the partnership (not government). Another 16% came from CIS (contrary to Taibbi’s original claim, not government). That leaves 5%, which came from six different organizations, mostly non-profits. Though it does list the GEC as one of the six organizations. But the GEC is literally <a href="https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/under-secretary-for-public-diplomacy-and-public-affairs/global-engagement-center/">focused</a> entirely on countering (not deleting) foreign state propaganda aimed at destabilizing the US. So, it’s not surprising that they might call out a few tweets to the EIP researchers.</p>
<p>Okay, okay, you say, but even so this is still problematic. It was still, as a Taibbi retweet suggests, these organizations who are somehow close to the government trying to silence narratives. And, again, that <em>would</em> be bad if true. But, that’s not what the information actually shows. First off, we already discussed how some of what they targeted was just out and out fraud.</p>
<p>But, more importantly, regarding the small number of tweets that EIP did report to Twitter… it <em>never suggested what Twitter should do about them, and Twitter left the vast majority of them up</em>. The entire purpose of the EIP program, as laid out in everything that the EIP team has made clear from before, during, and after the election, was just to be another set of eyes looking out for emerging trends and documenting how information flows. In the rare cases (again less than 1%) where things looked especially problematic (phishing attempts, impersonation) they might alert the company, but made no effort to tell Twitter how to handle them. And, as the report itself makes clear, Twitter left up the vast majority of them:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>We find, overall, that platforms took action on 35% of URLs that we reported to them. 21% of URLs were labeled, 13% were removed, and 1% were soft blocked. No action was taken on 65%. TikTok had the highest action rate: actioning (in their case, their only action was removing) 64% of URLs that the EIP reported to their team.)</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>They don’t break it out by platform, but across all platforms no action was taken on 65% of the reported content. And considering that TikTok seemed quite aggressive in removing 64% of flagged content, that means that all of the other platforms, including Twitter, took action <strong>on way less than 35%</strong> of the flagged content. And then, even within the “took action” category, the main action taken was <em>labeling</em>.</p>
<p>In other words, the top two main results of EIP flagging this content were:</p>
<ol>
<li>Nothing</li>
<li>Adding more speech</li>
</ol>
<p>The report also notes that the category of content that was most likely to get removed was the out and out fraud stuff: “phishing content and fake official accounts.” And given that TikTok appears to have accounted for a huge percentage of the “removals” this means that Twitter removed significantly less than 13% of the tweets that EIP flagged for them. So not only is it not 22 million tweets, it’s that EIP flagged less than 3,000 tweets, and Twitter ignored most of them and removed probably less than 10% of them.</p>
<p>When looked at in this context, basically the entire narrative that Taibbi is pushing melts away.</p>
<p>The EIP is not part of the “industrial censorship complex.” It’s a mostly academic group that was tracking how information flows across social media, which is a legitimate area of study. During the election they did exactly that. In the tiny percentage of cases where they saw stuff they thought was pretty worrisome, they’d simply alert the platforms with no push for the platforms to take any action, and (indeed) in most cases the platforms took no action whatsoever. In a few cases, they added more speech.</p>
<p>In a tiny, tiny percentage of the already tiny percentage, when the situation was most extreme (phishing, fake official accounts) then the platforms (entirely on their own) decided to pull down that content. For good reason.</p>
<p>That’s not “censorship.” There’s no “complex.” Taibbi’s entire narrative turns to dust.</p>
<p>There’s a lot more that Taibbi gets wrong in all of this, but the points that Hasan got him to admit he was wrong about are literally core pieces in the underlying foundation of his entire argument.</p>
<p>At one point in the interview, Hasan also does a nice job pointing out that the posts that the Biden campaign (note: not the government) flagged to Twitter were of Hunter Biden’s dick pics, not anything political (<a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-twitter-and-hunter-bidens-laptop/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">we’ve discussed this point before</a>) and Taibbi stammers some more and claims that “the ordinary person can’t just call up Twitter and have something taken off Twitter. If you put something nasty about me on Twitter, I can’t just call up Twitter…”</p>
<p>Except… that’s wrong. In multiple ways. First off, it’s not just “something nasty.” It’s literally non-consensual nude photos. Second, actually, given Taibbi’s close relationship with Twitter these days, uh, yeah, he almost certainly could just call them up. But, most importantly, the claim about “the ordinary” person not being able to have non-consensual nude images taken off the site? That’s wrong.</p>
<p>You can. There’s <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/forms/safety-and-sensitive-content/private-information" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">a form for it right here</a>. And I’ll admit that I’m not sure how well staffed Twitter’s trust & safety team is to handle those reports <em>today</em>, but it definitely used to have a team of people who would review those reports and take down non-consensual nude photos, just as they did with the Hunter Biden images.</p>
<p>As Hasan notes, Taibbi left out this crucial context to make his claims seem way more damning than they were. Taibbi’s response is… bizarre. Hasan asks him if he knew that the URLs were nudes of Hunter Biden and Taibbi admits that “of course” he did, but when Hasan asks him why he didn’t tell people that, Taibbi says “because I didn’t need to!”</p>
<p>Except, yeah, you kinda do. It’s vital context. Without it, the original Twitter Files thread implied that the Biden campaign (again, not the government) was trying to suppress political content or embarrassing content that would harm the campaign. The context that it’s Hunter’s dick pics is totally relevant and essential to understanding the story.</p>
<p>And this is exactly what the rest of Hasan’s interview (and what I’ve described above) lays out in great detail: Taibbi isn’t just sloppy with facts, which is problematic enough. He leaves out the very important context that highlights how the big conspiracy he’s reporting is… not big, not a conspiracy, and not even remotely problematic.</p>
<p>He presents it as a massive censorship operation, targeting 22 million tweets, with takedown demands from government players, seeking to silence the American public. When you look through the details, correcting Taibbi’s many errors, and putting it in context, you see that it was an academic operation to study information flows, who sent the more blatant issues they came across to Twitter with no suggestion that they do anything about them, and the vast majority of which Twitter ignored. In some minority of cases, Twitter applied its own speech to add more context to some of the tweets, and in a very small number of cases, where it found phishing attempts or people impersonating election officials (clear terms of service violations, and potentially actual crimes), it removed them.</p>
<p>There remains no <em>there</em> there. It’s less than a Potemkin village. There isn’t even a façade. This is the Emperor’s New Clothes for a modern era. Taibbi is pointing to a naked emperor and insisting that he’s clothed in all sorts of royal finery, whereas anyone who actually looks at the emperor sees he’s naked.</p>New York Times Makes Glaring Error About Iraq War — Then Corrects It Incorrectly2023-03-30T21:00:00.437000ZJon Schwarzhttps://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-error/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/new-york-times-makes/5396787:c05d27">shared this story</a>
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<p><u>For the 20th anniversary</u> of the start of the Iraq War, the New York Times published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/world/middleeast/iraq-war-reason.html">an article</a> by Max Fisher headlined “20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?”</p>
<p>The article is a fairly cogent summation of the evidence. However, when it was first published, it was undermined by an extremely significant and extremely funny mistake. After inquiries from The Intercept, the paper has changed the original mistake into a fresh, new mistake.</p>
<p>Here’s how the article originally read:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mr. Hussein had ejected international weapons inspectors, which was seen in Washington as a humiliating policy failure for Mr. Clinton.</p>
<p>When the American war leader was weakened by scandal later that year [in 1998], congressional Republicans pounced, passing the Iraq Liberation Act …</p></blockquote>
<p>One reason this is so funny is because in 1998 the Times <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/121898iraq-nations.html">accurately reported</a> what happened. The United Nations inspections team, called UNSCOM, was not expelled by Saddam Hussein, but rather was withdrawn by Richard Butler, the head of UNSCOM, after he consulted with the U.S. — about the fact that the U.S. was about to start bombing Iraq, in a campaign called Operation Desert Fox.</p>
<p class="p1">Even funnier is that the Times went on to claim erroneously that Iraq had expelled UNSCOM in 1998 at least five times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/08/world/us-used-un-team-to-place-spy-device-in-iraq-aides-say.html">twice</a> in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/16/world/un-is-asked-to-enlarge-iraq-inquiry.html">1999</a> and then in 2000, 2002 and 2003. It issued corrections on the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/02/nyregion/c-corrections-634450.html"><span class="s1">three</span></a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/nyregion/c-corrections-922501.html"><span class="s1">latter</span></a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/04/nyregion/c-corrections-541125.html"><span class="s1">articles</span></a>.</p>
<p class="p1">Two decades later, the paper apparently wanted to recapture its youth by being wrong again. The paper has now issued its fourth correction on this subject. Its present-day story currently reads:</p>
<blockquote><p>Hussein had ejected international weapons inspectors in 1997, which was seen in Washington as a humiliating policy failure for Mr. Clinton.</p>
<p>Then, when Mr. Clinton was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/us/politics/25-years-clinton-lewinsky.html">weakened by scandal</a> in 1998, congressional Republicans pounced, passing the Iraq Liberation Act …</p></blockquote>
<p>Wonderfully enough, this is also wrong. Iraq did expel the <em>American</em> members of the U.N. inspections team in 1997. But the rest remained in Iraq until they were withdrawn by the United Nations. All, including the Americans, returned to Iraq eight days later.</p>
<p>You can find this information in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/14/world/iraq-carries-out-threat-to-expel-us-inspectors.html">story</a> published when it happened, by a little-known paper called the New York Times.</p>
<p>The corrected text in the 2023 story also leaves out the reason Iraq expelled the (American) inspectors in 1997: Because some of the Americans were conducting espionage against Iraq. Again, you can read about this <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/07/world/us-spied-on-iraq-under-un-cover-officials-now-say.html">in the New York Times</a>.</p>
<p>If you just want to chuckle morosely about the inability of America’s most prestigious newspaper to get this story right — even now, after two decades, after the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/03/18/iraq-war-death-toll/">death of hundreds of thousands of human beings</a> in Iraq <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/03/26/iraq-war-book-ghaith-abdul-ahad/">because of the 2003 invasion</a> — you can stop here. But if you want the details about why this mistake truly matters, please continue reading.</p>
<div class="shortcode"></div>
<p><u>In the run-up</u> to the Iraq War, one of the favorite talking points of its proponents was that Saddam Hussein had expelled the UNSCOM team in 1998. This claim appeared in numerous<a href="https://fair.org/home/what-a-difference-four-years-makes/"> media outlets</a>, not just the Times.</p>
<p>This little bit of propaganda was popular because of its obvious implication. What possible reason would Iraq have to throw out the U.N. weapons inspectors unless it was hiding something?</p>
<p>Telling the story accurately, however, makes clear why Iraq’s behavior was congruent with having no banned weapons.</p>
<p>The UNSCOM inspections protocol was created by <a href="https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/IQ%20KW_910403_SCR687%281991%29_0.pdf">U.N. Security Council Resolution 687</a>, which ended the 1991 Gulf War following Iraq’s retreat from Kuwait. UNSC 687 demanded that Iraq disclose all its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Harsh sanctions would remain on Iraq until it had verifiably done so. At that point, however, the sanctions would be lifted. Also, Iraq’s disarmament would “represent steps towards the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction.”</p>
<p>But President George H.W. Bush immediately announced that the U.S. would ignore all of this, and maintain the sanctions — whether Iraq was or wasn’t disarmed — until Saddam Hussein was forced from power. (You can read about this <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/21/world/after-the-war-bush-links-end-of-trading-ban-to-hussein-exit.html">in the New York Times</a>.) In fact, the sanctions were seen as a way to make life in Iraq so miserable that Iraqis would be motivated to overthrow Saddam.</p>
<p>This stance was later reiterated by President Bill Clinton, as well as his <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/03/25/madeleine-albright-dead-iraq-war-herbalife/">secretary of state, Madeleine Albright</a>. What UNSC 687 said didn’t matter; sanctions would remain until Saddam was gone.</p>
<p>Thus Saddam Hussein’s regime had little incentive to cooperate with UNSCOM to begin with. Nevertheless, UNSCOM did an excellent job. We now know Iraq was largely disarmed by the end of 1991. It concealed extensive documentation and some equipment from its WMD programs until 1995, when it was forced to divulge all of it. But by that point, eight years before the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq was essentially clean.</p>
<p>The Iraqi regime understandably believed sanctions should be lifted. As the CIA’s final report on Iraq’s WMD programs put it, “Iraq considered [turning over its remaining material] to be a measure of goodwill and cooperation with the UN.” Internally, the government required WMD scientists to sign a declaration that they wouldn’t hide anything from the U.N., on pain of execution.</p>
<p>At the time Richard Haass, now the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke on a Washington, D.C., panel about the problem Iraqi disarmament presented. “We have to guard,” Haass said, “against the possibility that one day we may not be able to keep the French and Russians in line, that Saddam does comply with so much of the resolutions that the United States can’t sustain the policy … We are clearly in favor of regime change … [but] there’s no reference anywhere in any UN resolution to regime change.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Clinton administration had grown tired of passively hoping Saddam would be overthrown and turned to more active measures to encourage a coup. This included putting American spies on the UNSCOM team who would purportedly be helping to look for WMD, but were actually there to conduct espionage aimed at Saddam’s removal.</p>
<p>Iraq figured this out fairly quickly. Naturally, Saddam and his regime weren’t enthusiastic about it, given that this would inevitably end in his death. Moreover, they now felt there would never be an end to the sanctions. This led to several famous standoffs between UNSCOM and Iraqi security.</p>
<p>For instance, on December 9, 1998, UNSCOM showed up unannounced at Saddam’s Baath Party headquarters and was denied entry. The CIA WMD report found that Saddam was actually there at the time, and that he “issued orders not to give them access. Saddam did this to prevent the inspectors from knowing his whereabouts, not because he had something to hide.”</p>
<p>The U.S. used this type of noncompliance as justification for the Desert Fox strikes, which took place from December 16 to December 19, 1998. Following this, Iraq refused to allow UNSCOM to return until forced to in the fall of 2002.</p>
<p>Providing an accurate history like this makes clear that the WMD issue was always irrelevant to the U.S. government. When we were helping Iraq in its war with Iran in the 1980s, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons was an embarrassing PR problem but otherwise of no significance. During the Clinton administration, it became a useful PR pretext to keep the sanctions on Iraq and try to overthrow Saddam. Then by 2003, it became a rationale for war.</p>
<p>That’s why the “Saddam threw out the inspectors” error is so pernicious. It leads to other conclusions in the Times article, such as that Saddam “concealed the paltry state of his weapons programs to appear strong at home and deter the Americans.” The evidence for this is, let’s say, extremely dubious. Saddam’s behavior can’t be called wise or good, but it wasn’t some kind of mysterious bluff. Iraq didn’t have WMD, and it kept saying that, over and over again. But Saddam had higher priorities than cooperating with UNSCOM, such as staying alive for the next 20 minutes.</p>
<p>The Times coverage of Iraq and its purported weapons of mass destruction was so atrocious in the lead-up to war in 2003 that the paper eventually had to issue an extensive <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html">mea culpa</a>. So you’d like to believe that it now would concentrate on getting it right, at long last. However, that’s clearly a vain dream. It’s inevitable that for the rest of our lives, the Times will intermittently claim Saddam threw out the inspectors. Our only hope to prevent this would be to get reporters at the Times a subscription to the paper.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-error/" rel="nofollow">New York Times Makes Glaring Error About Iraq War — Then Corrects It Incorrectly</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theintercept.com" rel="nofollow">The Intercept</a>.</p>Texas Governor Says Most Gun Crimes Involve Illegally Owned Weapons. That’s Not True for Mass Shootings.2023-02-23T19:09:21.424000Zby Jessica Priest and Perla Trevizohttps://www.propublica.org/article/texas-greg-abbott-guns-crime-mass-shootings<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/texas-governor-says-/6795410:bd95ab">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6795410.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Articles and Investigations - ProPublica.</b>
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by <a class="name" href="https://www.propublica.org/people/jessica-priest">Jessica Priest</a> and <a class="name" href="https://www.propublica.org/people/perla-trevizo">Perla Trevizo</a> </p>
<p>ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive <a href="https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=54G&placement=top-note&region=texas">our biggest stories</a> as soon as they’re published.</p>
<p>This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/newsletters/briefweekly/">The Brief Weekly</a> to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.</p>
<p>Without mentioning the Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Gov. <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/directory/greg-abbott/">Greg Abbott</a> last week declared school safety a priority for the current legislative session and again dismissed calls for more laws that would restrict access to guns.</p>
<p>“Some want more gun laws, but too many local officials won’t even enforce the gun laws that are already on the books,” the governor said during his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Q8wC84b_Y">annual State of the State address</a>. Without providing a source or clear data, he then asserted that “most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally.” Abbott proposed a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for people who are not legally allowed to have a firearm but have them anyway.</p>
<p>“We need to leave prosecutors and judges with no choice but to punish those criminals and remove them and their guns from our streets,” said Abbott, a Republican.</p>
<p>But Abbott’s speech avoided a glaring reality: The majority of the state’s 19 mass shootings over the past six decades were carried out by men who legally acquired firearms, according to an <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/mass-shootings-texas-gun-control">investigation</a><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/mass-shootings-texas-gun-control"> by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune</a> published before his speech. Guns were legally obtained in 13 shootings, including two in which the shooter was not allowed to have one but took advantage of a loophole in the law that does not require background checks for firearms that are acquired from private individuals. Firearms were obtained illegally in three instances. The rest of the cases were unclear.</p>
<p>The news organizations’ analysis found that lawmakers failed to pass at least two dozen bills that would have prevented people from legally obtaining the weapons and ammunition used in seven of the state’s mass shootings. Such measures included requiring universal background checks, banning the ownership of certain firearms and raising the minimum age to purchase an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years old.</p>
<p>State lawmakers instead have loosened restrictions over the years on publicly carrying guns while making it harder for local governments to regulate them.</p>
<p>Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son was among the 19 children and two teachers killed last year at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, agreed with Abbott that criminals should not have access to guns. But, Cross said, the governor’s comments ignore the fact that the people responsible for many mass shootings did not previously have a criminal background.</p>
<p>“Before May 24, our shooter was not a criminal,” Cross said. “If this shooter hadn’t been able to just go in and buy those guns literally two days after his 18th birthday, then my child would still be alive.” Abbott, he said, “wants to be reactive instead of proactive, and proactive is what we need to stop these things.”</p>
<p>The governor did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the news organizations’ investigation or about his remarks during his State of the State address.</p>
<p>Little evidence exists to support Abbott’s claim, said <a href="https://lbj.utexas.edu/spelman-william">Bill</a><a href="https://lbj.utexas.edu/spelman-william"> Spelman</a>, who worked for a national police association for seven years and has spent the last 30 years teaching and researching criminal justice policy. </p>
<p>“To just say that most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally is a statement you can’t back up,” said Spelman, an emeritus professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.</p>
<p>James Densley, who co-founded the Violence Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit research center best known for its <a href="https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database/">extensive mass shooter database</a>, said that Abbott’s 10-year mandatory minimum sentence proposal would do little to deter mass shootings because the shooter does not survive in most of those cases and in others is already facing life in prison. In the vast majority of the nationwide cases in which it is known how the shooters obtained their firearms, they did so legally, Densley said.</p>
<p>Densley said different forms of gun violence require targeted approaches. For instance, restrictions on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines could be effective at reducing mass shootings, but less so at curbing “everyday gun violence,” he said.</p>
<p>“And I think politicians actually know this,” Densely said. “They understand it intuitively. But they have to say what is politically convenient to satisfy the needs of their constituents and others. And so they often conflate these different forms of gun violence to be perceived to be talking about one thing when they’re actually talking about something else.”</p>Bill Would Establish Official State Aroma2023-02-16T16:45:06.472000ZKevinhttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/727494599/0/loweringthebar~Bill-Would-Establish-Official-State-Aroma.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>Officially, <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.loweringthebar.net/category/series/official-state-crap">the Official State Crap project</a> has only reached Indiana, which would make Iowa next on the list. But there is <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.loweringthebar.net/2017/04/official-state-crap-alert-bill-would-abolish-it.html">precedent</a> for taking a state out of order if relevant legislative action is (a) imminent (b) stupid (c) both, and at least one of those conditions seems to be met here.</p>
<p>On January 23, New Mexico legislator William P. Soules introduced <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.nmlegis.gov/Legislation/Legislation?chamber=S&legType=B&legNo=188&year=23">Senate Bill 188</a>, which if passed would make that state the first in the nation, apparently, and surprisingly, to have an official state aroma. While there was at least some debate as to which of the state’s many aromas should be so honored, the consensus was to accept the sponsor’s suggestion that New Mexico name “the aroma of green chile roasting in the fall” as its official smell.</p>
<p>As is so often the case, here grade-school children are the (a) culprits (b) heroes (c) scapegoats responsible for proposing yet another state symbol, according to the <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.abqjournal.com/2569203/smells-like-student-advocacy-schoolkids-bolster-bill-to-create-official-state-aroma.html"><em>Albuquerque Journal</em></a>. But when I read that a group of fifth-graders had been allowed to suggest an official aroma, and that the aroma they came up with was chile-roasting, I strongly suspected adult (a) supervision (b) coercion (c) inception was involved, and I was right.</p>
<p>This is <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.abqjournal.com/2572271/what-a-late-night-host-said-to-offend-new-mexico-chile-lovers.html">said to have come about</a> while Soules (a retired teacher) was visiting the class at Monte Vista Elementary. In a valiant effort to get them interested in what a legislature does, Soules asked them if they could identify the state’s official bird. Some poindexter knew that it was the <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner">roadrunner</a>, and the discussion of official things continued. Somehow “the smell of roasting chile” came up, and Soules then “implored the class: ‘Let’s see about putting the smell of chile roasting as our official aroma for the state of New Mexico. Would you all help me?'” Yes, they would.</p>
<p>At a hearing on the bill, some of the fifth-graders testified in favor of the bill (via an online platform). “Is there anyone in the room who does not know what chile roasting smells like?” one student asked. Nobody who mattered didn’t, at least, and the committee voted 5-0 to recommend passing the bill. If it is adopted by the legislature and signed into law, it <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/23%20Regular/firs/SB0188.PDF">would take effect on June 16, 2023</a>, just in time for the fall harvest and roasting of chiles, hopefully to be followed by a green-chile-aroma-inspired increase in tourism.</p>
<p>The <em>Journal </em>reported that some state residents were semi-riled by Steven Colbert’s joke last week that he had assumed New Mexico’s official aroma would be the smell of “an abandoned RV that a bobcat is living in,” but it doesn’t look like they were really all that upset.</p>
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/elon-musk-is-still-s/5396787:224aa5">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/5396787.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> The Intercept.</b>
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<p class="caption source">Photo Illustration: The Intercept/Getty Images</p></div><br />
<u>I’ve been writing</u> critically about billionaire Elon Musk since he took over Twitter — particularly about his <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/11/22/elon-musk-twitter-censor-ddosecrets/">“free speech” hypocrisy</a> and his <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-ngo-antifascist/">censorship</a> of left-wing accounts. This must have angered him. Last week, he <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/12/16/elon-musk-twitter-suspended-journalists/">suspended me</a> and eight other journalists from Twitter.</p>
<p>We had all pointed out that Musk <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/12/14/twitter-elonjets-elon-musk-ban/">censored a Twitter account</a>, @ElonJet, which used public data to post the location of his private jet, but that @ElonJet had moved to rival social networks, like Mastodon, that didn’t censor the account. Musk accused us of “<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841">doxxing</a>” him by posting “<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603587970832793600">assassination coordinates</a>” and then tried to blame his outburst on an alleged stalking incident that had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details-of-musk-stalking-incident/">nothing to do</a> with the @ElonJet account.</p>
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<p>My suspension lasted just a few days before my account was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/business/media/twitter-reinstates-accounts.html">reinstated</a>. When people visit my Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/micahflee">profile</a>, it no longer says “account suspended,” and it looks as if I’m back on the platform. Friends and strangers alike have reached out to me saying it’s good to see that I’m back on Twitter. It’s an illusion.</p>
<p>In reality, I’m still locked out of my Twitter account unless I agree to delete a specific tweet at the <a href="https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1604168556165271557">behest of the billionaire</a>. Several of the other suspended journalists are in the <a href="https://mastodon.social/@drewharwell/109527398462508424">same boat</a>. (Twitter, where the communications team was decimated by Musk’s layoffs, did not immediately reply to a message for comment.)</p>
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<p>When I log in to my Twitter account, the site is replaced with the message: “Your account has been locked.” Twitter accuses me of violating its rules against posting private information. (In the 13 years that I’ve used Twitter, I’ve never violated any rules, and my account has never been suspended or locked until now.)</p>
<p>To unlock my account, I must remove the offending tweet, which in my case said, “Twitter just banned Mastodon’s official Twitter account @joinmastodon with 174,000 followers, probably because it tweeted a link to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account. Twitter is now censoring posting the link, but the user is @elonjet@mastodon.social.”<br />
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<img alt="remove tweet screenshot" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-417753" src="https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2022/12/remove-tweet-unlock-924x1024.jpg" />
<p class="caption source">Screenshot: Micah Lee</p></div><br />
<u>I didn’t want</u> to bend the knee to the Mad King of Twitter, so I submitted an appeal. “My tweet is about Twitter censoring rival social network Mastodon,” I wrote. “This is suppression of speech that never would have happened before Elon Musk took over.” After two days, I received an update from Twitter: “Our support team has determined that violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.”</p>
<p>My alleged offense is that I posted private information to Twitter by linking to @ElotJet’s account on Mastodon or, in my case, mentioning the username and showing the link in a screenshot. This is on its face absurd — I didn’t post private information, much less “assassination coordinates” — but a quick Twitter search for <a href="https://mastodon.social/@ElonJet">https://mastodon.social/@ElonJet</a> shows that plenty of other accounts have <a href="https://twitter.com/evacide/status/1603155463842824195">posted</a> this same link yet aren’t locked out.</p>
<p>I’m not the only suspended journalist that’s locked out of my account. Some journalists like Drew Harwell of the Washington Post have written on Mastodon about being locked out. “For anyone wondering,” Harwell <a href="https://mastodon.social/@drewharwell/109541347423442494">wrote</a>, “I’m still unable to access Twitter until I delete this tweet, which is factual journalism that doesn’t even break the location rule Twitter enacted a few days ago.” He appended a screenshot of the tweet.</p>
<p>And in an <a href="https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1604168556165271557">interview on CNN</a>, Donie O’Sullivan, another suspended journalist, explained that his account is locked as well. “Right now, unless I agree to remove that tweet at the behest of the billionaire, I won’t be allowed to tweet on the platform,” he said. He also submitted an appeal.</p>
<p>Mashable’s Matt Binder was <a href="https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1603984754776322048">unsuspended</a> following the mass banning, but he <a href="https://mastodon.social/@MattBinder/109533669567389674">wrote on Mastodon</a> that when he wrote to a Twitter official to ask how he had broken company policy, he was then locked out. “Seems they forgot to force me to delete the tweet the first time, like they did the other suspended journalists,” he wrote.</p>
<iframe class="mastodon-embed" height="680" src="https://mastodon.social/@MattBinder/109533669567389674/embed" style="border: 0;" width="500"></iframe>
<p>Steve Herman of Voice of America, whose account was also suspended last week, <a href="https://mastodon.social/@w7voa@journa.host/109531811071475665">told CNN</a> over the weekend: “When I got up this morning, I saw a bunch of news stories that my account had been reinstated with those of the others. Well, that’s not exactly true.” Herman explained that Musk was demanding he delete three offending tweets, all about @ElotJet.</p>
<p>The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/business/media/twitter-reinstates-accounts.html">reported</a> that the account of its suspended journalist, Ryan Mac, was also locked, contingent on whether he chooses to delete posts that Twitter flagged as violating rules against posting private information.</p>
<p>Other journalists who were suspended for their @ElonJet-related tweets are now fully back, including <a href="https://post.news/atrupar">Aaron Rupar</a> and <a href="https://mastodon.tonywebster.com/@tony">Tony Webster</a>.</p>
<p>I personally don’t plan on submitting to Musk’s petty demands. We’ll see if anything changes. In the meantime, you can follow me on Mastodon at <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@micahflee">@micahflee@infosec.exchange</a>, and The Intercept at <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@theintercept@journa.host">@theintercept@journa.host</a>.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/elon-musk-twitter-banned-journalists/" rel="nofollow">Elon Musk Is Still Silencing the Journalists He Banned From Twitter</a> appeared first on <a href="https://theintercept.com" rel="nofollow">The Intercept</a>.</p><br><br><img src="https://prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2022/12/twitter-phone-account-suspended-em.jpg" /><br><br><img src="https://prod01-cdn04.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2022/12/remove-tweet-unlock.jpg" />Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists2022-12-16T16:52:43.831000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/15/thursday-night-purge-elon-musks-twitter-bans-tons-of-high-profile-journalists/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/thursday-night-purge/1190:a4ed5b">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/1190.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Techdirt.</b>
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<p>Well. Just after finishing that last post about Twitter <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/15/elons-commitment-to-free-speech-rapidly-replaced-by-his-commitment-to-blatant-hypocrisy-bans-the-joinmastodon-account/">banning the official Mastodon account</a> on Twitter for tweeting about the ElonJet tracking account existing on Mastodon, it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new “free speech absolutist” Twitter have really come off. In quick succession, a whole bunch of high profile reporter accounts were suspended, including Aaron Rupar (who famously covers and quotes videos of high profile politicians), Drew Harwell from the Washington Post, Ryan Mac from the NY Times, Donie Sullivan from CNN, and Matt Binder from Mashable.</p>
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<p>It’s not entirely clear what “policy” these accounts violated. For all of Elon’s talk about transparency, there doesn’t seem to be very much here. A few of the accounts had <em>talked about</em> the ElonJet controversy but it’s not clear that they linked to it.</p>
<p>In Donie’s case, his last tweet had been posting <em>the police report</em> from the LAPD in response to questions about Elon Musk’s claim that a stalker had jumped on a car with one of his children inside. The LAPD statement said:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>LAPD’s Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet.”</em></p>
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<p>And then he got banned.</p>
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<p>Binder’s final tweet was noting what Donie’s final tweet was before getting banned.</p>
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<p>So, look, again, content moderation at scale is <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/">impossible to do well</a>, yada yada yada. But, uh, I’d sure like some Twitter Files on what’s going on here. </p>
<p>Either way, it would be <em>nice</em> if Musk’s supporters began to realize that (1) maybe this isn’t as easy as “no moderation” and (2) maybe the old Twitter wasn’t really evilly censoring their ideological viewpoints after all… but I fear that most are going to instead not care at all and (1) cheer on this removal of “the corporate media fake news elite” and (2) come up with some ridiculous excuse about how it’s not really a free speech issue at all.</p>
<p>But, of course, all of that is bullshit. Elon is free to do what he wants. Just as the old Twitter was. But, we can still call out what appears to be hypocrisy.</p>
<p><strong>Update: </strong>The purge continues. Micah Lee, Tony Webster and Keith Olbermann are three more reporters now gone from Twitter.</p>Anker Tries To Bullshit The Verge About Security Problems In Its Eufy ‘Smart’ Camera2022-12-07T20:48:08.918000ZKarl Bodehttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/anker-tries-to-bullshit-the-verge-about-security-problems-in-its-eufy-smart-camera/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/anker-tries-to-bulls/1190:2c9cc0">shared this story</a>
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<p>Anker, the popular maker of device chargers and the Eufy smart camera line, <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1514734&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fus.eufy.com%2Fpages%2Fprivacy-commitment&referrer=theverge.com&xcust=https://us.eufy.com/pages/privacy-commitment?utm_source=cj&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_content=Eufy+Homepage+US_5370367_Skimlinks_100084481&cjevent=0866faf174ad11ed82d00a3f0a1c0e0b&cjdata=MXxOfDB8WXww" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">proudly proclaims on its website</a> that user data will be stored locally, “never leaves the safety of your home,” footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that the company will only send that footage “straight to your phone.”</p>
<p>Yeah, about that. </p>
<p>Security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi have discovered that few if any of those claims are true, and that it’s possible to stream video from a Eufy camera, from across the country, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/30/23486753/anker-eufy-security-camera-cloud-private-encryption-authentication-storage?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter">with no encryption at all</a> simply by connecting to a unique address at Eufy’s cloud servers using the free VLC Media Player.</p>
<p>Both clearly <a href="https://twitter.com/Paul_Reviews/status/1596048648416423936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1596048648416423936%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=about%3Asrcdoc">demonstrated the problem on Twitter</a>, but, when contacted by The Verge, Anker tried to claim that what the security researchers had clearly, repeatedly demonstrated <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/30/23486753/anker-eufy-security-camera-cloud-private-encryption-authentication-storage?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter">wasn’t possible</a>:</p>
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<p><em>When we asked Anker point-blank to confirm or deny that, the company categorically denied it. “I can confirm that it is not possible to start a stream and watch live footage using a third-party player such as VLC,” Brett White, a senior PR manager at Anker, told me via email.</em></p>
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<p>Except it’s not only possible, it’s been repeatedly proven (though there’s no evidence yet of this having been exploited in the wild and it only works on cameras that are in an awakened state). Users really only need a camera’s serial number, which they can obtain from the box or sometimes guess. An attacker could also exploit and access cameras he donated to Good Will or other thrift stores. </p>
<p>The discovery comes after a decade of “smart” hardware device makers having a fairly abysmal track record on security and privacy despite websites that routinely claim the opposite. From TVs that fail to encrypt your home conversations to refrigerators that leak your email credentials, the sector is rife with problems that somehow still don’t get the kind of scrutiny they deserve. </p>
<p>Moore claims Anker’s problems go deeper, <a href="https://twitter.com/Paul_Reviews/status/1595421705996042240">claiming</a> that Eufy had violated numerous additional security promises, including uploading camera thumbnail images, including captured users’ faces to the cloud without permission and <a href="https://twitter.com/Paul_Reviews/status/1596169445361287168">failing to delete stored, private consumer data</a>.</p>
<p>Despite Anker being a Chinese-based company, you won’t hear any of the same national security hyperventilation over these kinds of issues routinely found in this and other Chinese-made “smart” home technologies. Those kinds of freak outs are, apparently, <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/30/fccs-carr-once-again-heads-to-the-fainting-couch-over-tiktok/">singularly reserved</a> for social media services like TikTok, and only if such complaints <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/30/fccs-carr-once-again-heads-to-the-fainting-couch-over-tiktok/">can get you on television</a>. </p>Twitter and the maintenance cost of code2022-11-19T01:41:24.438000Zshared_prophethttps://eejo.substack.com/p/twitter-and-the-maintenance-cost<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/twitter-and-the-main/8001009:e8b694">shared this story</a>
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<p>Elon Musk pledged to get rid of bots and spam and promote free speech when he bought Twitter. Then he stepped on a rake, stumbled dazed onto a floor covered with marbles, ran in place for a few seconds windmilling his arms, fell down, got back up but his pants fell down, tripped over them, and a cartoon anvil fell on his head. That is to say, Twitter is melting down.</p><p>From what I have read (on Twitter, of course; what better vantage point is there from which to watch the collapse?), at this point most critical departments at the company are completely vacant. As many as 90% of the 7,500 employees the company had last month are gone. Importantly, payroll and tax departments are empty, so that will be a huge problem, but I want to talk about the software. There are a lot of reasonable and informative threads about how things will likely play out, but a few people seem to think the platform will basically run itself, and will be fine without all these people to keep it going.</p><p>That’s not how it works.</p><p>Elon likes to say that technology doesn’t just advance automatically, that it only happens if a lot of people work really hard on it. In the same way, no technology we have created just keeps working indefinitely without maintenance. Just as gravity pulls us down to Earth, entropy constantly pulls matter towards simpler, less useful configurations, breaking down everything from our bodies to solid state data storage. Resisting this degration requires energy: attention and effort from people.</p><p>Even software that is built and released as finished on a speicific date has a maintenance cost. Without considering how these days basically all software is constantly being updated, hardware changes and older models are discontinued. If you just want the same software to work on a new computer (likely with a new operating system version), it takes effort to update it so that can happen.</p><p>Software services require that kind of maintenance continuously. Newly discovered bugs in the software or its dependencies require updates. Usage patterns change, and if database queries and schemas aren’t adjusted to fit the new use case, everything will slow to a crawl. Browsers change over time, and the next version of Safari or Chrome or Firefox could break your script or your layout.</p><p>And of course this is not even to mention the hardware:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link is-viewable-img image2" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa71f8686-dd9b-48d5-a1ae-4d5a88c69a2d_600x678.png" target="_blank"><div class="image2-inset"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="Twitter thread from @ MosquitoCapital, an experienced sysadmin, about things that can go wrong with the Twitter infrastructure." class="sizing-normal" height="678" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa71f8686-dd9b-48d5-a1ae-4d5a88c69a2d_600x678.png" title="Twitter thread from @ MosquitoCapital, an experienced sysadmin, about things that can go wrong with the Twitter infrastructure." width="600" /><div class="image-link-expand"><svg class="lucide lucide-maximize2" fill="none" height="16" stroke="#FFFFFF" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="16" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></div></div></a></figure></div><p>See the <a href="https://twitter.com/MosquitoCapital/status/1593541177965678592">full thread</a> for items 3 through 56 if Twitter is still up when you read this.</p><p>A commonly accepted signifier of proficiency is the ability to do something difficult while making it look easy. The sheer number of people who think Twitter is simple is a huge testament to how well it was executed.</p><br><br><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/h_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa71f8686-dd9b-48d5-a1ae-4d5a88c69a2d_600x678.png" />Road Space Comparison2022-10-12T21:16:18.633000Zhttps://xkcd.com/2684/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/road-space-compariso/5994357:b13eca">shared this story</a>
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<img alt="I wonder how hard it would be to ride an electric scooter in a hamster ball." src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/road_space_comparison.png" title="I wonder how hard it would be to ride an electric scooter in a hamster ball." />Universe Price Tiers2022-09-01T02:00:20.703000Zhttps://xkcd.com/2666/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/universe-price-tiers/5994357:f0de12">shared this story</a>
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<img alt="In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility." src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/universe_price_tiers.png" title="In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility." />Horrifying: Google Flags Parents As Child Sex Abusers After They Sent Their Doctors Requested Photos2022-08-22T20:00:57.376000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/22/horrifying-google-flags-parents-as-child-sex-abusers-after-they-sent-their-doctors-requested-photos/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
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<p>Over the last few years, there has been a lot of attention paid to the issue of child sexual abuse material (<a href="https://www.techdirt.com/tag/csam/">CSAM</a>) online. It is a huge and serious problem. And has been for a while. If you talk to trust and safety experts who work in the field, the stories they tell are horrifying and scary. Trying to stop the production of such material (i.e., literal child abuse) is a worthy and important goal. Trying to stop the flow of such material is similarly worthy.</p>
<p>The problem, though, is that as with so many things that have a content moderation component, the <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/">impossibility theory</a> rears its head. And nothing demonstrates that quite as starkly as this <em>stunning</em> new piece by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times, discussing how Google has been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html?s=33">flagging people as potential criminals</a> after they shared photos of their children in response to requests from medical professionals trying to deal with medical conditions the children have.</p>
<p>There is much worth commenting on in the piece, but before we get into the details, it’s important to give some broader political context. As you probably know if you read this site at all, across the political spectrum, there has been tremendous pressure over the last few years to pass laws that “force” websites to “do something” about CSAM material. Again, CSAM is a massive and serious problem, but, as we’ve discussed, the law (namely <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A">18 USC 2258</a>) already requires websites to report any CSAM content they find, and they can face stiff penalties for failing to do so.</p>
<p>Indeed, it’s quite likely that much of the current concern about CSAM is due to there finally being some level of recognition of how widespread it is <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2020/03/06/why-does-ny-times-seem-literally-incapable-reporting-accurately-section-230/"><em>thanks to</em> the required reporting</a> by tech platforms under the law. That is, because most websites take this issue so seriously, and carefully follow the law, we now know how widespread and pervasive the problem is. </p>
<p>But, rather than trying to tackle the <em>underlying</em> problem, politicians often want to do the politician thing, and just blame the tech companies for doing the required reporting. It’s very much shooting the messenger and using the fact that the reporting by tech companies is shining a light on the underlying societal failures that resulted in this, as <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/06/25/stop-using-content-moderation-demands-as-effort-to-hide-governments-social-policy-failures/">an excuse to blame the tech companies</a>, rather than the societal failings.</p>
<p>It’s easier to blame the tech companies — most of whom have bent over backwards to work with law enforcement and to build technology to help respond to CSAM — than to come up with an actual plan for dealing with the underlying issues. And so almost all of the legal proposals we’ve seen are really about targeting tech companies… and, in the process, removing underlying rights. In the US, we’ve seen the <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/tag/earn-it/">EARN IT Act</a>, which completely misdiagnoses the problem, and would actually make it that much harder for law enforcement to track down abusers. EARN It attempts to blame tech companies for <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/02/17/whatever-problem-earn-it-is-trying-to-solve-it-doesnt/">law enforcement’s unwillingness</a> to go after CSAM producers and distributors.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, over in the EU, there’s an apparently serious proposal to effectively <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/12/eu-proposes-its-own-version-of-earn-it-effectively-mandates-full-surveillance-of-all-messaging-no-encryption/">outlaw encryption and require client-side scanning</a> of all content in an attempt to battle CSAM. Even as experts have pointed out how this makes everyone <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/08/23/researchers-who-built-similar-system-explain-why-apples-csam-scanning-system-is-dangerous/">less safe</a>, and there has been <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/27/germany-says-hell-no-to-eu-proposal-to-outlaw-encryption/">pushback</a> on the proposal, politicians are still supporting it by basically just repeating “<a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/10/eu-commissioner-pens-barely-coherent-defense-of-spying-on-everyone-for-the-children/">we must protect the children</a>” without seriously responding to the many ways in which these bills will make children less safe.</p>
<p>Separately, it’s important to understand some of the technology behind hunting down and reporting CSAM. The most famous of which is PhotoDNA, initially developed by Microsoft and used among many of the big platforms to share hashes of known CSAM material to make sure that the material that has been discovered isn’t more widely spread. There are some other similar tools, but for fairly obvious reasons these tools have some risks associated with them, and there are concerns both about false positives and about who is allowed to have access to the tools (even as they’re sharing hashes, not actual images, the possibility of such tools to be abused is a real concern). A few companies, including Google, have developed more AI-based tools to try to identify CSAM, and Apple (somewhat infamously) has been working on its own <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/08/13/apples-new-scanning-tools-raising-more-concerns-even-inside-apple/">client-side scanning</a> tools along with cloud based scanning. But client-side scanning has <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/10/20/report-client-side-scanning-is-insecure-nightmare-just-waiting-to-be-exploited-governments/">significant limits</a>, and there is real fear that it will be abused.</p>
<p>Of course, spy agencies also love the idea of everyone being <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/27/two-gchq-employees-suggest-the-solution-to-csam-distribution-is-more-client-side-scanning/">forced to do client-side scanning</a> in response to CSAM, because they know that basically creates a backdoor to spy on everyone’s devices.</p>
<p>Whenever people talk about this and highlight the potential for false positives, they’re often brushed off by supporters of these scanning tools, saying that the risk is minimal. And, until now, there weren’t many good examples of false positives beyond things like Facebook <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2020/11/20/content-moderation-case-study-facebook-attracts-international-attention-when-it-removes-historic-vietnam-war-photo-posted/">pulling down iconic photographs</a>, claiming they were CSAM.</p>
<p>However, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html?s=33">this article</a> (yes, finally we’re talking about the article) by Hill gives us some very real world examples of how aggressive scanning for CSAM can not just go wrong, but can potentially destroy lives as well. In horrifying ways. </p>
<p>It describes how a father noticed his son’s penis was swollen and apparently painful to the child. An advice nurse at their healthcare provider suggested they take photos to send to the doctor, so the doctor could review them in advance of a telehealth appointment. The father took the photos and texted them to his wife so she could share with the doctor… and that set off a huge mess.</p>
<p>In texting them — in Google’s terms, taking “affirmative action,” — it caused Google to scan the material, and it’s AI-based detector flagged the image as potential CSAM. You can understand why. But the context was certainly missing. And, it didn’t much matter to Google — which shut down the guy’s entire Google account (including his Google Fi phone service) and reported him to local law enforcement.</p>
<p>The guy, just named “Mark” in the story, appealed, but Google refused to reinstate his account. Much later, Mark found out about the police investigation this way:</p>
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<p><em>In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.</em></p>
<p><em>The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.</em></p>
<p><em>Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark <strong>but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked</strong>.</em></p>
<p><em>“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.</em></p>
<p><em>Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.</em></p>
<p><em>“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”</em></p>
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<p>In the article, Hill highlights at least one other example of nearly the same thing happening, and also talks to (<a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2019/02/12/techdirt-podcast-episode-199-apple-to-aclu-with-jon-callas/">former podcast guest</a>) Jon Callas, about how it’s likely that this happens way more than we realize, but the victims of it probably aren’t willing to speak about it, because then their names are associated with CSAM.</p>
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<p><em>Jon Callas, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization,<strong> </strong>called the cases canaries <strong>“</strong>in this particular coal mine.”</em></p>
<p><em>“There could be tens, hundreds, thousands more of these,” he said.</em></p>
<p><em>Given the toxic nature of the accusations, Mr. Callas speculated that most people wrongfully flagged would not publicize what had happened.</em></p>
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<p>There’s so much in this story that is both horrifying, but also a very useful illustration of the trade-offs and risks with these tools, and the process for correcting errors. It’s good that these companies are making proactive efforts to stop the creation and sharing of CSAM. The article already shows how these companies go above and beyond what the law actually requires (contrary to the claims of politicians and some in the media — and, unfortunately, many working for public interest groups trying to protect children).</p>
<p>However, it also shows the very real risks of false positives, and how it can create very serious problems for people, <strong>and</strong> how very few people are even willing to publicly discuss it for fear of the impact on their own lives and reputations for even highlighting the issue.</p>
<p>If politicians (pushed by many in the media) continue to advocate for regulations mandating even more aggressive behavior from these companies, including increasing liability for missing any content, it is inevitable that we will have many more such false positives — and the impact will be that much bigger.</p>
<p>There are real trade-offs here, and any serious discussion of how to deal with them <em>should</em> recognize that. Unfortunately, most of the discussions are entirely one-sided, and refuse to even acknowledge the issue of false positives and the concerns about how such aggressive scanning can impact people’s privacy.</p>
<p>And, of course, since the media (with the exception of this article!) and political narrative are entirely focused on “but think of the children!” the companies are bending even further backwards to appease them. Indeed, Google’s response to the story of Mark seems ridiculous as you read the article. Even after the police clear him of any wrongdoing, it refuses to give him back his account.</p>
<p>But that response is totally rational when you look at the typical media coverage of these stories. There have been so many stories — often misleading ones — accusing Google, Facebook and other big tech companies of not doing enough to fight CSAM. So any mistakes in that direction are used to completely trash the companies, saying that they’re “turning a blind eye” to abuse or even “deliberately profiting” off of CSAM. In such a media environment, companies like Google aren’t even going to risk missing something, and its default is going to be to shut down the guy’s account. Because the people at the company know they’d get destroyed publicly if it turns out he was involved in CSAM.</p>
<p>As with all of this stuff, there are no easy answers here. Stopping CSAM is an important and noble goal, but we need to figure out the best way to actually do that, and deputizing private corporations to magically find and stop it, with serious risk of liability for mistakes (in one direction), seems to have pretty significant costs as well. And, on top of that, it distracts from trying to solve the underlying issues, including why law enforcement isn’t actually doing enough to stop the actual production and distribution of actual CSAM.</p>Elon Musk’s Twitter Business Model Idea: Ignore Free Speech Rights And Try To The Charge Media To Quote Tweets2022-05-02T22:24:38.417000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/02/elon-musks-twitter-business-model-idea-ignore-free-speech-rights-and-try-to-the-charge-media-to-quote-tweets/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/elon-musks-twitter-b/1190:4951fd">shared this story</a>
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<p>As everyone’s trying to read the tea leaves of what an Elon Musk-owned Twitter <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/28/reality-check-twitter-actually-was-already-doing-most-of-the-things-musk-claims-he-wants-the-company-to-do-but-better/">will actually look like</a>, it’s been reported that in his presentation to Wall St. banks to get the financing he needs to complete the deal, he suggested the deal would be profitable because of some of his <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/musk-told-banks-he-will-rein-twitter-pay-make-money-tweets-sources-2022-04-29/">new business model ideas</a>. Now, obviously, these are entirely speculative, and my guess is that he hasn’t thought through any of this that deeply (just like he <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-demonstrates-how-little-he-understands-about-content-moderation/">hasn’t thought through content moderation’s challenges</a>, even though he’s sure he can fix it). But, at least some of the banks are buying into the deal based on Musk promising a stronger Twitter business, so we need to pay attention to his ideas. Like this one, that, um, <strong>would be effectively impossible under the 1st Amendment</strong>.</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>Musk told the banks he also plans to develop features to grow business revenue, including new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information or go viral, the sources said.</em></p>
<p><em>Ideas he brought up included charging a fee when a third-party website wants to quote or embed a tweet from verified individuals or organizations.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, like, I don’t want to throw any cold water on the business model ideas of the guy people keep telling me is the most brilliant innovative business mind of our generation, but… it… um… seems at least a <em>little</em> ironic that he’s spent the past month screaming about “free speech” and enabling whatever the law allows… and now he wants to <strong>charge companies for quoting a tweet.</strong></p>
<p>Yeah, so, thanks to the 1st Amendment (that he claims to support so much) he’s unlikely to be able to do that successfully. Quoting a tweet (we’ll deal with embedding shortly) in almost every damn case is going to be fair use under copyright law. And, a key reason we have fair use in copyright law… is that the 1st Amendment <strong>requires it</strong>, or else copyright law would stifle the very free speech that Musk claims to love so much.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618">Eldred v. Ashcroft</a></em>, the important (if wrongly decided) case on the Constitutionality of copyright term extension, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly talked about how fair use was a “safeguard” in copyright law to make sure that copyright law could exist under the 1st Amendment, even as it could be used to suppress speech. The crux of the argument is that, because there’s fair use that allows people to do things like quote a 240 character outburst, then there’s no serious concern about copyright silencing speech. This point is often raised in the context of calling <a href="https://abovethelaw.com/2017/08/the-first-amendment-and-copyright-law-cant-we-all-just-get-along/#:~:text=Justice%20Ginsburg%20called%20the%20fair,valve%E2%80%9D%20for%20the%20First%20Amendment." rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">fair use a necessary safety valve</a> on copyright to make it compatible with the 1st Amendment.</p>
<p>Given that Musk has claimed (incorrectly, but really, whatever) that free speech laws represent “the will of the people,” and his apparent big business model innovation is to demand that media organizations pay to quote tweets, which violates our fair use rights, which are necessary under the 1st Amendment… well, it appears that his biggest business model idea so far is to try to ignore the 1st Amendment rights of people wishing to quote tweets.</p>
<p>Good luck with that.</p>
<p>Also, under the current terms of service on Twitter, users hold any copyright interest in their own tweets. Twitter holds a license for it, but that wouldn’t allow <em>Twitter</em> as an entity to file copyright claims against any media organization that was quoting tweets in the first place. The only way it could do that is if it changed the terms entirely and required all its users to actually assign their copyrights to Twitter and, well, good luck with that as well.</p>
<p>Now, of course, the report claimed that the fee could be charged if someone “wants to quote <em>or embed</em> a tweet from verified individuals,” and the company certainly could set up some convoluted system to try to make people pay to embed, but that would (a) be fucking annoying for most everyone else and (b) would just lead to everyone screenshotting, instead of embedding, which is a lot less useful in the long run for Twitter, since it would drive fewer people to interact with Twitter. And, again, fair use and (I feel I must remind you) the 1st Amendment would protect all that screenshotting and quoting. Free speech, ftw!</p>
<p>And that’s not even getting into the idea that Twitter might now be effectively selling its popular tweets to websites. I mean, if this plan were to go forward (and somehow got over all the other hurdles), I’d imagine the company would literally <strong>need</strong> to cut its users in on the deal and set up some sort of “every time the NY Times embeds your tweet, they pay us $5 and we revert $3 of them to you” or some sort of nonsense like that. And, sure, maybe it’ll excite some Twitter users that they could get paid for their tweets (again, assuming any third party website out there ignores its fair use/1st Amendment rights to simply quote or screenshot and chooses to pay instead).</p>
<p><strong>But</strong>, this would also likely create a whole world of complications. First, Twitter would need to set up an entirely new kind of operation to manage all of this. Musk also promised in these documents that he’s planning on reducing headcount at Twitter, but he’d need to staff up at least on managing the payments and payouts to tweeters. But, again, this is Elon Musk, so I’m guessing the system will work on the blockchain in Dogecoin and payments will flow automagically. And sure, maybe you could see how that could actually <em>kinda</em> work, if you’re into that sort of thing?</p>
<p>But, now, we get into the next issue: when you add <strong>money</strong> (even cute dog-meme based money) to a platform where people normally did shit for free, <em>the incentives change. </em> Oh, boy do they ever change. Suddenly you’re going to get scammers galore, looking to abuse the system, and get filthy stinkin’ Doge rich. I guess maybe this needs to be expressed in meme form?</p>
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<p>And Elon <em>should</em> understand this better than anyone, given how frequently crypto scammers follow him around and try to scam his fans. Introducing <em>actual money</em>, even of the meme variety, into the mix is going to lead to a lot of scam behavior. And it would probably be helpful if the company had a… what’s it called… oh yeah, trust & safety staff to help think these issues through.</p>
<p>I’m never going to knock anyone for experimenting with creative business model ideas. And I’m all for Twitter trying out non-advertising based business models, as Elon has suggested is part of his focus. That actually seems like a good idea. But, it’s kinda <em>weird</em> when this whole deal is premised on the idea of bringing more “free speech” to the site… and his first business model suggestion when trying to convince banks to back him is to ignore the free speech rights of others and try to force them to pay up.</p>
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</div>Reality Check: Twitter Actually Was Already Doing Most Of The Things Musk Claims He Wants The Company To Do (But Better)2022-04-28T16:42:37.472000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/28/reality-check-twitter-actually-was-already-doing-most-of-the-things-musk-claims-he-wants-the-company-to-do-but-better/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>So there has been lots of talk about <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/tag/elon-musk/">Elon Musk</a> and his takeover of Twitter. I’ve written multiple things about <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/25/on-elon-musk-and-free-speech/">how little he understands about free speech</a> and <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-demonstrates-how-little-he-understands-about-content-moderation/">how little he understands content moderation</a>. I’ve also written (with giant caveats) about ways in which his takeover of Twitter <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/25/ways-in-which-elon-musks-twitter-takeover-could-be-good/">might improve <em>some</em> things</a>. Throughout this discussion, in the comments here, and on Twitter, a lot of people have accused me of interpreting Musk’s statements in bad faith. In particular, people get annoyed when I point out that the two biggest points he’s made — that (1) Twitter should allow all “legal” speech, and (2) getting rid of spambots is his number one priority — contradict each other, because spambots are protected speech. People like to argue that’s not true, but they’re wrong, and anyone arguing that expression by bots is not protected doesn’t understand the 1st Amendment at all.</p>
<p>Either way, I am always open to rethinking my position, and if people are claiming that I’m interpreting Musk in bad faith, I can try to revisit his statements in a more forgiving manner. Let’s, as the saying goes, take him figuratively, rather than literally. </p>
<p>But… here’s the thing. If you interpret Musk’s statements in the <em>best</em> possible light, it’s difficult to see how Twitter is not<strong> <em>already doing pretty much everything he wants it to do</em></strong><em>.</em> Now, I can already hear the angry keyboard mashing of people who are very, very sure that’s not true, and are very, very sure that Twitter is an evil company “censoring political views” and “manipulating elections” and whatever else the conspiracy theory of the day is. But it’s funny that the same people who insist that I’m not being fair to Musk, refuse to offer the same courtesy or willingness to understand why and how Twitter actually operates.</p>
<p>So, let’s look at Musk’s actual suggestions, phrased in the best possible light, and look at what Twitter has actually done and is doing… and again, you’ll realize that Twitter is (by far!) the social media service that has gone the farthest to make what he wants real, and in the few areas that he seems to think the company has fallen short, the reality is that it has had to balance difficult competing interests, and realized that its approach is the most likely to get to the larger goal of providing a platform for global conversation.</p>
<p>Musk has repeatedly said that he sees free speech on Twitter as <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344">an important part of democracy</a>. So do many people at Twitter. They were the ones who framed themselves as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">“free speech wing of the free speech party.”</a> But as any actual expert in free speech will tell you, free speech does not mean that private websites should <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/30/why-moderating-content-actually-does-more-to-support-the-principles-of-free-speech/">allow <strong>all</strong> free speech</a>. And I know people — including Musk — will argue against this point, but it’s just fundamentally wrong. We’ve gone over this over and over again. The internet itself (which is not owned by any entity) is the modern public square, and anyone is free to set up shop on it. But that does not mean that they get to commandeer private property for their own screaming fits.</p>
<p>If it did, you would not have free speech, because you would (1) just get inundated with spam and garbage, and (2) only the loudest, most obnoxious voices would ever be heard. The team at Twitter actually understands the tradeoffs here, and while they don’t always get it “right” (in part <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/">because there is no “right”</a>), Twitter’s team is so far above and beyond any other social media website, it’s just bizarre that the public narrative insists the opposite.</p>
<p>Twitter has long viewed its mission as enabling more free speech and more conversation in the world, and has taken steps to actually make that possible. Opening up the platform to people who violate the rules, abuse and harass others, and generally make a mess of things, does not aid free speech or “democracy.” You can disagree with where Twitter draws the lines (and clearly, Musk does), but Musk has shown little to no understanding of why and how the line drawing is done in the first place, and if he moves in the direction he claims, will quickly realize that Twitter’s lines are drawn <strong>much much much</strong> more permissively than nearly any other website (including, for what it’s worth, Trump’s Truth Social), and that there are actually clear reasons for why it drew the lines it did — and those lines are often to enable more ability for there to be communication and conversation on the platform.</p>
<p>Twitter has long allowed all sorts of dissenting viewpoints and arguments on its platform. Indeed, there are many activists who insist that the problem is that Twitter doesn’t do enough moderation. Instead, Twitter has put in place some pretty clear rules, and it tries to only take down accounts that really break those rules. It doesn’t always get that right. And it misses some accounts, and takes down others it shouldn’t. But on the whole, it’s way more permissive than most any other site that is much quicker to ban users.</p>
<p>Second, even as it contradicts his first point, Musk has claimed that he wants to get rid of spambots and scambots. This is a good goal. And, again, it’s also one that Twitter has been working on for ages. And it has really good, really smart people working on the issue (some of the best out there). And, in part <strong>because</strong> the company is so open and so permissive (again much more so than other platforms), this is an extraordinarily difficult problem to solve, especially at the scale of Twitter. People assume, falsely, that Twitter doesn’t care about spammers, but part of the issue is that if you want to have an “open” platform for “free speech,” that means that people will take advantage of that. Musk is going to find that Twitter already has some of the best people working on this issue — that is if they don’t rush out the door (or get pushed out by him).</p>
<p>Third, Musk has talked about redoing the verification system. He’s said that Twitter should <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215736606957573" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">“authenticate all real humans.”</a> This appears to be (at least partly) part of his method for dealing with the bots and spam he’d like to eradicate. For years we’ve discussed the dangers of a <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2011/08/05/whats-name-importance-pseudonymity-dangers-requiring-real-names/">“real names”</a> policy, that requires people to post under their own names, including that studies have shown that the trolling often is worse under real names. It’s especially dangerous for marginalized people, and those who have stalkers, or are otherwise at risk.</p>
<p>But, some people respond, it’s unfair to assume he means a real names policy. Perhaps he just means that Twitter will keep a secret database of your verified details, and you can still be pseudonymous on the site. Except, as experts will tell you, that still is massively problematic, especially for marginalized groups, at-risk individuals, and those in countries with authoritarian regimes. Because now that database becomes a massive target. You get <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/01/10/twitter-asks-court-to-reconsider-order-to-unmask-anonymous-critic-billionaire-over-questionable-copyright-claims/">extremely questionable subpoenas</a>, seeking to unmask users all the time. Or, you get the <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2011/01/10/kudos-to-twitter-not-just-rolling-over-when-us-govt-asked-info/">government demanding</a> you cough up info on your users. Or you get hackers trying to get into the database. Or, you get authoritarian countries getting employees into these companies to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/06/777098293/2-former-twitter-employees-charged-with-spying-for-saudi-arabia">seek out info</a> on critics of the regime.</p>
<p>All of these things have happened with Twitter. And Twitter was in a position to push back. But it sure helped that in many of those cases Twitter didn’t actually have their “verification,” but much less information, like an IP address and an email.</p>
<p>Or, to take it another level, perhaps Musk really just means that Twitter should offer verification <em>to those who want it</em>. That’s not at all what he said, but it’s how some of his vocal supporters have interpreted this. Well, once again, Twitter <strong>has tried that</strong>. And it didn’t work. Back in 2016, Twitter <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/blue-sky/ct-twitter-verified-account-wp-bsi-20160720-story.html" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">opened up verification for everyone</a>, and the company quickly realized it had a huge mess on its hands. First people gamed the system. Second, even though the program was only meant to just verify that the name on the account was the real person it was labeled as, people took it to be an “endorsement” by Twitter, which created a bunch of other headaches. Given that, Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/928654369771356162">paused the program</a>.</p>
<p>It then spent <strong>years</strong> trying to figure out a way to open up verification to anyone without running into more problems. Indeed, Jack Dorsey made it clear that the plan has always been to “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/09/twitter-says-it-will-open-verification-to-everyone/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">open verification to everyone</a>.” But it turns out that, like dealing with spam and like dealing with content moderation, this is a <strong>much harder problem to solve at scale</strong> than most people think. It took Twitter almost four years to finally <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/relaunching-verification-and-whats-next">relaunch its verification program</a> in a much more limited fashion, which they hoped would allow the company to test out the new process in a way that would avoid abuse.</p>
<p>But even in that limited fashion the program ran into all sorts of problems. It had to <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-pauses-new-verifications-after-getting-flooded-with-requests/">shut down the program a week after launching it</a>, to sort out some of the issues. Then, it had to do so again 3 months later, after <a href="https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-hits-another-hiccup-with-public-requests-for-verification-pauses-r/605021/">finding more problems</a> with the program — specifically that fake accounts <a href="https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2021/08/twitter-brings-pause-to-its.html">were able to game the verification process</a>.</p>
<p>But, again, Twitter has been trying to do <strong><em>exactly</em></strong> what Musk’s fans insist he wants to do. And they’ve been doing so thoughtfully, and recognizing the challenges of actually doing it right, and realizing that it involves a lot of careful thought and tradeoffs.</p>
<p>Next, Musk said that Twitter DMs <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519469891455234048" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">should have end-to-end encryption</a>, and on this I totally agree. It should. And <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/after-weeks-hack-it-past-time-twitter-end-end-encrypt-direct-messages">lots of others</a> have been asking for this as well. Including… people <a href="https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/twitter-encryption-direct-messages-3469400" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">within Twitter</a> who have been working on it. But there are a <strong>lot</strong> of issues in making that actually work. It’s not something that you can just flip a switch on. There are some technical challenges… but also some social issues as well. All you have to do is look at how long it’s taken Facebook to do the same thing — in part because as soon as the company planned to do this, they were accused of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/21/meta-delays-encrypted-messages-on-facebook-and-instagram-to-2023">not caring about child safety</a>. Maybe, a privately owned Twitter, controlled by Musk just ignores all that, but there are real challenges here, and it’s not quite as easy as he seems to think. But, once again, it’s not an issue that’s never occurred to Twitter either.</p>
<p>Another recent Musk “idea” was that content moderation should be “politically neutral,” <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519415674111672325" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">which he (incorrectly) claims</a> “means upsetting the far right and far left equally.” For a guy who’s apparently so brilliant, you’d think he’d understand that there is no fundamental law that says (1) political viewpoints are distributed equally across a bell curve and (2) the differences between neutrality of inputs and neutrality of outputs. That is, <strong>every single study</strong> has shown that, if anything, Twitter’s content moderation practices <strong><em><a href="https://cnets.indiana.edu/blog/2021/09/24/probing-political-bias-on-twitter-with-drifter-bots/">greatly favor the right</a>.</em></strong> It’s just that (right now), the right is much, much, much more prone to <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/18/fascinating-new-study-suggests-again-that-twitter-moderation-is-biased-against-misinformation-not-conservatives/">sharing misinformation</a>. But if you have an unequal distribution of troublemakers, then a “neutral” policy will lead to unequal outcomes. Musk seems to want equal <strong>outcomes</strong> which literally would mean a <strong>non-neutral policy</strong> that gives much, much, much more leeway to troublemakers on the right. You can’t have equal outcomes with a neutral policy if the distribution is unequal.</p>
<p>Finally, the only other idea that Musk has publicly talked about is “open sourcing” the algorithm. At a first pass, this doesn’t make much sense, because it’s not like you can just put the code on Github and let everyone figure it out. It’s a lot more complicated than that. In order to release such code, you first have to make sure that it doesn’t reveal anything sensitive, or reveal any kind of vulnerabilities. The process for securing production code that was built in a closed source environment to make it open source… is not easy. Having dealt with multiple projects attempting to do that, it almost always fails.</p>
<p>In addition, if they were open sourcing the algorithm, the people it would benefit the most are the spammers and scammers — the very accounts Musk claims are his very first priority to stomp out. So once again, his stated plans contradict his other stated plans.</p>
<p>But… Twitter has actually again been making moves in this general direction all along anyway. Jack Dorsey, for years, has talked about why there should be “<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22275441/jack-dorsey-decentralized-app-store-algorithms">algorithmic choice</a>” on Twitter, where others can build up their own algorithms, and users can pick and choose whose algorithm to use. That’s not the same as open sourcing it, but actually seems like it would be a hell of a lot closer to what Musk actually wants — a more open platform where people aren’t limited to just Twitter’s content moderation choices. And, as Dorsey has pointed out, Twitter is also the only platform that allows you to turn off the algorithm if you don’t want it.</p>
<p>So, as we walk down the list of each of the “ideas” that Musk has publicly talked about, taking them in the most generous light, it’s difficult to argue that Twitter isn’t (1) already doing most of it, but in a more thoughtful and useful manner, (2) much further along in trying to meet those goals than any other social media platform, and (3) already explored, tested, and rejected some of his ideas as unworkable.</p>
<p>Indeed, about the only actual practical point that Musk seems to disagree with Twitter about is a few <strong>specific content moderation decisions</strong> that he believes should have gone in a different direction. And this is, as always, the fundamental disconnect in any conversation about content moderation. Every individual — especially those with no experience doing any actual moderation — insists that <em>they</em> have the perfect way to do content moderation: just get rid of the content <em>they</em> don’t want and keep the content they <em>do</em> want.</p>
<p>But the reality is that it’s ridiculously more complicated than that, especially at scale. And no company has internalized that more than Twitter (though, I expect many of the people who understand this the best will not be around very long).</p>
<p>Now, I’m sure that Musk fans (and Techdirt haters, some of whom overlap), will quickly rush out the same tired talking points that have already been debunked. Studies have shown, repeatedly, that, <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/18/fascinating-new-study-suggests-again-that-twitter-moderation-is-biased-against-misinformation-not-conservatives/">no, Twitter does not engage in politically biased moderation</a>. Indeed, the company had to put in place <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2019/04/29/content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-some-republican-politicians-are-indistinguishable-neo-nazis/">special safe space rules </a>to protect prominent Republican accounts that violated its rules. Lots of people will point to individual examples of specific moderation choices that they personally don’t like, but refuse to engage on why or how they happened. We’ve already explained the <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/18/fascinating-new-study-suggests-again-that-twitter-moderation-is-biased-against-misinformation-not-conservatives/">whole “Biden Laptop” thing</a> so it doesn’t help your case to bring it up again — not unless you’re able to explain why you’re not screaming about Twitter’s apparently anti-BLM bias for <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/16/content-moderation-case-study-twitter-removes-account-pointing-users-to-leaked-documents-obtained-hacking-collective-june-2020/">shutting down an account</a> for leaking internal police files.</p>
<p>The simple fact is that content moderation at scale <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/">is impossible to do well</a>, but Twitter actually does it better than most. That doesn’t mean you’ll agree with every decision. You won’t. People within the company don’t either. I don’t. I regularly call the company out for <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2018/04/20/how-twitter-suspended-account-one-our-commenters-offending-himself/">bad content moderation decisions</a>. But I actually recognize that it’s not because of bias or a desire to be censorial. It’s because it’s impossible for everyone to agree on all of these decisions, and one thing the company absolutely needs to do is to try to craft policies that can be understood by a large content moderation team, around the globe, who can make relatively quick decisions at an astounding speed. And that leads to (1) a lot of scenarios that don’t neatly fit inside or outside of a policy, and (2) a lot of edge case judgment calls.</p>
<p>Indeed, so much of what people on the outside wrongly assume is “inconsistent” enforcement of policy is actually the exact opposite. A company like Twitter can’t keep changing policy on every decision. It needs to craft policy and stick with it for a while. So, something like the Biden laptop story comes along and someone points out that it seems pretty similar to the Blueleaks case, so if the company is being consistent, shouldn’t it block the NY Post’s account as well? And you can make an argument as to how it’s different, but there’s also a strong argument as to how it’s the same. And, so then you begin to realize that not blocking the NY Post in that scenario would actually be the “inconsistent” approach, since the “hacked materials” policy existed, and had been enforced against others before. </p>
<p>Now, some people like to claim that the Biden laptop didn’t involve “hacked” materials, but that’s great to be able to say in retrospect. At the time, it was extremely unclear. And, again, as described above, Twitter has to make these decisions without the benefit of hindsight. Indeed, they need to be made without the benefit of very much time to investigate at all. </p>
<p>These are all massive challenges, and even if you disagree with <em>some</em> of the decisions, it’s simply wrong to assume that the decisions are driven by bias. I’ve worked with people doing content moderation work at tons of different internet companies. And they do everything they can to avoid allowing bias to enter into their work. That doesn’t mean it never does, because of course, everyone is human. But on the whole, it’s incredible how much effort people put into being truly agnostic about political views, even ridiculous or abhorrent ones. And Twitter, pretty much above all others, is incredibly good at taking the politics out of its trust and safety efforts.</p>
<p>So, again, once Musk owns Twitter, he is free to do whatever he wants. But it truly is incredible to look over his stated goals, and to look at what Twitter has actually done and what it’s trying to do, and to realize that… Twitter already is basically the company Musk insists it needs to be. Only it’s been doing so in a more thoughtful, more methodical, more careful manner than he seems interested in. And that means we seem much more likely to lose the company that actually has done the most towards enabling free speech in support of democratic values. And that would be unfortunate.</p>
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</div>Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation2022-04-15T17:08:10.027000ZMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-demonstrates-how-little-he-understands-about-content-moderation/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>Lots of talk yesterday as Elon Musk <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465922045641/tm2212748d1_sc13da.htm" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">made a hostile takeover bid</a> for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/25/on-elon-musk-and-free-speech/">we discussed before</a> in looking at how little Musk seemed to understand about free speech. But soon after the bid was made public, Musk went on stage at TED to be interviewed by Chris Anderson and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM&t=5220s" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">spoke more about his thoughts</a> on Twitter and content moderation.</p>
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<p>It’s worth watching, though mostly for how it shows how very, very little Musk understands about all of this. Indeed, what struck me about his views is how much they sound like what the techies who originally created social media said in the early days. And here’s the important bit: all of them eventually learned that their simplistic belief in how things should work <strong>does not work in reality</strong> and have spent the past few decades trying to iterate. And Musk ignores all of that while (somewhat hilariously) suggesting that all of those things can be figured out eventually, despite all of the hard work many, many overworked and underpaid people have been doing figuring exactly that out, only to be told by Musk he’s sure they’re doing it wrong.</p>
<p>Because these posts tend to attract very, very angry people who are very, very sure of themselves on this topic they have no experience with, I’d ask that before any of you scream in the comments, please read all of Prof. Kate Klonick’s seminal paper on the history of content moderation and free speech called <a href="https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1598-1670_Online.pdf" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">The New Governors.</a> It is difficult to take seriously anyone on this topic who is not aware of the history.</p>
<p>But, just for fun, let’s go through what Musk said. Anderson asks Musk why he wants to buy Twitter and Elon responds:</p>
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<p><em>Well, I think it’s really important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech. Twitter has become the de facto town square, so, it’s really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law. And one of the things I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm, and make any changes to people’s tweets — if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized — that should be made apparent so that anyone can see that action has been taken. So there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.</em></p>
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<p>First, again, this is the same sort of thing that early Twitter and Facebook and other platform people said in the early days. And then they found out it doesn’t work for reasons that will be discussed shortly. Second, Twitter is not the town square, and it’s a ridiculous analogy. The internet itself is the town square. Twitter is just one private shop in that town square with its own rules. </p>
<p>Anderson asks Musk why he wants to take over Twitter when Musk had apparently told him just last week that taking over the company would lead to everyone blaming him for everything that went wrong, and Musk responds that things will still go wrong and you have to expect that. And he’s correct, but what’s notable here is how he’s asking for a level of understanding that he refuses to provide Twitter itself. Twitter has spent 15 years experimenting and iterating its policies to deal with a variety of incredibly complex and difficult challenges, nuances, and trade-offs, and as Musk demonstrates later in this interview, he’s not even begun to think through any of them.</p>
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<p><em>My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.</em></p>
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<p>Again, this is the same sort of things that the founders of these websites said… until they had to deal with the actual challenges of running such platforms at scale. And, I should note, anyone who’s spent any time at all working on these issues knows that “maximally trusted” <strong>requires</strong> some level of moderation, because otherwise platforms fill up with spam and scams (more on that later) and are not trusted at all. There’s a reason these efforts are put under the banner of “trust & safety.”</p>
<p>Finally, the “public platform” is the internet. And trust is earned, but opening up a platform broadly does not inspire trust. Being broadly inclusive and trustworthy also requires recognizing that bad actors need to be dealt with in some form or another. This is what people have spent over a decade working on. And Musk acts like it’s a brand new issue. </p>
<p>And so then we get to the inevitable point of any such discussion in which Musk admits that of course some moderation is important.</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><strong><em>Chris Anderson: </em></strong><em>You’ve described yourself as a free speech absolutist. Does that mean that there’s literally nothing that people can’t say and it’s ok?</em></p>
<p><em><strong>Elon Musk: </strong>Well, I think, obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country it operates in. So, obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US. And of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>CA: </strong>Right. So you can’t incite people to violence, like direct incitement to violence… like, you can’t do the equivalent of crying fire in a movie theater, for example.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>EM: </strong>No, that would be a crime (laughs). It should be a crime.</em></p>
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<p>And all the free speech experts <a href="https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">scream out in unison</a> at the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/shouting-fire-crowded-theater-speech-regulation/621151/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">false notion</a> of “fire in a crowded theater.” </p>
<p>But just the fact that Musk (1) agrees with this sentiment and (2) thinks that it would obviously be a crime shows how little he actually understands about free speech or the laws governing free speech. As a reminder for those who don’t know, the “fire in a crowded theater” line was a non-binding rhetorical aside in a case that was used to lock up a protestor for handing out anti-war literature (not exactly free speech supportive), and the Supreme Court Justice who used the phrase basically denounced it in rulings soon after — and the case that it came from was effectively overturned a few decades later, in the new case that set up the <em>actual</em> standard that Anderson suggests about incitement to imminent lawless action (which, in most cases, crying fire in a theater absolutely would not reach).</p>
<p>Anderson then <em>tries</em> (but basically fails) to get into some of the nuance of content moderation. It would have been nice if he’d actually spoken to, well, anyone with any experience in the space, because his examples aren’t just laughable, they’re kind of pathetic.</p>
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<p><em><strong>CA</strong>:</em><strong> </strong><em>But here’s the challenge, because it’s such a nuanced between different things. So, there’s incitement to violence, that’s a no if it’s illegal. There’s hate speech, which some forms of hate speech are fine. I… hate… spinach.</em></p>
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<p>First of all, “I hate spinach” is not hate speech. I mean, of all the examples you could pull out… that’s not an example of hate speech (and we’ll leave aside Musk’s joke response, suggesting that if you cooked spinach right it’s good). But, much more importantly, here’s where Anderson and Elon could have confronted the <strong>actual</strong> issue which is that, in the US, <em>hate speech is entirely protected under the 1st Amendment.</em> And, we’ve explained why this is actually important and a good thing, because in places where hate speech is against the law, those laws are <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2015/10/28/hate-speech-laws-are-just-another-way-governments-to-punish-people-they-dont-like/">frequently abused</a> to silence government critics.</p>
<p>But keeping hate speech legal is very different from saying that any private website must keep that speech on the platform. Indeed, keeping hate speech on a private platform takes away from the supposed “trust” and “broadly inclusive” nature Musk claimed to want. That would be an interesting point to discuss with Musk — and instead we’re left discussing what’s the best way to cook spinach.</p>
<p>Anderson again sorta weakly tries to get more to the point, but still doesn’t seem to know enough about the actual challenges of content moderation to have a serious discussion of the issue:</p>
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<p><em><em><strong>CA:</strong></em> <em>So let’s say… here’s one tweet: ‘I hate politician X.’ Next tweet is ‘I wish politician X wasn’t alive.’ As some of us have said about Putin, right now for example. So that’s legitimate speech. Another tweet is ‘I wish Politician X wasn’t alive’ with a picture of their head with a gunsight over it. Or that plus their address. I mean at some point, someone has to make a decision as to which of those is not okay. Can an algorithm do that, or surely you need human judgment at some point.</em></em></p>
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<p>First of all, broadly speaking all of the above are protected under the 1st Amendment. Somewhat incredibly, his final hypothetical is one I can talk about directly, because <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2016/09/29/how-i-taught-jury-about-trolls-memes-4chan-helped-get-troll-out-jail/">I was an expert witness</a> in a case where a guy was facing criminal charges for literally Photoshopping gunsights over government officials, and the jury found him not guilty. But, also broadly speaking, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a private platform would not want to host that content. In part, that gets back to the “maximally trusted” and “broadly inclusive” points.</p>
<p>But, on top of that, none of those examples are <em>hate speech.</em> Hate speech is not, as Chris Anderson bizarrely seems to believe, saying “I hate X.” Hate speech is generally seen as forms of expression designed to harass, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or class of persons based on various characteristics about them (generally including things like race, religion, sexual identity, ethnicity, disability, etc.). The examples he raises are not, in fact, hate speech.</p>
<p>Either way, here’s where Elon shows how little <em>he</em> understands <em>any</em> of this, and how unfamiliar he is with all that’s happened in this space in the past two decades.</p>
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<p><em>In my view, Twitter should match the laws of the country. And, really, there’s an obligation to do that. But going beyond that, and having it be unclear who’s making what changes to who… to where… having tweets mysteriously be promoted and demoted without insight into what’s going on, having a black box algorithm promote some things and not other things, I think those things can be quite dangerous.</em></p>
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<p>Again, in the US, the laws say that such speech is protected, but that’s not a reasonable answer. We’ve gone through this before. Parler claimed it would only moderate speech that <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2020/07/01/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days/">violated the law</a> and then flipped out when it realized that people were getting on the site to mock Parler’s supporters or to post porn (which is also protected by the 1st Amendment). Simply saying that moderation should follow the law generally shows that one has never actually tried to moderate anything. Because it’s much more complicated than that, as Musk will implicitly admit later on in this interview, without the self-awareness to see how he’s contradicting himself.</p>
<p>There’s then a slightly more interesting discussion of open sourcing the algorithm, which is its own can of worms that I’m not sure Musk understands. I’m all for more transparency, and the ability for <em>competing algorithms</em> to be available for moderation, but open sourcing it is different and not as straightforward as Musk seems to imply. First of all, it’s often not the algorithm that is the issue. Second, algorithms that are built up in a proprietary stack are not so easy to just randomly “open source” without revealing all sorts of other stuff. Third, the biggest beneficiaries of open sourcing the ranking algorithm will be spammers (which is doubly amusing because in just a few moments Musk is going to whine about spammers). Open sourcing the algorithm will be most interesting to those looking to abuse and game the system to promote their own stuff.</p>
<p>We know this. We’ve seen it. There’s a reason why Google’s search algorithm has become more and more opaque over the years. Not because it’s trying to suppress people, but because the people who were most interested in understanding how it all worked were search engine spammers. Open sourcing the Twitter algorithm would do the same thing.</p>
<p>Chris then gets back to the moderation process (again in a slightly confused way about how Twitter trust & safety actually works), pointing out that “the algorithm” is probably less of an issue than all the human moderators, leading Musk to give a very long pause before stumbling through a bit of a word-salad response:</p>
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<p><em>Well, I…I… I think we would want to err on the side… if in doubt, let… let… let the speech… let it exist. It would have… if it’s.. uh… a gray area, I would say, l would say let the tweet exist. But… obviously… in a case where perhaps there’s a lot of controversy where perhaps you’d not want to necessarily promote that tweet, you know… so…so… so… I’m not saying I have all the answers here, but I do think that we want to be very reluctant to delete things and be very cautious with permanent bans. I think time outs are better than permanent bans. </em></p>
<p><em>But just in general, like I said, it won’t be perfect but I think we want to really have the perception and reality that speech is as free as is reasonably possible and a good sign as to whether there is free speech, is ‘is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like.’ And if that is the case, then you have free speech. And it’s damn annoying when someone you don’t like says something you don’t like. That is a sign of a healthy, functioning free speech situation.</em></p>
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<p>Again, so much to unpack here. First off, that approach of “when in doubt, let it exist” has almost always been the default position of the major social media companies from the beginning. Again, it’s important to go back to things like Klonick’s paper which describes all this. It’s just that over time anyone who’s done this quickly learns that fuzzy standards like “when in doubt” don’t work at all, especially at scale. You need specific rules that can be easily understood and rolled out to thousands of moderators around the world. Rules that can take into account local laws, local contexts, local customs. It’s not nearly as simple as Musk makes it out to be.</p>
<p>Indeed, to get to the spot that we’re in now, basically all of these companies started with that same premise, realized it wasn’t workable, and then iterated. And Musk is basically saying “I have a brilliant idea: let’s go back to step 1 and pretend none of the things experts in this space have learned over the past decade actually happened.”</p>
<p>And, again, Twitter and Facebook — just as Musk claims he wants — tend to lean towards time outs over permanent bans, but both recognize that malicious actors eventually will just keep trying, so some people you will have to ban. But Musk pretends like this is some deep wisdom when every website with any moderation at all knew this ages ago. Including Twitter.</p>
<p>Second, his definition of free speech is utter nonsense (and ridiculously got a big applause from the audience). That’s not the definition of free speech and if it is, then Twitter already has that. Tons of people I dislike are allowed to say things I dislike. You see that all over Twitter. But that’s not a reasonable or enforceable standard at all without context. The problem is not “someone I dislike saying something I dislike” the problem is spam, abuse, harassment, threats of violence, dangerously misleading false information, and more. Musk not understanding any of that is just a representation of how little he understands this topic.</p>
<p>Anderson then asks Musk about what changes he would make to Twitter, leading Musk to basically contradict <strong>everything he just said</strong> and go straight to banning speech on Twitter:</p>
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<p><em>Frankly, the top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. You know, I think, these influence… they make the product much worse. </em></p>
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<p>Um, nearly all of those are legal (the scam ones are a bit more hazy there, but the spam ones are legal speech). And just the fact that he acknowledges that they make the product much worse underlines how confused he is about everything else. Dealing with the things that “make the product much worse” is the underlying point of any trust & safety content moderation program — and tons and tons of work, and research, and testing have gone into how Twitter (and every other platform) tries to manage those things, and they all pretty much end up at the same place.</p>
<p>To deal with the spam and the scams and the things that “make the product much worse” you have to have rules, and you have to have enforcement that deals with the people who break the rules, meaning that you have to have people knowledgeable about content moderation and who are able to iterate and adjust, especially in the face of malicious actors trying to game the system.</p>
<p>But it’s quite incredible for him to say “pretty much leave it up if it’s legal” one moment, and the next moment say his top priority is to get rid of spam. Spam is legal.</p>
<p>And, again, as anyone who has lived through (or read up on) the history of content moderation knows, platforms all went through this exact process. The process that Musk thinks no one has actually done. They all started with a fundamental default towards allowing more speech and moderating less. And they all realized over time that it’s a lot more nuanced than that.</p>
<p>They all realized that there are massive trade-offs to <strong>every</strong> decision, but that some decisions still need to be made in order to stop “making the product worse” and to figure out ways to build “maximal trust” and to be “broadly inclusive.” In other words, for all of Musk’s complaining, Twitter has already done all the work he seems to pretend it hasn’t done. And his “solution” is to go back to square one while ignoring all the people who learned about the pitfalls, challenges, nuances, and trade-offs of the various approaches to dealing with these things… and to pretend that no one has done any work in this area.</p>
<p>Every time I post about this, Musk’s fans get angry and insist I couldn’t possibly understand this better than Musk. And, again, I actually really admire Musk’s ability to present visions and get the companies he’s run to achieve those visions. But dealing with human speech isn’t about building a car, a robot, a tunnel, or a rocket ship. It’s about dealing with human beings, human nature, and society.</p>
<p>None of this is to say that, if Musk does succeed in the bid, he doesn’t have the right to make these massive steps back to square one. Of course he has every right to make those mistakes. But it would be a disappointing move for Twitter, a company that has been more thoughtful, more careful, and more advanced than many other companies in this space. And it would likely wipe out the important institutional knowledge around all of this that has been so helpful.</p>
<p>I know that the narrative — which Musk has apparently bought into — is that Twitter’s content moderation efforts are targeted at stifling conservatives. There is, yet again, no actual evidence to support this. If anything, Twitter and Facebook have bent over backwards to be extra accommodating to those pushing the boundaries in order to use Twitter mainly as a platform to rile up those they dislike. But, from knowing how much effort Twitter has actually put into understanding interventions and how to build a trustworthy platform, I fear that what Musk would do with it would be a massive step backwards and a general loss for the world.</p>
<p>Incredibly, there’s a pretty good analogy to all of this earlier in that video. At the beginning, Anderson plays a snippet of a taped interview he did with Musk a week ago (when they weren’t sure if he’d be able to attend in person). And in that interview, Anderson points out that Musk predicted to Anderson five years ago that Tesla would have full self-driving working that year, and it obviously has not come to pass. Musk jokes about how he’s not always right, and explains that he’s only now realized that just how hard a problem driverless artificial intelligence is, and he talks about how every time it seems to be moving forward it hits an unexpected ceiling.</p>
<p>The simple fact is that dealing with human nature and human communication is much, much, much more complex than teaching a car how to drive by itself. And there is no perfect solution. There is no “congrats, we got there” moment in content moderation. Because humans are complex and ever-changing. And content moderation on a platform like Twitter is about recognizing that complexity and figuring out ways to deal with it. But Musk seems to be treating it as if it’s the same sort of challenge as self-driving — where if you just throw enough ideas at it you’ll magically fix it. But, even worse than that, he doesn’t realize that the people who have actually worked in this field for years have been making the kind of progress he talked about with self-driving cars — getting the curve to move in the right direction, before hitting some sort of ceiling. And Musk wants to take them all the way back to the ground floor for no reason other than he doesn’t seem to recognize that any of the work that’s already been done.</p>
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</div>Canadian Vaccine Protesters Are Confused About the Law, Too2022-02-24T17:45:13.949000ZKevinhttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/683399180/0/loweringthebar~Canadian-Vaccine-Protesters-Are-Confused-About-the-Law-Too.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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SharedProphet
<a href="https://sharedprophet.newsblur.com/story/canadian-vaccine-pro/6594:e7f676">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6594.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Lowering the Bar.</b>
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<p>You will be surprised to learn that some of the people involved in the “Freedom Convoy,” a protest against Canada’s attempt to limit the freedom of the virus that causes COVID-19, are confused about more than just science.</p>
<p>The first example of this comes from <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/tamara-lich-bail-hearing-february-19-1.6358307">the CBC, which reported this week</a> on the bail hearing for Tamara Lich, one of the protest’s organizers. Lich and some other participants have been arrested and charged with what we would probably call “incitement to riot” but Canada more politely calls “counselling to commit mischief.” (The CBC said that “[b]efore her arrest, Lich told journalists she wasn’t concerned about being arrested,” which wasn’t the first and won’t be the last thing she’s wrong about.)</p>
<p>Prosecutors argued bail for Lich should be denied because she’s already proven that she “has no respect for the law” and that she and her husband and/or their associates have resources that would allow her to keep stirring up trouble if released. The Liches said they have virtually no assets and have not done anything wrong anyway.</p>
<p>I guess I should say something at this point to acknowledge that these people are called “the Liches,” something the nerds among you are surely all agog about. As you know, a “lich” is a <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/lich">type of undead creature that may be encountered while playing <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em></a>, although in my experience such encounters do not involve fighting but rather fleeing in panic and later searching local towns for vendors of replacement undergarments. (I of course gained this experience while researching my dissertation on the habits of the nerd population, not as a member of it.) <em><a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lich">Lich</a> </em>was an Old English word for “corpse,” but through fiction and especially <em>D&D</em>-style gaming has come to mean the animated corpse of a powerful evil wizard or sorcerer.</p>
<p>Here, though, it is just the last name of some Canadian goofball.</p>
<p>Two of them, actually, because Tamara Lich’s husband Dwayne—definitely not a name I would have associated with a lich before today—was also present for the hearing. Dwayne was there because he was proposing to act as “surety,” meaning he would have to report if his wife jumped bail. But the court had some questions about whether he would be an appropriate surety, given that he had been in Ottawa during the protest his wife had organized. The report doesn’t say whether he too had been actively protesting, but the court apparently suspected maybe he was doing more than helping his protest-organizing wife with her luggage.</p>
<p>Mr. Lich claimed he did not agree with the strategy of trying to blockade downtown Ottawa until the government stops persecuting the virus, but also said he didn’t see anything wrong with it. According to the CBC, he “equat[ed] the blockades to a large traffic jam or parked cars in a snow storm,” neither of which is a situation that people bring about intentionally to force other people to do something. “I don’t see no guns,” Lich told the court, placing himself mentally back at the scene of the protest. “I don’t see anything criminal as far as I can see. I just see trucks parked.” And doesn’t a person have a right to park his truck wherever he wants, and for as long as he wants, regardless of whether that might inconvenience others?</p>
<p>Well, no. And this is true even under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which Lich invoked at the hearing, although he is Canadian:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>[Lich] questioned whether the Emergencies Act … was implemented legally, at times confusing the numbered amendments found in the U.S. Constitution with Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.</p><p>“Honestly? I thought it was a peaceful protest and based on my first amendment, I thought that was part of our rights,” he told the court.</p><p>“What do you mean, first amendment? What’s that?” Judge Julie Bourgeois asked him.</p><p>“I don’t know. I don’t know politics. I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t supportive of the blockade or the whatever, but I didn’t realize that it was criminal to do what they were doing. I thought it was part of our freedoms to be able to do stuff like that.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Turns out <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms">Canada does have something similar to the First Amendment</a>, and a bunch of other laws too. Those are the ones that apply in Canada. Of course Lich had the right general idea here (though the wrong answer), but citing the wrong country’s laws tends to make people think that maybe you haven’t really done your homework. </p>
<p>Whether this error contributed to the result or not, <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2005549635920">the court denied bail</a>.</p>
<p>The second example was reported by <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://twitter.com/althiaraj/status/1494726736319324160">Althia Raj on Twitter</a> and also by <a href="http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/0/loweringthebar/~https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-for-convoy-protesters-a-very-bad-day-broadcast-on-facebook-live/"><em>The Globe and Mail</em>.</a> Both were reporting comments made on Facebook Live by Pat King, another protest organizer who was arrested this week. In fact, he was arrested during one of his video streams. “They’ve cornered me,” he told viewers, as if he had been engaged in a dramatic escape attempt instead of sitting in a truck goofing around on Facebook. But cornered him they had.</p>
<p>Thankfully, this was only after he had taken the opportunity to provide some legal advice to his fellow protesters. And what glorious legal advice it was. King told viewers that it was time to regroup (not retreat, he made clear), and said that if they were confronted by police while regrouping they should wave a white shirt or white underpants at the officers. “They cannot touch you if you’re holding a white flag,” he declared. “It’s international law.”</p>
<p>This, of course, is not true. Under international law, waving your underpants at a police officer only confers immunity if the country in question has signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (which Canada has not) or if the underpants have gold fringe down the sides. Or maybe that’s maritime law, I don’t know. And I might be wrong. I certainly don’t want to discourage any anti-vaccine protesters from trying this. Also, anyone who sees them trying it should definitely get it on video and post that online immediately. Whether it works or not, it will definitely be educational. </p>
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‘The Age of AI’ advances a larger political and corporate agenda.<br><br><img src="https://prospect.org/downloads/17263/download/ND21%20Whittaker-Suchman.jpeg?cb=2453342ee267685544e111e7618379c5" />The Night The United States Supreme Court Cancelled Law2021-09-22T20:48:47.785000ZCathy Gellishttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~3/XHzvZpFSqvE/night-united-states-supreme-court-cancelled-law.shtml<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>
Last week's <a href="https://apnews.com/article/health-amy-coney-barrett-courts-coronavirus-pandemic-us-supreme-court-73389c829dc170751a95c5c1d4fc7ca6">news</a> about Justice Barrett fretting about the Supreme Court being seen as partisan calls to mind the old joke about a defendant on trial for murdering his parents and begging the court for mercy because he's an orphan. If you've created the mess you find yourself in, you have no one to blame but yourself.
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Nevertheless, there is credence to her protest (which <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/scotus-allowing-texas-ban-abortions-bad-political-justice/story?id=79973845">other</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/justice-clarence-thomas/2021/09/16/d2ddc1ba-1714-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html">justices</a> have since echoed) that the way the Court has acted recently is not actually "partisan." After all, Republican-appointed Justice Roberts has been frequently joining the Democrat-appointed justices of late, which we wouldn't expect if political loyalties were all that were at the root of all Supreme Court actions. As Justice Barrett herself suggests, to understand what the Court has been doing of late, we need to look deeper:
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<em>“To say the court’s reasoning is flawed is different from saying the court is acting in a partisan manner,” said Barrett[.] “I think we need to evaluate what the court is doing on its own terms.”</em>
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So let's do what she suggests and evaluate the Court's actions on its own terms. Because what we'll find is even worse than partisanship.
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Justice Barrett argues that what the public is seeing is merely a difference in "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-political-hacks/2021/09/13/5beae2b6-14c3-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html">judicial philosophies</a>," as if the prevalent splits among justices are but two sides of the same coin. But what we are seeing from this Court is hardly a case of the justices simply <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/12/roberts.statement/">calling balls and strikes</a> differently according to their respective vantagepoints. Instead we are seeing the majority deploy a "judicial philosophy" willing if not eager to erode the previously stalwart foundations upon which American law has historically depended. It is a philosophy of little more than legal nihilism. And it represents a profound change in the nature of the Court of enormous if not cataclysmic consequence.
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Trouble has been brewing for some time now, with the majority's increasing use of its "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/09/03/shadow-docket-elena-kagan-abortion/">shadow docket</a>" to wield a heavy hand on legal questions without any meaningful opportunity for briefing or substantive argument by anyone affected. Instead of carefully weighing the pros and cons of the particular issue raised by the case before them in an open and transparent way, as the Court traditionally has on matters of such significance, they are instead making ad hoc and inconsistent procedural decisions behind the scenes, despite the fact that these sorts of decisions are having huge practical effect and impacting people's rights just as much they would in any case brought before them for their full and reasoned review.
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This problematic practice culminated a few weeks ago with its rushed, unsigned, barely two-page, late-night <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a24_8759.pdf">order</a> in <em>Whole Women's Health v. Jackson</em>, when the majority declined to exercise its procedural powers to stop Texas's SB8, a facially unconstitutional law that offended the Constitution in almost every way a law possibly could, from coming into force. As a result, rather than upholding the Constitution, or protecting the public from a wayward state actor, or even acting consistently with its own principles of jurisprudence, that slim majority, with only a few, ill-supported sentences, casually abdicated the Court's role as a protector of liberty and ruled instead as arbitrary, unaccountable autocrats.
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There are at least two key reasons why the majority's behavior here is so deserving of such excoriation. The first relates to the specious way the majority misapplied procedural rules as convenient cover for producing substantively consequential outcomes, apparently deliberately, although even if it had been unintentionally it would still be a problem. Procedural rules exist to help ensure that justice can be meted out timely and fairly. While it's true that in this case the Supreme Court found itself in the position of having to clean up the mess caused by the Fifth Circuit's own procedural hijinks – which had abruptly, and dubiously, snatched the Texas statute away from the district court's established review process and thus made it practically impossible for it to act before the law was supposed to go into effect – the Supreme Court's astonishing refusal to take corrective action is what made this review ultimately impossible. And it did it by turning those very same procedural rules designed to help administer justice into outright obstacles obstructing it, opting instead to hide behind them with nothing more than a brief prevarication explaining why these rules somehow, and suddenly, had made it, the most powerful court in the land, unusually powerless to prevent a clearly unconstitutional law from going into effect.
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In failing to act the Court also unilaterally overruled the long-standing judicial preference in American courts for preserving the status quo when there is a reasonable chance of a law potentially causing an improper injury before the matter has been able to receive appropriate review. And not only did the Court ignore that concern, but it all but invited those injuries to occur. The statute in question had basically walked up to several areas of settled precedent protecting constitutional rights and proverbially punched them all in the nose, openly daring the Supreme Court to come after it. Yet, shockingly, the majority declined to.
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This refusal to defend the Court's own precedents was yet another way the majority's behavior was aberrant and destructive. Precedent is what gives the law stability, because once the Court has spoken we can all know where we stand. Sure, new cases will come up and be litigated, but the questions then will be about if and how precedent applies to the new situation. Sometimes this inquiry may result in the narrowing or limiting a precedent's reach, but precedent has historically been outright nullified only on the rarest of occasions and only when there has been a material change in the circumstances upon which the Court's reasoning had rested, like a new statute, a new Constitutional amendment (rare), or some other fundamental shift in society prompting a second look by the Court.
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And even then the Court's practice has not been to simply ignore or overturn its previous rulings; rather, it would generally issue decisions to explain what holdings were being revisited, and why, so that the new decisions could take on the same weight of recognized authority the previous precedent once had. But that standard went out the window on that Thursday night when it issued the <em>Whole Women's Health</em> order. With this order it signaled that it is happy to cavalierly trash the Court's previous rulings, and, worse, with no explanation. While reasonable minds may disagree about the wisdom of a particular Court decision, everyone should be able to read its analysis to understand how the Court arrived at its conclusion. But there is nothing here in this order to legitimize the Court's sudden and drastic rejection of all the past precedent the statute implicated. Worse, in so rejecting it, it has told the world that we can never know what the law is, because it can change instantly, depending entirely on the majority's mood of that moment.
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Such a reality is untenable. No matter what you think of the Texas statute, even if you believe in or support its policy goals, what the Supreme Court did on this Thursday night should still strike fear in your heart. Because the impact of what it did transcends any particular law or policy. Not only did it undermine its own esteem as an institution, but it made America unsustainable, a hollowed-out Potemkin Village of abandoned constitutional principle, and Americans no better off than the wretched citizens of the ancient feudal empire that inspired the story.
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What happened on that Thursday night was the catastrophic undermining of not only the Court's own legitimacy but the legitimacy of the entire American legal system. It left all our laws and freedoms, and even the very adjudication of these questions, subject only to the capricious whim of the handful of people with enough power to unilaterally decree, with no argument, consideration, or any need to justify themselves, how we must live our lives. We might as well replace their black robes with crimson ermine and sit them on thrones, so at least we can all see and acknowledge the sheer unchecked power they now rule us with.
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This is not how our constitutional order has worked. It is not how our constitutional order <em>can</em> work. Yes, courts have always had lots of power. And the Supreme Court in particular has always had an enormous amount of power to shape our legal world. But there were always apparent rules tempering this power. Which meant that such things as reason, persuasion, equitable procedure, predictable precedent, transparency, and notions of fair play could function as guiding pillars within which advocacy took place so that, win or lose, we all could believe in the justice of the result. But not anymore. With this order all those basic tenets have now been bulldozed. Even any sort of reasonable standard for injunctive relief is out the window. As Justice Kagan noted in her dissent, the Court's unconstrained behavior has become increasingly "unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend." In other words: our law has itself become lawless.
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Supreme Court justices are of course human beings and therefore fallible, and the Supreme Court itself is a human institution that necessarily has to evolve as the society it serves does as well. But the concern is not that the Supreme Court may be evolving, because evolution is one thing; radically altering the operation of the Court practically overnight is another. And what the majority did can hardly be explained away as mere mistake, as in, "Oops, five justices' pens slipped and they accidentally repudiated decades if not centuries of past practice and precedent." But when even the most generous view of what happened is incompetence it severely undermines the esteem of the institution and those who inhabit it.
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Nor can we say it's simply a matter of one bad decision. Bad decisions have happened before, and while it's never good when they do, as long as the system still works they can eventually be overcome. But what happened here represented a fundamental shift in the way the Court exercises its power, from one of predictable certainty to one of subjective judicial impulse, and there's no overcoming that change.
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How could we? For those of us connected to the legal profession, what power would we still possess as practitioners to influence the cause of justice in this new system? What skills could we still exercise? How could we continue to play our own constitutional role in furthering justice in the courts when everything we were taught in law school about the American legal system has just suddenly been rendered moot?
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Yes, life will go on for most tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. But for how long can we deceive ourselves that everything remains normal when the new normal is anything but? When the Supreme Court can so dramatically change our understanding of the law and the scope and dimension of our rights with little more than a snap of its fingers, how are we to live in a society predicated on the rule of law and guaranteed rights? How can we even tell ourselves that we are? We're like the coyote that has run off the cliff, and sooner or later we're going to notice that there is nothing supporting us anymore. And then where will we be?
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</div><img alt="" height="1" src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/XHzvZpFSqvE" width="1" />WORDS ADDED TO SPELL CHECK TODAY: flabbergastingly, flabbers, gasted, gast, gasting2021-09-17T14:55:54.979000Zhttp://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3799<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>To whom it may concern,</p><p>This week we withdrew our daughter from the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts. I feel it is important share my reasoning with you and anyone else who will listen.</p><p>I know your organization isn't in the business of second guessing government directives, but you <em>are</em> supposed to be in the business of protecting the children entrusted to your care. Unfortunately, the <a href="https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/post.jupitered.com/v1/p80542713/1/2089696915/2021-2022_TCA_A_Health_Plan_(1).pdf">2021-2022 Health Plan</a> you recently released will do the opposite, exposing students, faculty, and their families to unnecessary risk.</p><p>We know now that transmission of SARS-CoV-2 mostly happens when people breathe the air that infectious carriers have exhaled, and that touching contaminated surfaces isn’t a significant risk if hands are washed regularly. Per the CDC:</p><blockquote><p>Current evidence strongly suggests <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html">transmission from contaminated surfaces</a> does not contribute substantially to new infections.<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-1" id="footnote-anchor-1">1</a></p></blockquote><p>We also know that the virus spreads indoors further than 6 feet; this initial guideline was based on a theory that did not account for aerosolized droplets which can hang in the air for hours. CDC again:</p><blockquote><p>Although infections through inhalation at distances greater than six feet from an infectious source are less likely than at closer distances, the phenomenon has been repeatedly documented under certain preventable circumstances. These transmission events have involved the presence of an infectious person exhaling virus indoors for an extended time (more than 15 minutes and in some cases hours) leading to virus concentrations in the air space sufficient to transmit infections to people more than 6 feet away, and in some cases to people who have passed through that space soon after the infectious person left.<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-2" id="footnote-anchor-2">2</a></p></blockquote><p>We also know that:</p><ul><li><p>children under 12 (most students below 7th grade at the start of the year) are not yet approved to be vaccinated for COVID-19</p></li><li><p>SARS-CoV-2 can be spread by asymptomatic carriers, and indeed that happens more often among children and adolescents<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-3" id="footnote-anchor-3">3</a></p></li><li><p>the delta variant, the current dominant strain responsible for spiking infections in the US, spreads significantly more easily than the strains we encountered last year<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-4" id="footnote-anchor-4">4</a></p></li></ul><p>So how did you decide to protect your students and staff? Given that you chose not to mandate masking to comply with GA-36, and that Texas House Bill 1468, providing for remote learning this year, was not passed,<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-5" id="footnote-anchor-5">5</a> what <em>are</em> you doing?</p><p>(Unless otherwise noted, the rest of the quotes here come from Texas Center for Arts + Academics 2021-2022 Health Plan, August 9, 2021, <a href="https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/post.jupitered.com/v1/p80542713/1/2089696915/2021-2022_TCA_A_Health_Plan_(1).pdf">https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/post.jupitered.com/v1/p80542713/1/2089696915/2021-2022_TCA_A_Health_Plan_(1).pdf</a>.)</p><blockquote><p><strong>Four Core Practices</strong></p><ol><li><p>Symptom Self-Screening for Students, Staff, and Visitors</p></li><li><p>Vigilant Hand Washing and Sanitizing</p></li><li><p>Frequent Disinfection of High Touch Areas</p></li><li><p>Face coverings highly recommended, but not required</p></li></ol></blockquote><p>Ok, hand washing is good. Face coverings recommended, good if that’s the best you can do. But these steps are not that useful against SARS-CoV-2.</p><p>Remember, it is airborne and spread (especially with children) by asymptomatic carriers. Symptom screening was inadequate with the <em>original</em> iteration of SARS-CoV-2, because infected people were contagious before the onset of symptoms. It’s especially inadequate with young people, who are more likely to exhibit no symptoms, or only mild symptoms which they can easily hide. And with the delta variant the cost of failing to catch and isolate an infection early is greater than before in terms of number of infections.</p><p>Based on these practices, you <em>will</em> have outbreaks. So the questions become, how prevalent will they be, and what will you do when they happen?</p><blockquote><p><strong>Individuals Confirmed or Suspected with COVID-19</strong></p><ol><li><p>Any individuals who themselves either: (a) are test-confirmed to have COVID-19; or (b) experience the symptoms of COVID-19 must stay at home throughout the infection period, and cannot return to campus until the conditions for campus re-entry have been met:</p></li></ol><p>[…]</p><p><strong>TCA+A Practices to Respond to a Test-Confirmed Case in the School</strong></p><ol><li><p>If an individual who has been on campus is test-confirmed to have COVID-19, the campus will notify the Tarrant County Health department in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations, including confidentiality requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).</p></li><li><p>Consistent with school notification requirements for other communicable diseases, and consistent with legal confidentiality requirements, TCA+A will notify all teachers, staff, and families of all students in the school if a test-confirmed COVID-19 case is identified among students, teachers, or staff.</p></li><li><p>The campus nurse and administrative team will determine all students who have been in close contact with the identified individual and notify all identified families.</p><ul><li><p>Students identified as within close contact <strong>may </strong>[emphasis added] quarantine until all return to campus protocols are met.</p></li></ul></li></ol><p>[…]</p><p><strong>Additional Procedures</strong></p><ol><li><p>Teachers will maintain a seating chart and track students within six[ ]feet of each other in case of needed quarantine.</p></li><li><p>TCA+A will provide optional COVID-19 rapid tests for all employees as requested.</p></li></ol></blockquote><p>Providing tests is great, but the six feet number is meaningless! It seems the answer to the earlier questions is that infections will be quite prevalent, and when they happen you will not do enough to keep them from spreading.</p><p>You <em>will</em> have cases that will never be confirmed by tests (and thus will not trigger your contact tracing protocols) but will spread to others. Even when you do get confirmed-positive cases, your contact tracing will be useless if it only includes students sitting within six feet of that person in class. What about where they eat lunch? What about everyone who has walked through a room or hallway they were in, especially if they weren’t wearing a mask?</p><p>CDC:</p><blockquote><p>Per published reports, factors that increase the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection under these circumstances include:</p><ul><li><p><strong>Enclosed spaces with inadequate ventilation or air handling </strong>within which the concentration of exhaled respiratory fluids, especially very fine droplets and aerosol particles, can build-up in the air space.</p></li><li><p><strong>Increased exhalation</strong> of respiratory fluids if the infectious person is engaged in physical exertion or raises their voice (e.g., <strong>exercising </strong>[such as dance, PE…], <strong>shouting</strong> [or projecting your voice so an audience can hear you in theatre…], <strong>singing</strong> [as you do in choir practice…]).</p></li><li><p><strong>Prolonged exposure</strong> to these conditions, typically more than 15 minutes.<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-6" id="footnote-anchor-6">6</a></p></li></ul></blockquote><p>All of these factors will be prevalent throughout your schools, and among students too young to be vaccinated (and likely surrounded by unvaccinated adults in their home life). <em>You teach dance, theatre, and multiple choirs.</em> Every practice session will be a potential super-spreader event. And you are doing effectively nothing to prevent that.</p><p>What could you do, though, beyond what you’ve already committed to? Well, we can contrast your approach with an actual successful reopening plan executed in San Diego:</p><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/kprather88/status/1424796471711264768?s=20" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @kprather88" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/kprather88.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Kimberly Prather, Ph.D. </span><span class="tweet-author">@kprather88</span></div>0. Decided to make a thread on what we have done <span class="tweet-fake-link">@UCSanDiego</span> to create a safe University environment during COVID-19. I was also involved in opening <span class="tweet-fake-link">@sdschools</span>. In both cases, we were able to open and remain open. (1/)<div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">August 9th 2021</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">583</span> Retweets</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">1,207</span> Likes</span></div></a></div><p>The first couple steps are out because you don’t want to ruffle the feathers of the pro-COVID party in control of this state, but beyond that we have:</p><blockquote><p>3a. Air ventilation-bring in as much outside air as you can thru the HVAC system. Avoid re-circulating air. Important to measure CO2 levels when classes are running-w/ people present. Levels need to be <800 ppm. ARANET4 is a great sensor that can be used to assess.</p><p>3b. Fresh outdoor air is 415 ppm so this is as low as possible and suggests one is breathing fresh air. Higher levels mean you are breathing other people's breath which can contain virus. This virus released in the breath of infectious people. 1000x more released w/ Delta</p><p>4a. Air filtration: Two types: 1) upgrade HVAC filters to MERV13. Make sure they fit well and there are no gaps/leaks. 2) supplement and add standalone HEPA filters (simple filtration—no ionizers or other bells and whistles) throughout big rooms.</p><p>4b. Reduces concentration of all aerosols and provides overall cleaner air (good!). Best to run 2 or 3 on lower speeds so they are more quiet. There are tests for quietness—see Marwa Zaatari on Twitter.</p><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/marwa_zaatari/status/1378476538463547392" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @marwa_zaatari" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/marwa_zaatari.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Marwa Zaatari </span><span class="tweet-author">@marwa_zaatari</span></div><span class="tweet-fake-link">@JollySnowflk</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@NastyOldWomyn</span> Check the graph below:
- Start by the area of the room to be cleaned (y axis)
- Consider cost (x axis) and noise (look at color of the dot; <55 db at highest setting is probably a good level)
colors = noise level expressed in db (decibel) <img alt="Image" class="tweet-photo" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FEyFUnZDVcAEN1xr.jpg" /><div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">April 3rd 2021</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">18</span> Retweets</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">77</span> Likes</span></div></a></div><p>4c. To build inexpensive air filters-see Rich Corsi <a href="https://twitter.com/CorsIAQ">@corsiAQ</a>, Jim Rosenthal <a href="https://twitter.com/JimRosenthal4">@jimrosenthal4</a>, David Elfstrom <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidElfstrom">@davidelfstrom</a>—all are on Twitter-great info-some below including cost estimate.</p><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/JimRosenthal4/status/1324064868723470337?s=20" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @JimRosenthal4" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/JimRosenthal4.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Jim Rosenthal </span><span class="tweet-author">@JimRosenthal4</span></div>An improvement to the Box Fan and MERV 13 Filter air cleaner. Thoughts and comments welcome:
<a class="tweet-url" href="https://www.texairfilters.com/how-to-improve-the-efficiency-of-the-box-fan-and-merv-13-filter-air-cleaner/" target="_blank">texairfilters.com/how-to-improve…</a>
<span class="tweet-fake-link">@nikomer75</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@clarkvangilder</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@HuffmanLabDU</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@neil_comparetto</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@JohnSemmelhack</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@energysmartohio</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@akm5376</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@CorsIAQ</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@jljcolorado</span><a class="expanded-link" href="https://www.texairfilters.com/how-to-improve-the-efficiency-of-the-box-fan-and-merv-13-filter-air-cleaner/" target="_blank"><img class="expanded-link-img" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,h_314,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdea1690a-eae7-4ced-8319-5bfde7d32b84_1024x986.jpeg" /><span class="expanded-link-title">How to Improve the Efficiency of the “Box Fan and MERV 13 Filter” Air Cleaner</span><span class="expanded-link-description">By Jim Rosenthal Several months ago I wrote two articles for this site on the “Box Fan and MERV 13 Filter” air cleaner. They have been viewed over 30,000 times and many people have built these air cleaners following the simple directions in the articles. They are easy to construct, inexpensive and e…</span><span class="expanded-link-domain">texairfilters.com</span></a><div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">November 4th 2020</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">87</span> Retweets</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">196</span> Likes</span></div></a></div><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/CorsIAQ/status/1362618407066030083?s=20" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @CorsIAQ" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/CorsIAQ.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Dr. Richard Corsi </span><span class="tweet-author">@CorsIAQ</span></div>Portable HEPA Filter Systems.
1/ The cost of retrofitting EVERY public school classroom in the entire US w/ a portable HEPA air filter w/ CADR = 300 cfm is approximately $1 billion w/ recurring cost of about $300M/yr for replacement filters. To be clear, EVERY single classroom.<div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">February 19th 2021</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">1,380</span> Retweets</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">3,577</span> Likes</span></div></a></div><p>5. Wastewater testing. We tested wastewater in all buildings <a href="https://twitter.com/UCSanDiego">@UCSanDiego</a>—other Universities did this too. This gives you a heads up before big outbreaks occur. When a building tests positive, everyone is alerted in that building and told to be tested.</p><p>6. Testing is key—PCR most common. There are really cheap rapid antigen tests that only cost $5 per test and only come up positive when the individual is infectious! Attached is article on the rapid/cheap tests developed by <a href="https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab">@michaelmina_lab</a></p><p><a href="https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/378975113857960">https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/378975113857960</a></p><p>7. <a href="https://twitter.com/UCSanDiego">@UCSanDiego</a> hired student "ambassadors" to help insure people were adhering to "rules"—wearing masks, avoiding crowds, etc. Enlisting a peer cohort (who wore bright yellow T-shirts) to help spread the word helped get important buy-in.</p><p>[…]</p><p>9. Tracing—when someone tested positive, we did tracing/testing of contacts.</p><p>10. Post signs reminding people to wear masks, etc.</p><p>11. Here is <a href="https://twitter.com/UCSanDiego">@UCSanDiego</a> dashboard with lots of info-open and transparent sharing of info as you will see.</p><p><a href="https://returntolearn.ucsd.edu">https://returntolearn.ucsd.edu</a></p><p>Here is a video you can show them on how aerosols spread and fill a room.... </p><div class="youtube-wrap" id="youtube2-WsjRiznwRns"><iframe height="409" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WsjRiznwRns?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0" width="728"></iframe></div><p>12. Note the riskiest places to be are crowded indoor locations with poor ventilation and people talking/yelling without masks.</p><p>FAQs on protecting yourself that we created:</p><p><a href="https://tinyurl.com/FAQ-aerosols">https://tinyurl.com/FAQ-aerosols</a></p><p>13. I also attached a list of items for protecting yourself from 1918—Do's and Don'ts showing we have known what to do for a very long time!</p><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/AmyGDalaMD/status/1423697181857525768" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @AmyGDalaMD" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/AmyGDalaMD.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Amy G Dala MD </span><span class="tweet-author">@AmyGDalaMD</span></div>Flu prevention recommendations from 1918 newspaper 😳😢😭 <img alt="Image" class="tweet-photo" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FE8H9CkYXEAUalVN.jpg" /><div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">August 6th 2021</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">31,385</span> Retweets</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">96,970</span> Likes</span></div></a></div><p>14a. Final points-Also, please share the Greenhalgh paper I co-authored-this provides evidence for how we know the main mode of transmission is in aerosols through the air—sharing air needs to be avoided.</p><p>14b. If you can't, then masks and cleaning the air are critical. People say ventilation and filtration are expensive—they don't have to be. Can simply open the windows and doors (for free).</p><p>15. Multiple layers of protection are critical especially to protect those that are unvaccinated still.</p><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/kprather88/status/1423997608784138243?s=20" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @kprather88" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/kprather88.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Kimberly Prather, Ph.D. </span><span class="tweet-author">@kprather88</span></div>With more contagious variants, the Swiss cheese model is more important than ever. Vaccines are one (important) slice but until everyone has access, we must use the other slices. Ventilation, filtration, and masks are essential protection against an airborne virus. <div class="quoted-tweet"><p><span class="quote-tweet-name">ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻🧙‍♂️ </span><span class="quote-tweet-username">@MackayIM</span></p>A new version with colour &amp; division inspiration from @uq_news and strict mouse design oversight by @kat_arden (ver3.0).
It reorganises slices into personal &amp; shared responsibilities (think of this in terms of all the slices rather than any single layer being most important) https://t.co/nNwLWZTWOL</div><div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">August 7th 2021</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">162</span> Retweets</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">379</span> Likes</span></div></a></div></blockquote><p>And the thread continues. Opening windows in the Texas summer isn’t very feasible but much of the rest could be done here. These are the kinds of protocols that are created when people actually care about protecting people from this pandemic. On the other hand, stories of the predictable outcomes of failing to take proper precautions when reopening are already <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-08-11/1-000-kids-in-mississippi-test-positive-for-covid-19-after-school-reopens">starting to come in</a>.</p><blockquote><p>The 69 outbreaks reported between Aug. 2 to Aug. 6, which was the second week of school for some districts, resulted in nearly 1,000 children and 300 teachers and staff testing positive for COVID-19, according to a <a href="https://msdh.ms.gov/msdhsite/_static/resources/15292.pdf">weekly report</a> from Mississippi's Department of Health.<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-7" id="footnote-anchor-7">7</a></p></blockquote><p>School hasn’t started yet in the Fort Worth ISD and ICU beds in our county are already more than 90% full.<a class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-8" id="footnote-anchor-8">8</a></p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 image2-554-960" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49698fe9-c9dc-469e-9e6d-c9b62d5cba50_960x554.png" target="_blank"><img alt="" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49698fe9-c9dc-469e-9e6d-c9b62d5cba50_960x554.png" /></a></figure></div><p>Withdrawing my daughter was the only remaining option I had to protect my family. And writing this is all I can do to protect yours. I hope it makes a difference.</p><p>Thanks,</p><p>Ethan Elias Johnson</p><div class="footnote" id="footnote-1"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-1">1</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>Scientific Brief: SARS-CoV-2 Transmission, <em>cdc.gov,</em> May 7, 2021, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#anchor_1619805200745">https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#anchor_1619805200745</a></p></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-2"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-2">2</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>Scientific Brief: SARS-CoV-2 Transmission, <em>cdc.gov, </em>May 7, 2021, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#anchor_1619805184733">https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#anchor_1619805184733</a></p></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-3"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-3">3</a><div class="footnote-content"><blockquote><p>Studies that have systematically tested children and adolescents, irrespective of symptoms, for acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (using antigen or RT-PCR assays) or prior infection (through antibody testing) have found their rates of infection can be comparable, and in some settings higher, than in adults.</p><p>[…] Compared with adults, children and adolescents who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms (e.g. headache, sore throat). Similar to adults with SARS-CoV-2 infections, children and adolescents can spread SARS-CoV-2 to others when they do not have symptoms or have mild, non-specific symptoms and thus might not know that they are infected and infectious.</p><p>— Science Brief: Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in K-12 Schools and Early Care and Education Programs – Updated, <em>cdc.gov</em>, July 9 2021, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html#covid-19-children-adolescents">https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html#covid-19-children-adolescents</a></p></blockquote></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-4"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-4">4</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>What's This About Delta Being 1,000 Times More Infectious?, <em>MedPage Today</em>, July 23, 2021, <a href="https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93717">https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93717</a></p></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-5"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-5">5</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>Back-to-School Plan, <em>artsacademics.org</em>, June 17, 2021, <a href="https://www.artsacademics.org/2021/06/17/back-to-school-plan/">https://www.artsacademics.org/2021/06/17/back-to-school-plan/</a></p></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-6"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-6">6</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>Scientific Brief: SARS-CoV-2 Transmission, <em>cdc.gov, </em>May 7, 2021, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#anchor_1619805184733">https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html#anchor_1619805184733</a></p></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-7"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-7">7</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>1,000 Kids in Mississippi Test Positive for COVID-19 After School Reopens, US News & World Report, August 11, 2021, <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-08-11/1-000-kids-in-mississippi-test-positive-for-covid-19-after-school-reopens">https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-08-11/1-000-kids-in-mississippi-test-positive-for-covid-19-after-school-reopens</a></p></div></div><div class="footnote" id="footnote-8"><a class="footnote-number" contenteditable="false" href="#footnote-anchor-8">8</a><div class="footnote-content"><p>Tarrant County, Texas COVID-19 Information, <em>tarrantcounty.com</em>, fetched August 12, 2021 <a href="https://www.tarrantcounty.com/en/public-health/disease-control---prevention/COVID-19.html">https://www.tarrantcounty.com/en/public-health/disease-control---prevention/COVID-19.html</a></p></div></div><br><br><img src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/h_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49698fe9-c9dc-469e-9e6d-c9b62d5cba50_960x554.png" />