Fourteen attorneys general are demanding that Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg censor more posts and crack down on users who amplify content about COVID-19 that does not agree with the governments narrative.

While we appreciate the efforts your platforms have undertaken to address some elements of vaccine disinformation on your platforms, including connecting users with factual COVID-19 information, we believe Facebook itself is undermining these efforts by allowing such false or misleading statements to persist and spread, their letter states.

The attorneys general hailing from Connecticut, California, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia not only asked Facebooks founder to reveal its internal censorship methods for dealing with vaccine disinformation, but also asked the Big Tech mogul to commit to deplatforming certain users for promoting anti-vaccine content and activists.

Facebook already has a long history of censoring, downplaying, and even removing content it doesnt agree with but the attorneys general cited the complaints of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a Democrat activist who helped nuke the New York Posts Hunter Biden story last October, as the reason to demand more action from Zuckerberg.

How is vaccine content being scored for removal? Have political or public relations considerations been factored into the scoring system? the letter asks. The Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of thousands of anti-vaccine comments have been viewed every day. What is Facebooks protocol to address false and misleading vaccine content that appears in the comments section of posts?

Anew report from The Federalist shows that the Facebook CEO funneled $419.5 million with strings attached through The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) to select U.S. elections offices before the 2020 election. These Zuck Bucks were largely awarded based on partisanship to local and state offices, and demanded the promotion of universal mail-in voting, greater opportunities for ballot curing, and other vulnerable election tactics.

Zuckerberg didnt just help Democrats by censoring their political opponents. He directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts, Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway wrote in her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

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

The rest is here:

14 Dem AGs Demand Facebook Censor Dissidents More Than It ...

Photo Courtesy of John Bauld

Content warning: this article contains discussions of transphobia and transphobic violence.

Recently, comedian Dave Chapelle has come under fire for voicing anti-transgender remarks in his new Netflix special The Closer. In a slew of transphobic rhetoric targeting trans women and a handful of comments defending the homophobic comments of rapper DaBaby, Chapelle doubled down on past instances of transphobia, going so far as to pit the experiences of Black people and the LGBTQ+ community against each other in an attempt to undermine the struggle faced by queer people in the 21st century.

The Closer is only the most recent instance of media personalities using their platforms to promote hate, and it certainly wont be the last. Moving forward, one thing needs to be indisputable: if you care about trans people, you need to stop supporting transphobes. Completely.

You can preach separating the art from the artist until youre red in the face, but the fact at the end of the day is that continuing to platform bigots does nothing but embolden their message, thereby endangering the marginalized communities they target. Consistently turning a blind eye to bigotry and passing off violent rhetoric as a joke forces marginalized communities to face increased violence while also undermining and overlooking their experiences.

Take, for instance, J.K. Rowling a known transphobe defended by Chapelle, who proudly assumed the label of Team TERF as he came to her aid in reference to her past remarks. Her books are chock-full of racism, antisemitism and transphobia, mirroring her values in real life.

Its insufficient to write her TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminst behavior off as a small misdemeanor in her otherwise lovably nostalgic franchise because her continued success allows for trans-exclusionary radical feminists to be emboldened by the sheer scale of her bigotry in the media. Rowlings transphobia isnt just harmful rhetoric confined to a fictional narrative it actively contributes to anti-transgender legislation and policies, seen when Republican Senator James Lankford quoted her while fighting the passage of the Equality Act.

The fearmongering generated by trans-exclusionary radical feminists is seen in the widespread yet disproven narrative that trans people are dangerous, which in turn creates more danger for visibly transgender people simply existing in public spaces. A woman trying to use the restroom is now more likely to be harassed because a cisgender person deemed her very existence a threat.

Making dehumanizing jokes about trans people isnt funny or subversive its violent. The most recent reports from the Human Rights Campaign suggest that at least 42 transgender and/or gender nonconforming people have already been killed since the beginning of 2021, with 2020 being the previous most violent year on record for transphobic violence. GLAAD also reports that these numbers may often be lower than reality due to underreporting.

By extension, transgender people are more likely to have less legal and healthcare protections, are more likely to live in poverty and are more likely to face harassment and discrimination. Trans women specifically are more likely to face violence than their cis peers, according to reports from GLAAD. I include these statistics not to use their suffering as a talking point, but rather to emphasize the reality experienced by so many transgender and gender nonconforming people in the wake of bigotry by those who cry injustice at being cancelled for their hateful remarks.

Its nave to say that jokes in poor taste have no effect on the world around us. Every time a public figure with a large following spouts harmful rhetoric, real people will be hurt. As such, the dollars you spend supporting these people are just reinforcing their impact.

Its insufficient to say you support trans rights while doing nothing to materially improve the circumstances in which transgender people live. What heavy lifting are you doing to deconstruct transphobia in your daily life? Do you see your trans peers as their actual gender, rather than simply memorizing their pronouns? Do you call out casual transphobia when you hear people using it including your friends and family? Are you taking time to educate yourself about the issues facing the trans community? Are you putting in effort to help trans people receive gender affirming care?

As harsh as it may sound, your words mean nothing if they arent reflected by your continuous action. If you arent consistently and actively listening to transgender people and fighting for their rights to respect and safety, you need to ask yourself why that is.

Read more here:

Deplatforming TERFs cannot end with performative activism - The Hofstra Chronicle

Its a strange fact of history that critics began calling on Twitter to ban Donald Trump shortly after he was elected president and got what they wanted a few days before the end of his term. For four years, we talked about a ban why it was necessary, why it was impossible; how refusing showed that platforms were principled, how it showed they were hypocrites and just when there was nothing left to say, it happened. There were detailed justifications for the ban when it came (it was a state of emergency, the best among bad options, and so on), but the timing suggests a simpler logic. As long as Trump was president, platforms couldnt punish him. Once hed lost the election, he was fair game.

Twitters decision to ban Trump had a cascading effect: Facebook issued its own ban, then YouTube, then everyone else. The Trump-friendly social network Parler came under scrutiny, and the platforms host, Amazon Web Services, took a closer look at the violent threats that had spread on Parler in advance of the Capitol riot, ultimately deciding to drop the network entirely. Trump boasted about starting his own social network only to offer a short-lived series of online press releases. Journalists who shared the releases too eagerly were shamed for helping the disgraced president evade the ban, and social pressures made the screenshots less common. Soon, even Facebook ads showing Trump speeches drew criticism as a potential evasion of the ban.

The months since have perfectly illustrated the effectiveness of deplatforming. Once inescapable, the former president has all but disappeared from the daily discourse. He continues to hold rallies and make statements, but the only way to hear about them is to go to a rally in person or tune into fringe networks like OANN or NewsMax. Before the ban, there was real doubt about whether deplatforming a major political figure could work. After the ban, it is undeniable.

For the most part, platforms have avoided meaningful blowback for the decision, although theres been growing angst about it from the American right wing. If they can do this to Trump, the thinking goes, they can do it to anyone. Its entirely true. This is the dream of equal justice under the law: anyone who commits murder should be worried that theyll go to jail for it. There should be no one so powerful that they cant be kicked out of a restaurant if they start spitting in other peoples food. In this one difficult case, Twitter was able to live up to the ideal of equal justice. But as we look to the next 10 years of speech moderation, its hard not to be anxious about whether platforms can keep it up.

We tend to talk about moderation politics as something that happens between platforms and users (i.e., who gets banned and why), but the Trump debacle shows theres another side. Like all companies, social platforms have to worry about the politics of the countries they operate in. If companies end up on the wrong side of those politics, they could face regulatory blowback or get ejected from the country entirely. But moderation is politically toxic: it never makes friends, only enemies, even as it profoundly influences the political conversation. Increasingly, platforms are arranging their moderation systems to minimize that political fallout above all else.

The problem is much bigger than just Twitter and Trump. In India, Facebook has spent the last seven years in an increasingly fraught relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, cultivating close ties with the countrys leader while violence against Indias Muslim minority continued to escalate. In Myanmar, a February coup forced Facebook to welcome groups it had previously counted as terrorists and suppress groups that mounted military opposition to the new regime.

Not surprisingly, both countries have flirted with an outright ban on Facebook, flexing moderation systems of their own. Modi has spoken openly about a ban, and India has less to lose from a ban than Facebook. The platform would drop 260 million users overnight, and it wouldnt take long for markets and investors to realize the implications. So when a post pushes the limits of whats acceptable, Facebook will usually make exceptions.

The starkest example of this dynamic was revealed by the Facebook Papers in October. In Vietnam, the company faced growing pressure from the ruling Communist Party to moderate against anti-state content essentially building the repressive values of the regime into its own moderation strategy. But when the issue came to a head, Facebook CEO (and now Meta CEO) Mark Zuckerberg personally directed the company to comply, saying it was more important to ensure our services remain available for millions of people who rely on them every day. Given the choice of protecting the independence of its moderation system or staying on the governments good side, Zuckerberg chose the easy way out.

There was a time when a country-wide blockade of Facebook would have been unthinkable. Civil society groups like Access Now have spent years trying to establish a norm against internet blackouts, arguing that they provide cover for human rights abuses. But Facebook is so toxic in US politics that its hard to imagine a president lobbying foreign countries on its behalf. When Myanmar instituted a temporary block in the wake of the countrys military coup, there were few objections.

These are ugly, difficult political shifts, and Facebook is playing an active role in them, just as much as national institutions like the press or the national guard. Facebook isnt pretending to be a neutral arbiter anymore, and for all the posturing of Facebooks Oversight Board a pseudo-independent body with authority over major moderation decisions there isnt any greater noble logic to the platforms choices. Theyre just trying to stay on the right side of the ruling party.

This kind of realpolitik isnt what deplatformers had in mind. The goal was to push Facebook and the others to take responsibility for their impact on the world. But instead of making Facebook and the other platforms more responsible, it has made them more unapologetic about the political realities. These are just corporations protecting themselves. Theres no longer any reason to pretend otherwise.

We often talk about tech companies as if theyre unprecedented, but the world has grappled with this kind of transnational corporate power before. If you want to stop Coca-Cola or United Fruit Company from killing union leaders, its not enough to pass laws in the US. You need an international standard of conduct, reaching beyond nation-specific concepts like probable cause or the first amendment.

For decades, a constellation of international activists has been building such a system, a body of voluntary transnational agreements generally referred to as international human rights law. The name is misleading in some ways since its less of a judicial system than a series of non-binding treaties agreeing to general principles: countries shouldnt discriminate on the basis of race or gender, they shouldnt use children as soldiers, they shouldnt torture people.

The language of the treaties is purposefully vague, and enforcement mostly consists of public shaming. (The 1987 Convention Against Torture didnt prevent the United States from embracing enhanced interrogation techniques, for example.) But you can see the beginnings of an international consensus there, nudging us towards a less oppressive and violent world.

For the more thoughtful critics of social media, this is the only system broad enough to truly rein in a company like Facebook. Jillian York, who dwells on the Facebook problem at length in her book Silicon Values, told me the only long-term fix to the troubles roiling India and the United States would be something on that scale. We need to be thinking about an international mechanism for holding these companies accountable to a standard, she told me.

Optimists might see the shift towards deplatforming and away from free speech extremism as a step in the right direction. Reddit-style speech libertarianism is very much an American concept, relying on the relatively unusual protections of the First Amendment. But rather than drifting towards an international consensus, York sees platforms as simply cut adrift, doing whatever fits the needs of their employees and users at a given moment. In this dispensation, there are few principles anchoring companies like Facebook and Twitter and few protections if they run astray.

Were now in a phase where theyre acting of their own accord, York says. I dont think the current scenario is workable for much longer. I dont think people will put up with it.

Our best glimpse of the post-deplatforming future has been Facebooks Oversight Board, which has done its best to square the realities of a platform with some kind of higher speech principles. Its the kind of notice-and-appeal system that advocates have been asking platforms to adopt for years. Faced with a never-ending stream of hard choices, Facebook put tens of millions of dollars into building a master moderator that everyone can trust. For all the systems flaws, its the best anyones been able to do.

In practice, most of the Oversight Board rulings trace the line where differences of opinion give way to political violence. Of the 18 decisions from the board so far, 13 are directly related to racial or sectarian conflicts, whether dealing with Kurdish separatists, anti-Chinese sentiment in Myanmar, or a jokey meme about the Armenian genocide. The specifics of the ruling might be about a particular Russian term for Azerbaijanis, but the potential for mass oppression and genocide looms in the background of each one. Taking on the work of moderating Facebook, the Oversight Board has ended up as the arbiter of how much racism is acceptable in conflicts all around the world.

But for all the boards public deliberations, it hasnt changed the basic problem of platform politics. Whenever the Oversight Boards fragile principles for online speech conflict with Facebooks corporate self-interest, the oversight board loses out. The most egregious example so far is Facebooks Crosscheck system that resulted in leniency high-profile accounts, which the Oversight Board had to find out about from The Wall Street Journal. But even as the company sidesteps its own panel of experts, Facebook can retreat into platitudes about the free exchange of opinions, as if every choice was being guided by a higher set of principles.

Weve been using freedom of opinion to sidestep this mess for a very long time. Jean-Paul Sartre described a version of the same pattern in his 1946 work Anti-Semite and Jew, writing just after the Allied liberation of Paris. In the opening lines of the essay, he marvels at how often the blood-soaked rhetoric of the Nazis was minimized as simply antisemitic opinion:

This word opinion makes us stop and think. It is the word a hostess uses to bring to an end a discussion that threatens to become acrimonious. It suggests that all points of view are equal; it reassures us, for it gives an inoffensive appearance to ideas by reducing them to the level of tastes. All tastes are natural; all opinions are permitted In the name of freedom of opinion, the anti-semite asserts the right to preach the anti-Jewish crusade everywhere.

This is the dream that tech companies are only now waking from. Companies like Facebook play the role of the hostess hoping for discussion that is lively enough to keep us in the room but not so heated that it will damage the furniture. But we can no longer pretend these opinions are safely cordoned off from the world. They are a part of the same power struggles that shape every other political arena. Worse, they are subject to the same dangers. We can only hope that, over the next 10 years, platforms find a better way to grapple with them.

Read more:

Facebook, Twitter, and social media vs. the world - The Verge

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.

Original post:

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

Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.

On Friday, the Washington Post dropped another bombshell report on what President Donald Trumps top lieutenants were up to during the January 6 insurrection: As a mob chanting hang Mike Pence! raged through the Capitol, one of Trumps lawyers, John Eastman, sent an email to the vice presidents office blaming Pence for the carnage. According to an email obtained by the paper, Eastman (who was responding to an angry email from a Pence staffer) wrote that The siege is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened. Whats more, the Post reported, Eastman continued to advocate for the electoral college results to be rejected after Congress returned to business following the riot.

Eastman, at the time (but no longer) a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, had spoken alongside Rudy Giuliani at Trumps rally on the National Mall that morning, where he alleged widespread fraud from Georgia voting machines and stated that if Pence didnt delay the certification of the Electoral College, We no longer live in a self-governing republic. But behind the scenes, hed played an even more important role; as Robert Costa and Bob Woodward reported in their book Peril, Eastman had drafted a memo that outlined a series of steps by which Trump, with Pences help, could overturn the results of the election.

Since that memo was published, Eastman and his current employer, the Claremont Institute, have sought to downplay its significance. Claremont recently described the reporting and criticism of its fellow as a disinformation, de-platforming, and ostracism campaign, and vowed to not remain silent in the face of widespread lies peddled by malicious domestic political opponents. Eastman, in a lengthy interview with National Review, said that the memo was simply one of several arguments hed prepared for Team Trumps perusal and not one he ultimately recommended or even agreed with in full.

But Eastman was not participating in some after-hours law-school bull session; he was advising a corrupt and desperate man who would do almost anything to hold onto power. The radical scenario outlined in the memo, and the equally-radical scenario Eastman says he ultimately recommendedin which Pence would decline to certify the results, buying time for Republican legislators in key states to purportedly investigate alleged fraud, and submit new slates of electorswould have only indulged Trumps delusions about his own chances.

And Eastman pursued all of this, because he was likewise deluded about what had happened in November. As part of a legal analysis he prepared for state legislators making the case that they could reject their states election results, the Post reported, Eastmans seven-page paper featured theories about voter fraud published by the right-wing blog the Gateway Pundit and an anonymous Twitter user named DuckDiver19.

DuckDiver19. Its a long way from Federalist no. 68.

Read more from the original source:

The More We Learn About John Eastman's Involvement in Trump's Coup, the Worse it Gets Mother Jones - Mother Jones

While many of these debates will be familiar to some readers, the analytic precision Srinivasan brings to them serves as a reminder that sexual ethics always need to be contextual and nuanced. The imperative for feminism, as these essays eloquently demonstrate, is not to find a safe space in which clear parameters are drawn (with even clearer exclusions), but to dwell on discomfort and ambivalence that come from being genuinely open to inclusivity. It also means acknowledging the deep tensions that have shaped feminism as a political movement.

To be sure, Srinivasan is not the first to make this observation. The poet and philosopher Denise Riley made a similar observation many decades ago, noting how the inconstant ontological status of being a woman has always made feminism a site of instability and tension. But, for Riley, as indeed I think for Srinivasan, this need not trouble us precisely because it bears witness to the internal differences that have productively shaped feminist political agency.

What perhaps needs to trouble feminism is knowing when and how to relinquish power. The final essay, Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism ponders how feminist gains might be implicated in other structural inequalities. To ask which women benefit from feminisms advances, and which women dont, or knowing when and how to relinquish power so other voices can be heard, does not mean giving up on feminism as a transformational political movement.

Loading

Instead, Srinivasan asks that we confront feminisms deep ethical ambiguities, not least its frequent complicity in global capitalisms counterfeit language of individual freedom and a carceral culture that is deeply raced and classed. This is a book that gets you thinking and gives you enough hope to imagine that things might be otherwise.

Follow this link:

Sex and the womens movement, then and now - Sydney Morning Herald