Good morning! The clash of competing social media rulings is setting up a potential Supreme Court showdown that would have lasting consequences for tech platforms. Meanwhile, the video game industry is facing its own showdown: between giant studios and their unionizing workforces. Lets dive in.

Floridians who want to stick it to Big Tech will have to wait another day, after an 11th Circuit appeals court found that the crux of the states anti-social media censorship law violates the First Amendment.

Earlier this month, a 5th Circuit court of appeals lifted an injunction on a very similar law in Texas, without offering an opinion. That decision allowed the Texas law to take effect immediately, causing chaos for just about every major tech company. The fate of that law is now before the Supreme Court, which could reply to an emergency application on its shadow docket any day now.

The Florida opinion could offer the justices a road map. Heres what the court said about the law:

This could tee up the Supreme Court for a much bigger ruling. Its decision in response to the emergency application will only decide whether Texas law stays in effect while the 5th Circuit appeals case remains ongoing.

The impact of that decision would be an earthquake for tech platforms and would have huge ramifications for their users.

Until this week, not a single major American game developer had a unionized workforce of any kind. That just changed.

Workers at Raven Software voted to unionize on Monday. A group of more than 20 employees at the Activision Blizzard-owned company cast ballots in a NLRB-sanctioned election to determine whether Raven management would be forced to recognize the group. The union won, 19-3, making the Game Workers Alliance the first of its kind at a major American game studio.

The union was spurred by layoffs and Activision Blizzards ongoing crises. In December, Raven quality assurance testers went on strike for five weeks to protest layoffs. Parent company Activision, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, is in the midst of its own turmoil.

Activision Blizzard has one week to appeal the decision before it must begin bargaining in good faith over a union contract. But statements and internal messages to staff make clear that management is not happy. However the company reacts, the GWAs union contract will have a ripple effect throughout the industry and its fast-growing labor movement.

Project Shield protects news and human rights organizations, government entities, and more from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These digital attacks are used by bad actors and cyber criminals to censor information by taking websites offline.

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Intel CEO (and former VMware CEO) Pat Gelsinger is mixed on Broadcoms potential acquisition of VMware:

Early Twitter exec Jason Goldman thinks Elon Musk is chaos for the company:

And Gwynne Shotwell defended Musk against allegations of sexual misconduct:

Terra investor Hassan Bassiri is certainly committed to the cause:

Adrian Cockcroft is retiring from Amazon after close to six years with the company. Cockcroft was most recently vice president of Sustainability Architecture.

Chime named Vineet Mehra chief marketing officer. He previously led growth and experience at Good Eggs.

Xiaomi inked a long-term partnership with Leica. Their first collaboration will be a smartphone released in July.

The worlds 50 richest people lost half a trillion dollars between them so far this year at least on paper. Elon Musk alone has lost close to $70 billion, or about 1.5 Twitters.

Klarna is laying off 10% of its workforce of about 6,500 employees. The news follows reports that its valuation fell by 30% to $30 billion. PayPal is also laying off workers.

Snap will miss its revenue and earnings guidance for the quarter. It will slow hiring in response.

Andy Jassy has a big AGM to deal with on Wednesday. He'll face shareholder questions about Amazon's working conditions, executive pay and tax.

Broadcom might pony up as much as $60 billion for VMware, according to the WSJ.

Shareholders of Didi voted to delist the company from the New York Stock Exchange.

Samsung said it would invest $350 billion over five years in next-generation technologies, mainly in South Korea.

Airbnb is reportedly planning to exit China. The company is expected to take down all listings in the country this summer.

Meta will give researchers access to targeting data for political ads, finally giving the academics the access theyve wanted for years.

D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine is suing Mark Zuckerberg over his responsibility for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The tech job market isnt cooling off (yet), but the economic downturn could change the way workers get paid. Fat salaries arent disappearing anytime soon, but tech companies will look to cut costs in other ways.

Cushy benefits packages and huge annual merit increases are easy places to cut back, according to compensation consultants. The amount of equity companies give to employees and the frequency of stock grants will also be scrutinized.

But experts also say the time is ripe for startups to land top talent. Many tech giants plan to slow hiring or freeze it altogether this year, which will make the market less competitive. And Big Tech workers looking for a fresh challenge might want to jump ship for an exciting growth opportunity.

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) is a team that investigates threat actors and combats cyber crime to help keep everyone safe online, including high-risk users, by increasing protections based on attacker techniques and through regular updates to the security community.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.

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The social media censorship showdown - Protocol

A record number of books have been banned or challenged in the U.S. in the last year, part of a push by conservatives torein in discussionof issues that some find distasteful. Now, author Margaret Atwood is responding to the rise in censorship by auctioning a fireproof edition of her novel "The Handmaid's Tale," which ranks among the most frequently banned books in the U.S.

In a video posted onSotheby's sitefor "The Unburnable Book," Atwood is shown with a flamethrower as she takes aim at the edition, which is printed on pages made from heat-resistantCinefoil, sewn together with nickel wire. The flames lick at the book, but the pages remain intact.

"I never thought I'd be trying to burn one of my own books ... and failing," Atwood said in a statement.

The edition is "designed to protect this vital story and stand as a powerful symbol against censorship," the auction site notes.

The auction, which places the expected sale range at $50,000 $100,000, will direct all proceeds to PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression and that plans to use the money to support those efforts. "The Handmaid's Tale," first published in 1985, is a dystopian vision of a future America where women are stripped of their rights and live under a theocracy that prizes them strictly for their reproductive abilities.

Interest in "The Handmaid's Tale" has increased amid a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that, if finalized, would pave the way for states to severely curtail abortion rights in the U.S. The prospect Roe v. Wade being overturned has sparked observations about the book's prescience and relevance to modern events.

"The Handmaid's Tale" has been among the most challenged publications in America, with the American Library Association (ALA) noting that it has been targeted for "vulgarity and sexual overtones."

Efforts to ban books have surged in the past year, with the ALA finding there were a record 729 challenges to more than almost 1,600 titles in 2021, double the number in 2020.

Atwood said in the statement that her book has been banned "by whole countries, as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists, sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries." She also expressed hope that society doesn't get to the point of "wholesale book burnings, as in 'Fahrenheit 451'," referring to the Ray Bradbury classic.

More recently, Barnes & Noble has faced pressure from a Virginia lawmaker and a congressional candidate to restrict sales of two books deemed "obscene" to minors without parental consent. The candidate, Tommy Altman, said he is running for Congress to protect freedom, including the right to free speech. One of the books the pair is aiming to restrict is the most challenged book of 2021, the memoir "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe.

"To see [Atwood's] classic novel about the dangers of oppression reborn in this innovative, unburnable edition is a timely reminder of what's at stake in the battle against censorship," Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in a statement.

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Fireproof "Handmaid's Tale" edition is up for auction: A "symbol against censorship" - CBS News

Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we dont know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Donald Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool that old monster solution is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you cant untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be todays judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadnt been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover. The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didnt save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nations capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadnt published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population.

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship banning someone elses speech isnt going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldnt be censorship.It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadnt first censored the Russian media.

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Censorship Isn't the Solution to Social Media's Ills InsideSources - InsideSources

One hashtag calling for the feature to be revoked quickly accumulated 8,000 posts and was viewed more than 100 million times before it was censored in late April. A university student in Zhejiang province sued Weibo, the Chinese social platform, in March for leaking personal information without his consent when the platform automatically showed his location. Others have pointed out the hypocrisy of the practice, since celebrities, government accounts, and the chief executive of Weibo have all been exempted from the location tags.

Despite the pushback, the authorities have signaled the changes are likely to last. An article in the state-run publication, China Comment, argued the location labels were necessary to cut off the black hand manipulating the narratives behind the internet cable. A draft regulation from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the countrys internet regulator, stipulates that user I.P. addresses must be displayed in a prominent way.

If censorship is about dealing with the messages and those who send the messages, this mechanism is really working on the audience, said Han Rongbin, a media and politics professor at the University of Georgia.

With the worsening relationship with United States and China and propaganda repeatedly blaming malign foreign forces for dissatisfaction in China, Mr. Han said the new policy could be quite effective at snuffing out complaints.

People worrying about foreign interference is a tendency right now. Thats why it works better than censorship. People buy it, he said.

Discontent among the population. The Chinese governments censorship and surveillance, which the pandemic has aggravated, are pushing a small but growing group of Chinese to look for an exit. Younger Chinese in particular are embracing the view that they might need to fleethe country in the pursuit of a safer and brighter future abroad.

A new trick for internet censors. To control the countrys internet, Chinas censors have relied for years on practices like on deleting posts, suspending accounts and blocking keywords. Now they have turned to displaying users locationson social media,fueling pitched online battles that link Chinese citizens locations with their national loyalty.

An uncertain harvest. Chinese officials are issuing warnings that, after heavy rainfalls last autumn, a disappointing winter wheat harvestin June could drive food prices already high because of the war in Ukraine and bad weather in Asia and the United States further up, compounding hunger in the worlds poorest countries.

A pause on wealth redistribution. For much of last year, Chinas top leader, Xi Jinping, waged a fierce campaign to narrow social inequalitiesand usher in a new era of common prosperity. Now, as the economic outlook is increasingly clouded, the Communist Party is putting its campaign on the back burner.

The vitriol can be overwhelming. One Chinese citizen, Mr. Li, who spoke on the condition that only his surname be used for privacy reasons, was targeted by trolls after his profile was linked to the United States, where he lived. Nationalist influencers accused him of working from overseas to incite protest in western China over a post that criticized the local government of handling a students sudden death. The accounts listed him and several others as examples of spy infiltration. A post to publicly shame them was liked 100,000 times before it was eventually censored.

Inundated by derogatory messages, he had to change his Weibo user name to stop harassers from tracing him. Even though he has used Weibo for more than 10 years, he is wary of the baseless attacks these days. They want me to shut up, so Ill shut up, Mr. Li said.

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Chinas Internet Censors Try a New Trick: Revealing Users Locations - The New York Times

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

FIRST ON FOX: A conservative nonprofit is launching a new ad campaign targeting Big Tech over online censorship.

Common Sense Leadership Fund (CSLF), a conservative nonprofit, launched the new seven-figure ad buy on Monday, railing against two pieces of legislation making their way through Congress.

CSLF president Kevin McLaughlin told Fox News Digital the "last thing we need is the federal government codifying into law Big Techs ability to silence anyone they happen to disagree with politically."

NEW CONSERVATIVE GROUP TARGETS HASSAN, KELLY OVER DEMOCRATS $3.5 TRILLION SPENDING PUSH

Two bills targeted in the ad campaign are the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and Open App Markets Act. (istock)

The ad, first obtained by Fox News Digital and titled "Big Brother," focuses on the loopholes in two bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and Open App Markets Act, that loosely uses the word "safety."

One provision in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act creates a legal defense for tech companies potential censorship if the measure they implement is to "protect safety, user privacy, the security of non-public data, or the security of the covered platform."

A similar "digital safety" provision also exists in the Open App Markets Act.

"Dont have the right opinion? Censored!" the ad says. "Are your facts an inconvenient truth? Banned!"

"No, its not big brother. Its Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. Apple," the voice-over continues. "They do it behind closed doors and answer to no one."

CSLFs ad warns that the two bills "would enshrine their censorship power in federal law" and that "Big Tech needs tough regulation not more rules that allow them to control your online speech."

"Tell Congress to reject Senate Bill 2922 and 2710 or you might be next," the ad concludes.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks to the media after a Democratic policy luncheon, Oct. 19, 2021, on Capitol Hill. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Conservative commentators warn that the bills would harm U.S. businesses by radically altering antitrust laws and changing ecommerce itself.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he wants to bring the American Innovation and Choice Online Act up by early summer.

Schumers move to bring the measure up for a vote comes the week after President Bidens disinformation board bit the dust.

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Conservative nonprofit launches ad campaign targeting bills over Big Tech censorship - Fox News

People like the murderer in the Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store will always find justification to be evil losers. He would have found some excuse even if no one had ever suspected that government is trying, for political purposes, to dilute the culture with those who dont share it.

The way to fight such ideas is to openly discuss them, not censorship. If you choose to censor ideas, Ill think you have no argument against them.

They will also always find something to use as a weapon, even if the anti-gun bigots ever manage to ban the type of weapon this one chose.

The effective way to defend from evil losers isnt with lone armed guards or with an armed class of enforcers, but with a universally armed population ready to stop any such attack in its tracks. An armed guard is too easy to notice and target, but when nearly everyone around you is ready to stop any attack, the cost of committing one is raised back to where it belongs.

Even so, the armed guard at the store gave his life to delay the evil loser and give more people the chance to escape. He saved lives.

There will always be evil people, and some percentage of those will decide to try to kill people who arent harming them in any way -- even if they must hallucinate that they are being harmed. You wont stop them by making everyone else helpless or by forbidding ideas that could inspire them to attack.

It might also help if government would stop actively radicalizing them with its actions and policies.

While government is constitutionally prohibited from regulating immigration, it is also not permitted to import people from other countries. Not that government stays within what it is allowed to do. Theres a difference between something happening naturally and government forcing something to happen. The latter is more intrusive.

Maybe government hopes more of these attacks will occur. They always seem to happen right before some anti-gun legislation is under consideration -- Im sure its only a coincidence. This attack -- apparently spurred by ideas a weak mind encountered online -- also happened, coincidentally, in the midst of a fight over censorship. Its all rather convenient, is it not?

Either way, I will not accept blame and be legislatively punished for things other people -- people I dont support in any way -- do. Will you?

Farwells Kent McManigal champions liberty. Contact him at:

[emailprotected]

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Censorship not the answer to evil - Quay County Sun

In yet another ill-planned publicity stunt by a democratic elected official, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot who did not step in to help Chicago Public Library workers during the pandemic posted a photo of herself reading a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in Houstons Brazos Bookstore.

Behind her are several other books that have seen book challenges or outright bans in the last year, including Melissa (formerly George), Lets Talk About Love, Go With the Flow, and more. Right-wing media seized this opportunity to call hypocrisy, much as they did when Californias Governor Newsom posed with a pile of banned books. Though he held Beloved, the media focused again on the carefully-placed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, noting that Lees classic has been banned in several blue states.

Both publicity stunts did a good job once again confusing the public about the difference between a book ban and a curriculum update. While To Kill a Mockingbird has indeed been challenged and banned, the qualifier that its been banned in blue states is a conscious effort by right-wing banners to suggest that a book by a white woman about racism being replaced by books by Black authors who experience the true effects of racism is revoking free speech and freedom to read. As much as there is to dig into this willful misrepresentation, the real issue worth addressing here is how many public figures in speaking out against book bans refuse to engage with the issues of sex and gender (and indeed, race as well).

Among the most banned books in the past year are those which highlight sex, sexuality, and gender. PEN Americas report on book bans in US schools shows that queer characters and topics of sexuality are two of the biggest reasons a book is banned, falling right after books with protagonists of color. These categories, of course, overlap significantly, as seen through the books the American Library Association identified as the most challenged in 2021.

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It is far too easy and clean to highlight the importance of classics like To Kill a Mockingbird in your advocacy, whether youre a public official or not. Its hard for the average person, who likely read the book in their own school years, to not be outraged about a beloved book being pulled, whether or not Lees book is actually the target of book bans.

Moreover, by focusing on a classic like Lees, were avoiding having vital and life-saving conversations about sex and sexuality. In an era where entire states seek to erase the human experience through legislation like Dont Say Gay in Florida and where educators and students are told that their rights dont exist and their jobs are on the line for simply being who they are, ignoring sex, sexuality, and gender is a major oversight.

Because its not just Critical Race Theory and Social Emotional Learning that the right sees as the enemy. Comprehensive Sex Education (CSL) is the third in their triangle of targets. By pushing for the continued removal of comprehensive sex education in schools which has led to the uptick of books like Its Perfectly Normal being splashed across censorship groups with images of an individual with a mirror looking at her vulva and anus as she seeks to understand all of the parts of her biological body the thought is there will be no discussions of sex, gender, or sexuality anywhere but in the home. This means an education that not only may have an agenda but may be factually incorrect, damaging, and create life-long harm and fear around pleasure.

CSL is the scientifically-backed alternative to combating issues that emerge with abstinence-only education. CSL has been linked to reductions in sexual activity, risky sexual activities, sexually transmitted infections, and adolescent pregnancy (this information is from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, an authority on sexual behavior and health, among other things). Three decades of research, when analyzed by professionals in the Journal of Adolescent Health, show CSL and its focus on a broad range of sexual and gender related education had major benefits for adolescents and that it should be broadly adapted in educational systems.

Grooming has been the word du jour from the right. Groups like Moms For Liberty find passages in titles like Gender Queer and pull them out of context in order to prove their ill-founded theories that public education is indoctrinating children. In the top 10 books challenged in 2021, Gender Queer was named because of a couple of brief moments where there is a dream sequence by a legal adult wherein Maia fantasizes about their first experience having queer sex. It is developmentally appropriate and it is representative of what queer individuals can experience the first time they dare allow themselves to think with desire something that is chemically created and controlled in our bodies and brains.

In Out of Darkness, there is an anal sex scene. This scene isnt about pleasure. Its about how the main character, a Mexican American, is reduced to objectification. It is embedded in the storys setting, its time frame, and its understanding of how brown bodies are seen as tools to be used by an oppressor. This happened. This happens.

Beloved? A depiction of brutal rape.

Both Out of Darkness and Beloved describe sexual crimes, both of which go uncharged in the text because they happen to marginalized bodies. Crimes that, were they to happen to white bodies, would be seen differently by these right-wing groups (debatably, of course if these crimes were done by Nice White Boys With Futures On The Line, theyd likely still be challenged).

Beyond Magenta and This Book Is Gay celebrate queer identities and allow queer voices to be seen and heard. They speak to the fact gender and sexuality are complex and are life-long processes of understanding and breaking apart socially-created norms and structures. The self-same structures, of course, that right-wing censors seek to uphold through legislation based on selective reading of the Bible.

Lawn Boy? Sex happens in the book between two kids and it happens to a young boy who grows up thinking about what that experience meant for his sense of self through adolescence and early adulthood. The main character is working class and this sexual encounter at age 10 impacts the way he looks at and approaches the world, much as it would any individual with similar life stories.

All Boys Arent Blue? Sex, gender, and sexuality. Johnsons memoir his true, lived experiences includes discussion of sexual assault, explored further in the authors followup memoir..which, interestingly, has not seen the same assault by censors.

Lees book about a white savior offers none of the above. Theres no author of color, and theres certainly not sex, sexuality, or gender to discuss. While the trail in the book is about rape, there is zero depiction of the realities of rape in the book. It is easier to accept rape conceptually as bad, but books that put it on the page and explore the long-lasting impact of an unwanted sex act, particularly as it relates to dehumanizing a non-cis, straight, white body, show why its bad.

We need to be talking about the sex parts and the gender parts of the books being challenged. Those with the platforms to do good work against book bannings need to be versed not just in the easy-to-reach-for classics but the harder books. The books that hold up a mirror and a window to readers in todays society. The books that, for young readers, offer insight into who they are and what the world around them really looks like. You can ban discussions of LGBTQ people in the classroom but that doesnt stop LGBTQ individuals from being inside those same rooms. It simply puts yet another barrier into their lives.

American culture is a prude culture. Were afraid to talk about the messy and complex stuff. We refuse to engage with accurate terminology for human anatomy and human chemistry. It is much easier to accept violence on a mass scale as just the cost of being a person in the US than it is to accept that a child might be queer and deserves to read about people like them. That indeed, they may see a picture of sex between two individuals with the same body parts depicted in a book meant to be for sexual education yet somehow, its perceived as okay to lie to children about the stork bringing a baby, rather than explain that a baby is created when an egg and a sperm meet.

Until more people are willing to talk about the sex stuff, were not going to be moving this conversation forward. Well continue to cling to puritanical ideals and fail to put an end to book bans and intellectual freedom.

Especially if when a leader does highlight a book with sex in it, theyre suddenly disappeared from their job for weeks.

For more ways to take action against censorship, use this toolkit forhow to fight book bans and challenges, as well as this guide toidentifying fake news. Then learn how and why you may want touse FOIA to uncover book challenges.

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You Need To Talk About The Sex Parts in Banned Books: Book Censorship News, May 20, 2022 - Book Riot

Facebook held a conference call Tuesday to discuss which posts they most often remove and why, which was inconveniently timed after the weekends Buffalo mass shooting video was still on the platform.

One of the many depressing aspects of Saturdays racist mass shooting in Buffalo was how the grisly video proliferated on social networks. According to CNN, the shooter livestreamed it on Twitch, and to that streaming platforms great credit, the stream was cut off within two minutes. The Washington Post reports that only 22 people saw it.

But eventually Facebook enters the picture. Clearly some (if not all) of those 22 viewers were horrible white supremacist trolls, because according to the New York Times, the video was was posted on a site called Streamable and viewed more than three million times before it was removed. And a link to that video was shared hundreds of times across Facebook and Twitter hours after the shooting.

As of Tuesday, there were still a few copies of the video floating around on Facebook, according to that Washington Post report. And this is the unfortunate backdrop against which Facebook released a quarterly report on which posts they remove and why, as The Verge explains.

The report was accompanied by a conference call, as Facebooks parent company Meta now has these calls and reports quarterly, not long after the company's earnings calls. The call was scheduled well before the shooting took place, but obviously, Meta had some explaining to do.

People create new versions and new external links to try to evade our policies, vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said, according to AdWeek. We will continue to learn, refine our processes and refine our systems to ensure that we can take down these links more quickly in the future. Its only a couple of days after the incident, so we dont have any more to share at this point.

Meta also released the Facebook quarterly community standards enforcement report, which The Verge describes as a document that has a boring name, but is full of delight for those of us who are nosy and enjoy reading about the failures of artificial-intelligence systems.

And yes, human moderators are much better at recognizing genuinely problematic posts than bot moderators. Facebook counts up the posts they admit were wrongfully removed, and the bots wrongfully remove posts more frequently than human moderators. No surprise there.

What is a surprise, at least in the context of the current Big Tech censorship discourse, is that very little political speech is removed. The Verge sifted through the removed-post numbers and concluded Very little of it is political, at least in the sense of commentary about current events. Instead, its posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, and bullying and harassment.

These are Facebooks own numbers, and not independently verified, so take that into account. But some standout numbers are that Facebook removed 1.6 billion fake accounts, and 2.5 million posts labeled "Terrorism and Organized Hate."

The current conservative horseshit grievances about Facebook censorship try to frame this as an attempt to attack free speech, all done by a company where Left Coast Liberals are supposedly in charge. This is a huge part of Elon Musks Twitter takeover discourse (to whatever degree said takeover is actually happening). And while I hate to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, its pretty clear that the censorship claims are driven by bad-faith attempts to blur the line between political speech and actual violence. But since those bad-faith efforts have proven an excellent political talking point, there is no amount of transparency from Facebook that will likely change this.

Related: Facebook Relaxes (and Then Reverses) Its Rules Over Calling for Leaders to Be Killed, Because of Putin [SFist]

Image: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash

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Facebook Releases Report On Which Posts They Remove and Censor, Turns Out Most Aren't Political - SFist

History hardly lacks examples of unintended consequences, but Hanoi 1902 remains especially instructive. Having caused a rat infestation by laying nine miles of sewage pipes, the colonial government of French Indochina reckoned it could fix things by paying locals to catch them: one cent per tail handed in at the local municipal office. The scheme began in April and by June the Vietnamese were producing up to 20,000 tails per day.

And yet the rat population seemed only to increase to the point where bubonic plague returned to the city. Why? Instead of killing rats, hunters simply docked their tails and set them free to breed more rats. There were even reports of rat farms popping up just outside the city.

This provides a perfect illustration of how well-intentioned incentives can misfire. When you reward people for certain outcomes, they will pursue them by methods that you never foresaw, and with side effects that you never intended.

Something very similar has happened in the UKs higher-education sector. Advance HE, a charity established in 2018 from a merger of the Equality Challenge Unit, the Higher Education Academy and Leadership for Higher Education, currently offers two incentive schemes to British universities: the Race Equality Charter and the Athena SWAN Charter. Universities apply for Bronze, Silver and (for Athena SWAN) Gold awards that demonstrate their commitment to race and gender equality. To apply, institutions have to subscribe to Advance HE and submit, among other things, an action plan for change. If an institution wins, it can get a shiny badge that it can advertise to potential students, employees and funding bodies.

Racism, sexism and other prejudices do exist, of course. And some institutions are taking serious steps to address them for instance, by introducing blind application processes for some posts, as at the University of Birmingham. But all too often these action plans are effectively blueprints for corporate virtue-signalling, censorship and indoctrination.

As part of its race-equality action plan, the University of Dundee, for instance, wants to make anti-racism training compulsory for all staff and students. Imperial College London, among many others, wants to extend the use of unconscious bias training. Never mind the glaring lack of evidence that anti-racism training helps anyone except those selling it, or the mountains of evidence that unconscious bias training is useless.

More importantly, universities attempts to win the approval of Advance HE, and thus signal their virtue, are eroding academic freedom and free speech.

Take the many ham-fisted plans to encourage the calling out, reporting, suppression and punishment of microaggressions commonplace expressions that make some people feel discomfited, even where no malice is intended.

For instance, the University of Cambridge tried to launch a new website to allow staff and students to report these micro-offences anonymously. The list of potential microagressions included the stereotyping of religion. Think of the effect this would have in the seminar room. Philosophers, for instance, have made all kinds of general and stereotypical claims about religions that are not entirely complimentary. As a teacher of philosophy, I may have to mention these claims is this a form of microaggression?

Either way, debating and thinking through potentially challenging ideas ought to be central to the academic enterprise. If anyone in charge thinks shutting down such debate is an acceptable price to pay for winning an Advance HE badge of approval then perhaps they shouldnt be running a university.

The erosion of free speech and academic freedom doesnt stop there. To win an Athena SWAN award a university must show its commitment to particular principles. These have changed since 2015. Where once they included tackling the discriminatory treatment often experienced by trans people, now an institution must also agree to fostering collective understanding that individuals have the right to determine their own gender identity.

This looks like a move from tackling discrimination to the policing of thought, and on a highly controversial topic, too. Gender identity means your personal sense of your own gender, but there are many serious thinkers who doubt that that means much at all. Are we meant to suppress these critical voices? And even if that is not Advance HEs intention, it is certainly something it appears to be incentivising. Surely, the job of a university is to facilitate open debate not to foster collective understanding on any controversial matter.

Advance HE claims that it doesnt want to compromise academic freedom. I dont think any, or at least not many, of the HE institutions which sign up to its schemes want to destroy academic freedom, either. But this will be the unintended upshot of what some of them are doing.

If Advance HE is serious about defending academic freedom, perhaps it should set up an Academic Freedom Charter. In the meantime, the rest of us will need to work hard to put freedom of speech and thought back at the heart of our universities, where they belong.

Arif Ahmed is a lecturer in philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

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Universities are sleepwalking into censorship - spiked - Spiked