There's really no good reason why we should still be talking about Dave Chappelle's 2-week-old standup special The Closer. Except that Netflix employees have wielded it as means of inserting themselves into high-level company affairs, demanding that the company accede to their demands, seemingly as penance for its decision to platform Chappelle.

For people who have actually committed an hour of their time to watching the special, it's a stretch to portray Chappelle as a man with animus toward the trans community. He makes a point of opposing North Carolina's bathroom bills, which would bar transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice, saying that no American should have to show their birth certificate to take a shit in a Walmart bathroom (true). He attempts to delineate the difference between such mean-spirited laws and feeling annoyed by the quickly changing elite consensus that we must actively cheer on the transgender rights movement, as opposed to just not being all that interested in the demands of a niche subgroup. He closes with a tale of his friend, the transgender comic Daphne Dorman, who committed suicide purportedly after facing online fury from people in the trans community (though Chappelle takes care not to assign a singular cause to her decision to take her own life). The through line is a commentary on the plight of the black man in America, along with a lamentation that it's terribly easy for people to get barred from polite society, immediately and retroactively, for committing acts or uttering words that offend people's poorly-calibrated sensibilities.

The special is characteristically irreverentwhich you should expect if you've seen literally anything that Chappelle has ever worked on before. And it created such a firestorm of internal criticism that Netflix's trans employee resource group organized a walkout, which took place earlier today, while laying a list of demands at the feet of Netflix executives.

The walkout itself didn't amount to much (a not-huge crowd of Netflix employees, plus some counter protesters with cutely tepid signs like "We like Dave" and "I like jokes"), but Twitter really wanted users to believe it was a big deal, promoting the walkout as a trending moment. Several prominent actors and comedians, like Elliot Page and Wanda Sykes, drummed up support for the protest. The protesters' demands, which interestingly do not actually call for deplatforming Chappelle, involve specific asks: the company must add disclaimers before transphobic or hate speech-promoting content; suggest "trans-affirming" content alongside content deemed transphobic; "hire trans and non-binary content executives, especially BIPOC, in leading positions"; create a new fund that specifically cultivates and platforms work by trans and non-binary creators; and revise the processes involved in curating transphobic content. Having pried the door open, low-level transgender rights activist-employees are trying to force Netflix executives to engage in affirmative action and aggressive content moderation.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who had recently defended Chappelle in a letter to employees ("content on screen doesn't directly translate to real-world harm," he wrote) now says he miscalculated. "I should have led with a lot more humanity. I had a group of employees who were definitely feeling pain and hurt from a decision we made," he toldVariety. "Because we're trying to entertain the world, and the world is made up of folks with a lot of different sensibilities and beliefs and senses of humor and all those things sometimes, there will be things on Netflix that you dislike," Sarandos continued, saying they'll draw the line at content that calls for intentionally "physically harming other people" and hyping the company's "creative equity fund," which supports trans and non-binary content creators. Sarandos' did not reiterate his initial question of whether content that appears on screen will "directly translate to real-world harm."

It's good that Sarandos hasn't fully backed down from his defense of supplying artistic freedom to creators who partner with Netflix, and it's perfectly reasonable for CEOs to want to cultivate content that appeals to different subgroups. But he blundered by ceding ground to a small group of employees who are making radical demands concerning the structure and priorities of a massive company with customers all over the world. After initially defending a good decision, Sarandos looks a bit like another CEO in a long line whose employees successfully held their feet to the fire, demanding a digital world littered with content warnings and a physical world filled with diversity hires.

This moment of moral panic is predicated on the idea that portrayal or discussion of bad actions in some way leads more people to commit terrible acts that end up harming the physical safety of vulnerable people. We don't have good data to indicate this (except perhaps when it comes to portrayal of suicides, where data better bears out the idea of a contagion effect), but people uncritically fling this concept around, rarely pausing to ask whether Chappelle's jokes about trans people carry a radicalizing power that converts otherwise benevolent decent people into violent transphobes. We have no evidence to indicate they do, and for whatever reason, this essential question has been repeatedly pushed aside, as if it bears no relevance to how we should forge ahead.

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Netflix CEO Apologizes for Having Principles

Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in Florida seeking to force Twitter to reinstate him, arguing the platforms ban violates the First Amendment and Floridas new social media law.

Trump is seeking a preliminary injunction of Twitters ban, according to the complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida late Friday. The former president argues that Twitter, coerced by members of the United States Congress, is censoring him, describing the social media platform as a major avenue of public discourse. Trump seeks to be temporarily reinstated on Twitter while he continues his efforts toward permanent reinstatement.

Twitter exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate, the complaint states. The former president used his @RealDonaldTrump account to announce policy and personnel decisions (often to the surprise of the agencies and people involved), criticize political enemies, and spread misinformation about election results.

Twitter permanently banned @RealDonaldTrump in January, two days after the deadly January 6th riot at the Capitol building by pro-Trump supporters seeking to prevent the certification of Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential election. Twitter at first put a 12-hour ban on the former presidents account for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy after he posted tweets repeating lies that the election was stolen. The platform made the ban permanent two days later. Other social platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube, also banned the former president after the January 6th riots. Facebooks Oversight Board later upheld that platforms decision.

In the Friday filing, Trump argues that his Twitter account became an important source of news and information about government affairs and was a digital town hall, where the former president posted his views. At the time of the ban, Trump had 88 million Twitter followers. Twitter also censored him during his presidency, Trump claims, by labeling some of his tweets as misleading information, which the platform said violated its rules against glorifying violence.

Trumps complaint also cites Floridas new social media law, which prohibits social media companies from knowingly deplatforming politicians, and requires the platforms to apply censorship, deplatforming, and shadow banning standards in a consistent manner. Trump argues that Twitter has not enforced its standards in a consistent manner. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law in May, but a federal judge blocked it in July before it could take effect. DeSantis administration is appealing that decision.

The former president also said Twitter applied its rules about COVID-19 posts inconsistently, to placate government actors who generally approved of the protests of the summer of 2020, but disapproved of the events of January 6. The media had claimed, Trump argues, that the January 6th riot was a source of COVID-19 infection, but the summer protests were not. Data from numerous reports found no increase in COVID-19 cases in cities where there were large protests in the summer of 2020, noting that outdoor masking at the events likely helped keep cases down.

Twitter declined to comment Saturday.

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Trump sues to reinstate his Twitter account - The Verge

Short audio clip extracted from a recording

A sound bite or soundbite[1] is a short clip of speech or music extracted from a longer piece of audio, often used to promote or exemplify the full length piece. In the context of journalism, a sound bite is characterized by a short phrase or sentence that captures the essence of what the speaker was trying to say, and is used to summarize information and entice the reader or viewer. The term was coined by the U.S. media in the 1970s. Since then, politicians have increasingly employed sound bites to summarize their positions.

Due to its brevity, the sound bite often overshadows the broader context in which it was spoken, and can be misleading or inaccurate. The insertion of sound bites into news broadcasts or documentaries is open to manipulation, leading to conflict over journalistic ethics.

In the 1960s and 1970s, pressure from advertisers on the American television industry to create entertaining news material made sound bites central to political coverage. Politicians began to use PR techniques to craft self-images and slogans that would resonate with the television-viewing audience and ensure their victory in campaigns.[2] The term "sound bite" was coined in the late 1970s, several years before the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was famous for short, memorable phrases like, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" in reference to the Berlin Wall.[3]

During the 1988 United States presidential election, candidate Michael Dukakis highlighted the prominent role of sound bites and spin doctors in political campaigns by running a commercial that mocked contender George H.W. Bush's handlers' frustration over the gaffes of his vice presidential running-mate Dan Quayle.[4]

In journalism, sound bites are used to summarize the position of the speaker, as well as to increase the interest of the reader or viewer in the piece. In both print and broadcast journalism, sound bites are conventionally juxtaposed and interspersed with commentary from the journalist to create a news story. A balanced news report is expected to contain sound bites representing both sides of the debate.[5] This technique, however, can lead to biased reporting when a sound bite is selected for sensationalism, or is used to promote the point of view of one individual or group over another.[6]

In his book The Sound Bite Society, Jeffrey Scheuer argues that the sound bite was the product of television's increased power over all forms of communication, and that the resulting trend toward short, catchy snippets of information had a significant negative impact on American political discourse.[7] In contrast, Peggy Noonan feels that sound bites have acquired a negative connotation but are not inherently negative, and that what we now think of as great historical sound bitessuch as "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", the most famous phrase in Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Inaugural Addresswere examples of eloquent speakers unselfconsciously and "simply trying in words to capture the essence of the thought they wished to communicate."[8]

The increased use of sound bites in news media has been criticized, and has led to discussions on journalistic and media ethics.[9] According to the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, journalists should "make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context."[10]

Despite this criticism, sound bites are widely employed by businesses, trade groups, labor unions and politicians. Senator Jim DeMint readily admitted this when he said, "Theres a reason why most politicians talk in sanitized sound bites: Once you get out of that, youre opening yourself up to get attacked."[11]

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Sound bite - Wikipedia

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A Texas bill signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in September, which was designed to stop social media companies from censoring users based on their political "viewpoint," has been blocked by a federal judge a day before it was due to come into force.

In a filing submitted to an Austin, Texas district court, Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the bill called HB 20 would violate social media companies' First Amendment right to exercise editorial control over the content that appears on their platforms.

"HB 20 prohibits virtually all content moderation, the very tool that social medial platforms employ to make their platforms safe, useful, and enjoyable for users," the filing states.

HB 20 was due to come into force on Thursday.

Pitman's ruling came in response to a legal challenge by NetChoice and the CCIA, two industry groups whose members include Google, Amazon, Meta (formerly known as Facebook), and Twitter.

The CCIA said in a press release: "Today's outcome is not surprising. The First Amendment ensures that the Government can't force a citizen or company to be associated with a viewpoint they disapprove of, and that applies with particular force when a State law would prevent companies from enforcing policies against Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and disinformation from foreign agents."

A similar bill signed in Florida by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May was blocked by a federal judge in July, also citing First Amendment violations.

Abbott and DeSantis are among Republican lawmakers who say social media companies unfairly target conservative voices when enforcing their moderation rules. When he signed HB 20 in September, Gov. Abbott said: "There is a dangerous movement by some social media companies to silence conservative ideas and values."

Former President Trump also accused social media companies of displaying a bias against conservative voices.

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Judge Blocks Texas Bill That Aimed to Ban Social-Media 'Deplatforming' - Business Insider

While the Biden administration appears uninterested in combating online censorship, that doesnt mean conservatives are powerless to do anything about it. States can act, and they must if they hope to protect First Amendment freedoms.

Major technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google control most of the spread of information online. They openly use this power to suppress disfavored views. Big Tech deplatformed former President Donald Trump, suppressed reporting on Hunter Bidens laptop scandal, and prohibited posts speculating that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. One poll found nearly half of the public knows someone who has been censored online. No wonder polling shows people overwhelmingly believe Big Tech companies are censoring their users.

These companies and their allies argue state governments have no power to prevent online censorship. They contend that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act allows them to remove any posts they want. Moreover, they argue First Amendment free speech rights allow them to pick and choose what content they will host on their platform.

These arguments persuaded conservative states such as North Dakota and Utah not to pass laws combating tech censorship. However, Big Tech overstates its case. States can and should protect free speech in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and Section 230.

It is true that the First Amendment generally prevents the government from forcing companies to transmit a specific message. But the government can require communications companies to serve everyone impartially. Common carrier regulations prohibit telephone companiesand telegraph lines before themfrom discriminating against particular users. The Supreme Court has long considered these requirements constitutional.

Imagine if your cellphone company cut your service because you were criticizing a particular politician. States can constitutionally prohibit such censorship. They can similarly stop Big Tech from discriminating against its users.

The Supreme Court has never interpreted the scope of the immunity Section 230 provides. It is true that some lower courts have interpreted the statute very broadly,reading it to protect virtually all decisions to restrict content. Other courts have paid closer attention to Section 230s statutory text. These courts interpret its immunity much more narrowly. Under these textual precedents, Section 230 only immunizes platforms that take down content in good faith. That allows states to pass laws against bad faith content moderation,such as selectively applying terms of service to suppress disfavored views. Until the Supreme Court clarifies this judicial debate, states have room to act, relying on the textual precedents.

Of course, Big Tech will likely sue over any new laws. Companies quickly sued Florida and Texas when those states passed social media free speech laws earlier this year. A Clinton-appointed judge enjoined the Florida law that ruling is under appeal while the Texas lawsuit is ongoing. Both cases underscore the importance for state legislators of drafting new laws carefully to maximize their odds of legal success.

The America First Policy Institute has produced model legislation that legislators can use to prevent Big Tech censorship. This proposal treats major social media companies as common carriers. It prohibits them from deplatforming users and requires them to moderate content in good faith; they cannot selectively apply their terms of service. It also prohibits platforms from discriminating against content based on its political, philosophical, or religious views. These common carrier regulations fit comfortably within the textual interpretation of Section 230.

The draft bill also contains a legal backstop. Some of the courts that interpret Section 230 broadly, including the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, nonetheless hold that, if a platform contractually commits to content moderation standards, that promise is legally enforceable.

So, the model legislation encourages the platforms to protect free speech in their terms of service. It imposes hefty, but not crushing, fees on big social media platforms that do not protect free speech. It then exempts platforms that incorporate the common carrier free speech protections into their terms of service. These terms of service would let users sue over violations. Courts that take a broad view of Section 230 may nonetheless enforce these contracts, thereby protecting free speech.

Moreover, this provision would be difficult to sue against. States have broad authority to tax, meaning that judges are unlikely to strike down the new fees. So, if a lawsuit struck down the exemption for noncensorious platforms, Big Tech would simply have to pay the fees.

Big Tech is deciding who can speak on the internet and what they can say. The public does not have to submit to this corporate censorship. States have the power to protect free speech. The only question is, will they?

JamesSherkis the director of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as a special assistant to the president in the Domestic Policy Council at the White House during the Trump administration.

Continued here:

States are the last line of defense against Big Tech - Washington Examiner

Twitter announced a new set of rules on Tuesday that effectively bans the dissemination of memes and the mockery of public figures.

The changes come one day after Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey resigned to usher in a new era under free-speech foe and new CEO Parag Agrawal, who, while he served as Twitters chief technology officer, expressed disregard for the First Amendment.

Under the new Twitter policy, photos of public figures will be subject to removal based on the censorship platforms desires.

This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse, the policy states. However, if the purpose of the dissemination of private images of public figures or individuals who are part of public conversations is to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence them, we may remove the content in line with our policy against abusive behavior.

Twitter clarified that exceptions would be made for content that you guessed it corrupt left-wing corporate media outlets deem acceptable.

We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.

As some Twitter users pointed out, with this new policy, the Big Tech company has carved out a way to justify removing or banning any content it deems irrelevant and effectively solidifies Twitters role as a gatekeeper of information instead of the free-speech platform it once claimed to be.

These tactics have, of course, been used by Twitter in the past to justify stifling the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story, subduing content about COVID-19 treatments and vaccine side effects, and intentionally deplatforming former President Donald Trump. But the updated policy suggests the Silicon Valley giants net is getting wider and seeks to stop even the smallest of accounts from sharing information that could damage Democrats or their propaganda narratives.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Twitter's New Rule Lets It Selectively Ban Memes, Mockery Of Democrats - The Federalist

Cast your mind back to 2016 and you might recall the name Milo Yiannopoulos although we could forgive you for completely blocking it out altogether.

The British commentator and journalist became synonymous with the alt-right movement in the United States which helped elect Donald Trump to the White House.

His unapologetic far-right views should have seen him maligned by the political and cultural landscape but his fame and stock kept rising, even after he was banned from Twitter for instigating an onslaught of abuse against actor Leslie Jones.

However, Yiannopouloss influence plummeted when video clips of him advocating paedophilia emerged online in 2017. Yiannopoulos, who was openly gay, claimed that the clips had been badly edited and that he had been a victim of child abuse.

This backlash to this controversy resulted in the 37-year-old being forced out of his position at the Conservative news outlet Breitbart, losing the opportunity to talk at CPAC and the publisher Simon & Schuster cancelling his planned autobiography. Yiannopoulos was also banned from Facebook in 2019.

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The de-platforming of Yiannopoulos has seen the controversial figure virtually fall of the face of the planet, at least in a digital sense. In recent months he has cropped up again in headlines when he told the right-wing Christian website LiteSite that he was now an ex-gay and that he had demoted his husband to being his housemate.

Yiannopoulos newfound faith in the Lord appears to have manifested itself into him becoming a sales rep for a US-based YouTube channel and website called Church Militant which is kind of like QVC but for religious trinkets.

The first episode, which was shared earlier this month but has since been flagged by the Twitter account Right Wing Watch, sees Yiannopoulos, alongside a woman named Deborah Vaughn, attempt to sell viewers a statue of the Virgin Mary for $87.50

Yiannopoulos descent into the more obscure realms of YouTube and shilling pieces of Catholic merchandise has inevitably resulted in much mockery but has also led to many people pointing out that limiting controversial figures outreach on the internet will reduce them to this kind of level.

It should be mentioned that Church Militant isnt any old Christian website. It has been flagged by outlets like NBC News as part of the Catholic alt-right movement, so it would appear that he is right at home.

Excerpt from:

Remember Milo Yiannopoulos? Deplatformed ex-gay reduced to flogging Catholic iconography on YouTube - The indy100

There is a new game in town. It is called: I-can-outdo-you-and-create-the-most-implausible-and-zany-comparisons-to-trash-Hinduism. This is score-settling blather, and juvenile. A bizarre bandwagonism is at play here as you notice that a massive and concerted effort is afoot to deplatform Hindus and their Sanatana Dharma.

The good news is that this deplatforming is not likely to happen, even though Hindus worldwide are ominously threatened today, subject to Hinduphobia, as their faith is pilloried, misrepresented and blatantly lied about.

In the last few days, much flack has been flying around about the Hindu bindi -- variously called pottu in South India, and tika or elsewhere. Both Hindu women and men wear bindis on their foreheads, and it was traditionally available in myriad hues of red, and sandalwood paste, or saffron: it could be round in shape, a streak, a line, or in more decorative forms; it is now worn in other colours too. The spot on the forehead where the bindi is worn marks the ajna chakra, which contains the pineal gland and the hypothalamus, and is represented by the Omkara.

There are two points on which Varma falters. He says that the bindi is a symbol of patriarchy: hes wrong. The fact that both men and women wear a bindi should dismiss any specious conflation of it with patriarchy - a word so sloppily bandied about in ubiquitous Hindu-bashing discourse today that you have to be cautious using it.

Second, and more intemperate, is his equating the bindi - a symbol of liberation and beauty, on a wholly visible female face - with the burqa. What is Varma's false- analogy-creating, faux-oppression-mongering gambit, I wonder? Why does he create these counterfeit and dangerous equivalences? Which master dialogue is he in vassalage to?

The bindi does not signify bondage; the case is quite the contrary. Varma's equating an attractive and liberating symbol to a loss of freedom for Hindu women, and, following this, equating it to the burqa, are flat out preposterous. First, you see the entirety of a woman's face when she wears a bindi; the burqa hides women's faces - it is meant to conceal and shut out women's faces and bodies. Also, the bindi symbolizes liberation; I'm not sure we can say that of the burqa, which has only recently been repudiated as repressive by a roster of Afghan women embracing the magnificent colours of their traditional attire, which empowers them into showing their charmante faces and not be badgered into concealing them.

The bindi represents the chandrabindu/anusvara on the pranava, the Omkara, or Om - the sound of cosmic creation, from which all sound and knowledge originate: hence, Udgitadpranavagitah sarva vagishwareshwaraha. The Om is believed to grant human beings viveka and jnana, or discrimination and wisdom. Women in rural India and small towns wear no makeup: the sole splash of colour on their visage is the bindi. Colour is raga; as well, it is ranga (the colour of the numinous, the spirit, and, per ancient, sacred Hindu texts, present in all humanity and creation). When Americas legendary Modern Dance choreographer, the late Merce Cunningham, a devotee of Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, was with us at Carnegie Mellon, he inevitably alluded to the colour in India, with delight and reverence.

Fence sitters inevitably bark on both sides. They fought across continents a few years ago to ban the oppressive burqa; now, chameleonic apologists think it is okay for women to be forced into wearing it and obeying the diktats of a male cabal.

Liberation, or the possession of higher and more meaningful inclinations, and a turning of the mind towards the sublime -- such as the intended achievement of a metaphysical/mystical union with the Infinite, the beyond, and the ever expanding frontiers of both the universe and human consciousness -- is what is signified by women wearing a bindi. There is no compulsion at all, but most Hindu women in India wear it through the day, with pleasure. When I was a little girl at Rishi Valley School, in south India, my classical dance teacher would insist we come to class with a bindi. Why? Because she said that with the bindi our little faces looked romba azhahrka, or very beautiful, in Tamil.

My maravilhoso, well-dressed female household staff in India always wears bindis, and if they forget to wear them, they tell me they feel incomplete: theres no patriarchy here. Also, Varma does not speak for them.

What Hinduism now witnesses is an awakening, and a culture of resistance, pursuant to centuries of colonial diminishment and atrocities, followed by current, coordinated worldwide attempts to demonise innocent, faith-loving Hindus and render them marginal. Hindus dont accept western domination and its dirigente ideas any longer; they have, and will always be, open to absorbing the best thought from other faiths and philosophies across the world, other echoes (that) inhabit the garden, (Eliot), but they recognize the treasure of dharmic knowledge that is theirs for the asking. It is this deep, neglected lake of wisdom that Hindus now wish to further explore, ignoring bogus equivalences and their creators.

(Oopalee Operajita is a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. She advises world leaders on public policy, communication, and international relations.)

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View: The bindi as the equalizer and Hindu women as seekers - Economic Times

Life in the digital age has added one more certain thing to the old saying about death and taxes: People are going to be jerks on the internet.

Whether its an anonymous troll questioning your parentage or a propaganda campaign by a foreign power, the signal-to-noise ratio on social media has become much worse in recent years. Thats not even mentioning the hate-mongers, conspiracy theorists and outright liars who want their skewed views to become your views.

Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn, a faculty member in Watson Colleges Department of Computer Science, has been researching bad actors online for more than 10 years. That journey has taken him to some dark places where outsiders fear to tread, but he hopes that by shining a light there, we can start to figure how to fix them.

I dont think the problems are new. They are fundamental human problems, Blackburn says. Whats different is that its become a socio-technical problem rather than just a social problem. The internet doesnt make people bad it just enables them to be worse, and it enables them to find other people who are also bad.

FROM GAMING TO SOCIAL MEDIA

Blackburn first became interested in computers while growing up in Florida, connecting with fellow users from around the world through massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online. Players adopted sword-and-sorcery character avatars for quests to conquer kingdoms and battle monsters.

Because Blackburn and his friends were clever with programming code, they sometimes would find ways to cause chaos. One time, his clan built a virtual house in front of a key entry point and shot arrows from inside at other players who approached. Another trick, which landed them in the games jail, involved killing a character and stealing the blueprints for a new kind of building being beta-tested.

Yeah, they werent exactly angels.

If you did that kind of stuff in person during a Dungeons & Dragons game, you might get punched in the mouth, Blackburn says with a laugh. But the fact that it was virtual enabled a whole different level of mischief.

Like many teens who love coding, Blackburn headed to college in his case, the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa with the intent to design computer games. His interests later shifted to the underlying technologies that make shared games possible, such as distributed systems that spread various components across multiple computers.

For his doctoral thesis also at USF he returned to the idea of bad behavior online by studying cheating in internet gaming, and that drew a direct path to the kind of research he does today.

While earning his degrees, Blackburn worked for more than a decade in private industry, including as principal developer at test-prep company Boson Software and as software architect at his own company, Pallasoft. He also spent three years as an associate researcher at Telefonica Research in Barcelona, Spain.

His time in academia first at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and now at Binghamton University has coincided with the proliferation and influence of mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as well as niche apps like Telegram, Parler, 4chan and Gab.

Things have evolved away from blogs and similar sites in the past 10 years, he says. People want interactive social media they want to be able to engage with each other rather than just scream on a soapbox.

In our polarized society, though, those back-and-forth interactions can get downright nasty.

TRACKING THE TROLLS

Blackburn is the co-founder of the International Data-driven Research for Advanced Modeling and Analysis (iDRAMA) Lab, which includes more than two dozen professors, PhD students and industry researchers from around the world.

In various configurations, iDRAMA members have studied nearly every social media platform, from dominant ones like Twitter to white supremacist havens such as Gab and 4chan. The only one they ignore is Facebook, because data collection from there has become increasingly unreliable.

Recent research

Assistant Professor Jeremy Blackburn has studied many types of bad actors on the internet. Here are just a few of the findings from the iDRAMA Lab in recent years.

CYBERBULLYING: By analyzing the behavioral patterns of abusive Twitter users and their differences from other Twitter users, Blackburn and his colleagues developed machine learning algorithms that can successfully identify bullies and aggressors on Twitter with 90% accuracy.

ZOOMBOMBING: As more companies and schools moved to online platforms like Zoom, Google Meet and Skype in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, interruptions to those meetings and classes often racist or pornographic became an increasing problem. An iDRAMA study showed that most of those attacks were not due to hackers, but because legitimate attendees gave passwords and advice to friends or posted the information on Reddit, Twitter and 4chan.

DEPLATFORMING: Once users are banned from Twitter and Reddit, what happens to them? Often they move to smaller platforms like Gab or Parler, where the content moderation is more lax. There, they have a potentially reduced audience but exhibit an increased level of activity and toxicity than they did previously.

ANTI-ASIAN HATE SPEECH: By analyzing posts from 4chans Politically Incorrect board as well as Twitter from late 2019 and early 2020, the iDRAMA lab tracked the rise of Sinophobic content related to the pandemic.

The iDRAMA Lab has published research on QAnon, the rise in anti-Asian and anti-Semitic sentiments, the use of manipulated news images (also known as fauxtography), cyberbullying, misogyny, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and more.

Its a roundup of the worst that humanity has to offer, and sometimes the haters strike back. A recent 4chan post, for instance, claimed that Blackburn is a Hamas recruiter, and hes received a few ominous threats over the years. (Luckily, nothing came of them.)

Blackburn fosters an atmosphere of camaraderie among his students and peers, welcoming open conversations so that no one feels overwhelmed by internet hate.

If you dont look at the content, you cant really do research about it, he says, but if you look at the content too much or too deeply if you stare into the abyss a bit too long you might fall into it. Its hard walking that line, and Ive certainly had failures along the way.

Gianluca Stringhini, an assistant professor at Boston University and co-founder of the iDRAMA Lab, praises Blackburns willingness to think outside of the boundaries of traditional computer science methods.

When Jeremy and I started working together, we realized that studying these emerging sociotechnical problems required techniques that dont really fall under any of the established research methods in our fields, Stringhini says.

Five years later, we are combining computer networks, security, graph analysis, psychology and other disciplines to paint a comprehensive picture of online weaponized information. Not many researchers would be comfortable doing that, but Jeremy has a unique vision and is not afraid of breaking with research norms.

TURNING OVER THE ROCKS

Earlier this year, Blackburn received a five-year, $517,484 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project Towards a Data-Driven Understanding of Online Sentiment. The CAREER Award supports faculty who have the potential to serve as future academic role models.

At the core of the project is devising a better way to train machine learning which does most of the content moderation on social media platforms about how to judge the offensiveness of images used in memes.

Currently, artificial intelligence software tries to determine if a particular image is bad or not, but Blackburn wants to take a trick from online gaming by presenting it two images and asking which is worse. The process is similar to the matchmaking system that puts gamers into groups of similar skills, not people who are 1,000 times better or worse than you.

Instead of looking at images in isolation and making a judgment on that individual piece of content, its more like ordering them, he says. Were not learning if something is racist or not were learning which is more racist. Who knows what well find, but were convinced that it will lead to something interesting.

Blackburn admits that he and his iDRAMA colleagues sometimes discuss whether their research is helping internet jerks to dig in deeper and evade future detection. Maybe if they didnt turn over the rocks, the nasty critters underneath would just stay there and never come out.

As a computer scientist, though, Blackburn believes that learning more will be an important step toward curbing what has become a political and social menace. He contends its also a public health crisis: Online hate affects our mental well-being, and misinformation about COVID-19 has led to more deaths and hospitalizations.

We have this insanely powerful, world-changing technology thats been around for less than a generation, he says. I hope that well provide the knowledge and tools to become more resilient, more robust and less susceptible to this type of behavior, and to start figuring out ways to actively address it.

The rest is here:

Blackburn's Quest: Computer science professor researches darkest corners of the internet | Binghamton News - Binghamton University

Holy Illegal Modifications, Batman! (Photo by Jennifer Graylock/Ford Motor Company)

When I was growing up, a group of people at my school had a passion for modified cars. Most did minor modifications such as tinting windows, replacing lights, or putting stickers of racing brands on their cars, hoping that they would scare off the Porsches and Corvettes. For those who were lucky enough to get jobs that paid $10 per hour (this was many years ago), they were able to afford more sophisticated mods such as racing wheels or an exhaust system that made their car sound cool. And there were a very privileged few who were lucky enough to get high-performance cars like a Toyota Supra, Mazda RX-7, or a BMW M3. Or they had the money to modify their cars so extensively that they were just as fast (and loud) as a high-performance car.

While most of them did it for fun, there were a few that took things too far. These people got a kick out of driving their loud cars in residential areas late at night. I recall some of them having exhausts so loud that they vibrated the ground to the point where they triggered the alarms of nearby cars.

And others engaged in illegal street racing. Sometimes they did it on an empty street in a remote area to avoid attracting attention from the police. But other times, they raced on the freeway or, worse, on surface streets. These people live one minute at a time and dont think about the consequences when something goes wrong.

Fast forward to today and it seems like not much has changed. The car mod culture seems to have died down somewhat. This may be due to racing videos being available on the internet so there is less of a need to go to a street race. Also, modern cars are very difficult to tune and modify because almost every aspect of the cars performance is computer controlled. Finally, fewer cars today have a manual transmission the preferred transmission for aggressive drivers.

But some people still get a thrill by driving a car with a loud exhaust. Also, incidents of illegal street racing have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. As people were forced to stay home, it cleared up the streets, thus opening up opportunities to race.

Finally, in many cities, there are reports of people blocking intersections. Cars would then enter the intersection and do burnouts, donuts, and spinouts. Cars would crash into other cars, and sometimes into other people.

Lawmakers nationwide have tried to control the illegal, annoying, and dangerous activities by imposing harsher penalties than those already in the books. For example, just recently in New York, cars equipped with excessively loud aftermarket exhausts can face a $1,000 fine, which is the highest in the nation. Some cities have made it illegal (or are considering it) to promote or even watch an illegal street race.

California is making it harder to modify cars. Effective last July, any vehicle with a modified Engine Control Unit (ECU) not approved by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) will fail the states biannual smog check test, making registration impossible. In other words, the cars ECU must be unmodified from the manufacturer or the modifications must be approved by CARB in order to pass the smog check. While it is believed that this new rule will only affect a small number of cars, those who plan to modify their cars extensively could be at risk of failing the smog check.

But will these new measures deter street racing, intersection-blocking sideshows, and loud mufflers at night? To some degree, yes. But others will stay defiant and roll the dice. Why? Because its fun for them, just as it was for their elders back when they were young. They get attention and props for flexing their modded rides, which results in getting more YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers.

Is there anything that can be done other than harsher punishments? Police (or their social worker equivalents) will have to disperse intersection sideshows quickly before they get too big. Seizures of cars should be made public and posted on law enforcement social media accounts. This might get some laughter emojis which could deter future attention-seeking wannabes.

The clickbait appeal should also be neutralized. Legislators should ask tech companies to ban and delete any illegal street racing videos and terminate accounts that promote gatherings.

Finally, while racers should be encouraged to have their thrill at private race tracks, I am mindful that some people just want to have fun on their own terms. On that note, police should be discouraged from interfering with street races so long as they are done in remote areas and away from residences. While this is not a perfect solution, at least it provides a controlled environment where people can be monitored.

I was a teenager once and so I can understand the temptation to speed and triggering car alarms can be funny. And I appreciate the sound of a finely tuned engine and still prefer it over the buzz of an electric car. But Im older now and so I care more about a cars fuel efficiency than its 0-60 time. And while I am wary of the government trying to control another aspect of my life, I want to sleep instead of hearing gunshots from a cars straight-pipe exhaust. But harsher penalties for illegal mods and street races will only do so much. The cool factor needs to be neutralized by deplatforming the promoters and the attention-seekers.

Steven Chung is a tax attorney in Los Angeles, California. He helps people with basic tax planning and resolve tax disputes. He is also sympathetic to people with large student loans. He can be reached via email at sachimalbe@excite.com. Or you can connect with him on Twitter (@stevenchung) and connect with him onLinkedIn.

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Will Higher Fines And Stricter Regulations Be Enough To Control The Underground Street Racing And Car Modification Culture? - Above the Law