Per the article, the USPS used every stupid, creepy, irresponsible surveillance tool to do pseudo-police work that should never have been their job. And they sold it to Republicans as a way to keep tabs on BLM protestors, and said something else to Democrats.
I find myself oddly aligned with Matt Gaetz here.
I'm going back to using the Trystero.
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I finally hit on the perfect term for the interoperability issues around sharing friends' data: Other People's Privacy (OPP).
So bummed I hadn't thought of that in time for this event.
The UK Online Harms draft captures contradictions of the platform speech debate in perfect microcosm.
Platforms must take down one legally undefined kind of content ("harmful") while leaving up another ("democratically important").
Have fun with that, guys.
If we could agree on what's "harmful" and what's "democratically important," we would be in a much different place as a society.
But I'm sure Facebook can sort it out.
And if they don't, Ofcom can sort it out and fine them.
It's good to have the inherent contradictions of the last few year's debate forced to the surface like that. Dialectics move fast these days.
Welcome to the future, where the government reaches out and takes user posts down from platforms directly. No more pretense that the platform is considering their request, exercising judgment, or trying to protect users. bbc.com/news/technolog…
Removals like these should be tombstoned with state branding. Anyone trying to access the content should see exactly which govt agency took it down.
(As @alexfeerst and I discussed long ago re compliance with the rapid takedown requirements of the Terrorist Content Regulation.)
Direct state-initiated removal from a marketplace is arguably different from such removal for "pure speech" platforms.
Letting state agencies require speech suppression without prior judicial review would be a prior restraint problem in some constitutional / human rights systems.
Uh... Doesn't Facebook permanently ban people all the time? I would have thought that was normal.
And does this kind of vindicate YouTube?
OMG wait you guys. Once that Florida law is in effect, will the FB Oversight Board decision be nullified (bc the law requires leaving up posts by candidates)?
Or... does the Board have to decide if that law is constitutional in order to determine its own authority??
I LOVE this.
The meme that “platforms algorithmically amplify polarizing content because engagement drives ad revenue” has gotten seriously out of hand. Someone needed to burst that bubble. It’s such a bummer that the someone is Facebook VP Nick Clegg. 1/ nickclegg.medium.com/you-and-the-al…
People will give his points less credence because of who they’re coming from. (And posting them on Medium, as if they were independent musings and not a message crafted by Facebook’s Comms and Policy teams is an interesting branding gesture but isn’t going to fool anyone.) 2/
He’s saying so many things that are right, though. 3/
This part of Zuckerberg’s testimony is a feat of geopolitical dexterity. 18 months ago, Facebook lost a major case about global content filtering in the EU. So now it’s telling Congress that *every* platform should be held to the standard imposed on FB by European courts. 1/
Platforms are geopolitical vectors. They take laws, including speech laws, from one country and impose them everywhere else. 2/
Historically that meant exporting U.S. 1st Amendment values, to the dismay of countries with different constitutional systems. That’s reversed now. Platforms are net importers of more restrictive speech rules from other countries to the U.S. 3/