I really appreciate this very, very generous profile from @petercoy but I do want to disagree with the headline, which is reinforced by the article. I do have a credential- the intersection of my whiteness, maleness and cisness. 1/N https://t.co/h9YcdjFDkK
— Nathan "Donate to @survivepunishNY" Tankus (@NathanTankus) July 2, 2020
It’s good to see someone acknowledge their own privilege in such a straightforward and honest way.
Lol. Really the only way it would look right: pic.twitter.com/ed1zkRjbTT— Laleh Khalili (@LalehKhalili) June 30, 2020
In and of itself, this tweet may justify the existence of Twitter.
With a growing boycott of ads from large advertisers, Facebook is promising half measures to address politically motivated hate speech and lies.
Rather unsurprisingly, given Facebook’s affection for right wing conspiracy theorists and racists, these motions are limited to a bland notice.
Hopefully, the advertisers will see through this:
As advertisers pull away from Facebook to protest the social networking giant’s hands-off approach to misinformation and hate speech, the company is instituting a number of stronger policies to woo them back.
In a livestreamed segment of the company’s weekly all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recapped some of the steps Facebook is already taking, and announced new measures to fight voter suppression and misinformation — although they amount to things that other social media platforms like Twitter have already enacted and enforced in more aggressive ways.
At the heart of the policy changes is an admission that the company will continue to allow politicians and public figures to disseminate hate speech that does, in fact, violate Facebook’s own guidelines — but it will add a label to denote they’re remaining on the platform because of their “newsworthy” nature.
It’s a watered-down version of the more muscular stance that Twitter has taken to limit the ability of its network to amplify hate speech or statements that incite violence.
………
Facebook is also going to take additional steps to restrict hate speech in advertising.
“Specifically, we’re expanding our ads policy to prohibit claims that people from a specific race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity or immigration status are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re also expanding our policies to better protect immigrants, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from ads suggesting these groups are inferior or expressing contempt, dismissal or disgust directed at them.”
Zuckerberg’s remarks came days of advertisers — most recently Unilever and Verizon — announced that they’re going to pull their money from Facebook as part the #StopHateforProfit campaign organized by civil rights groups.
It's only Cancel Culture if it originates in the Cancelle region of France.
Otherwise, it's just sparkling consequences.
— Berrak Sarıkaya 😷 (@BerrakBiz) June 26, 2020
Am I the only one who thinks that “Cancel Culture” is being fomented by the right wing to sabotage movement on progressive issues?
"I joined a gang of bank robbers. These incompetents, tripped on their shoelaces, got lost, ran out of gas, forgot the masks and passed a note to a teller that read 'I have a gub.' Worst part? They wouldn't let me blow things up! I quit. Here's a book about my moral superiority." https://t.co/tzYQUyqmbQ
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) June 25, 2020
John Bolton is not your friend, and he has been a consistent force for evil his entire life.
Facebook is starting to lose advertisers because they think that it is a toxic organization:
Nima Gardideh, the co-founder of a digital advertising agency, has encouraged his clients to hold back millions in advertising dollars from Facebook.
………
But there was something else weighing on his mind: Facebook’s hands-off attitude toward President Trump’s aggressive, misleading posts.
“We harshly disagree with how Facebook has approached this,” said Mr. Gardideh, the co-founder of Pearmill, a New York marketing agency with a dozen clients, mostly tech start-ups. “For the past couple of years, this problem has become bigger and bigger. These massive platforms have to care about free speech issues to some extent, but Facebook is on the extreme end of not caring.”
Unlike Twitter and Snap, which have toughened their stances against Mr. Trump’s online statements that contain misinformation or promote violence, Facebook has held firm on its decision to leave his posts alone. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has defended the policy, despite the resignations of some staff members and public criticism from current and former employees.
In recent days, many companies have cautiously returned to advertising, after having pulled back during the height of the pandemic in the United States. But some have decided not to advertise on Facebook, now that it has become clear that Mr. Zuckerberg will give the president a wide berth.
But it ain’t just advertisers. Non-profit organizations are starting to reject funds from Zuckerberg’s Panopticon too, which kind of boggles the mind, since evil captains of industry is a primary source of funding for such groups:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to apply platform policies to moderate rule-breaking posts by President Trump and other political figures has prompted a pair of tech policy groups to stop accepting money from the ad biz.
On Wednesday, Public Knowledge and the Open Technology Institute said they would no longer accept funding from Facebook because it refuses to moderate hate, misinformation, and abuse.
“I believe that different platforms can have different moderation policies,” said Chris Lewis, President and CEO of Public Knowledge, in a statement.
“However, platforms shouldn’t hide behind the First Amendment as an excuse to allow hate, misinformation, and abuse to run rampant on their services, particularly when they hold such a dominant position in the marketplace. Doing so distorts what the First Amendment means, and ignores the influence that moderation has on our civic conversations and system of democracy.”
Facebook’s relentless support of right-wing lies and exhortations are not an accident, nor are they an artifact of deeply held beliefs about free speech by Zuckerberg.
They are an artifact that right-wing mythology and violence get more engagement from the users than does the left wing equivalent, and so generates so generates more money, as both Zuckerberg and the Macedonian teens promulgating conspiracy theories in 2016.
It’s all about the Benjamins.
Британский парламентарий призывает громить еврейские могилы.
🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️ https://t.co/lY5ymjJDGh— Ruslana Boshirova Альянс пианистов (@ValLisitsa) June 11, 2020
In case you are wondering, “Британский парламентарий призывает громить еврейские могилы,” translates to, “British MP calls for smashing Jewish graves.”
It’s not a statue that he wants destroyed, it’s Karl Marx’s grave stone.
The problem with relying on your gut is that your gut generally produces only puke and shit.
— (((haroldfeld))) (@haroldfeld) June 5, 2020
This is Matt Taibbi level snark.
I find this Twitter thread by an Egyptologist on how to pull down an obelisk to be very important, particularly in the case, as she notes, where the “Obelisk might be masquerading as a racist monument.
This is beautiful, man.
RELEASE THE QUACKEN!— Nikki Kennedy (@NikkiKennedy957) February 27, 2020
Almost perfect.
Wewease the Quacken would have been perfect.
Pai just called out Musk’s play for government subsidies by labeling his Starlink satellite network high latency:
The Federal Communications Commission is not convinced that SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network will be able to deliver the low latencies promised by CEO Elon Musk. As a result, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing limits on SpaceX’s ability to apply for funding from a $16 billion rural-broadband program.
While traditional satellite broadband generally suffers from latency of about 600ms, Musk says that Starlink will offer “latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level.”
Everyone expects Starlink to offer much lower latency than traditional satellites because SpaceX satellites are being launched in low Earth orbits ranging from 540km to 570km. By contrast, geostationary satellites used for broadband orbit at about 35,000km.
“SpaceX claims that because its low-Earth orbit satellite system operates at ‘an altitude of 550 kilometers,’ it can deliver roundtrip latency at less than 50ms,” according to a public draft of Pai’s proposed rules for the $16 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund distribution. But the FCC plans to classify SpaceX and all other satellite operators as high-latency providers for purposes of the funding distribution, saying the providers haven’t proven they can deliver low-latency broadband.
………
SpaceX and other satellite operators are also being ruled ineligible for a gigabit tier. Both the latency and gigabit decisions would put SpaceX at a disadvantage. As Pai said in an announcement, his plan “prioritizes bids offering to provide even faster speeds (up to a gigabit) and lower latency by giving those bids greater weight in the auction and awarding support to the bidder offering the best combination of speed and latency in each area.”
SpaceX has made demonstrations, but they are breadboards conducted under optimum conditions.
Once Starlink is in service, and is serving customers in the real world, that decision can be revisited, but my guess is that the claims of high bandwidth and low latency will be as much of an illusion as Tesla’s claims of self driving cars being just around the corner.
Once again, Mark Zuckerberg takes something that sounds like a good ideal, aork from home, and turns it evil, announcing that if you are working remotely, and end up in an area that is not as expensive as the Bay Area, they will cut your pay, and they will spy on you, and if they catch you living some place less expensive, they will fire you:
Mr. Zuckerberg said that location would affect employee compensation, both for new hires and for those who relocate. He said that Facebook will monitor employees’ locations and those who mislead the company would face “severe” penalties.
“If you live in a place where the cost of living is dramatically lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Seriously, they saving you office costs, and you have to find another way to screw with your employees.
What, did Jeff Bezos beat you at the International Association of Evil Bastards picnic sack race last year o or something?
Inspector Renault Says………Round up the usual suspects, it turns out that food delivery companies are using their piles of venture capital money to dominate the market, and then they will be able to extract monopoly rents:
Ranjan Roy has a great article on Substack about DoorDash and “pizza arbitrage”: Roy’s friend was first annoyed to discover that DoorDash was providing delivery services for his nondelivery pizzeria: taking web orders without his knowledge, phoning in for takeout and sending a DoorDash delivery worker to pay and pick up the food, and often delivering to a customer who would be annoyed that the pizza arrived cold. And then he was surprised to see DoorDash was selling his $24 pizzas for only $16. This meant he had an arbitrage opportunity: Order his own pizzas at $16, sell them to DoorDash for $24 each, and pocket the difference. This worked even better if he didn’t put real pizzas in the delivery boxes. But how on earth was DoorDash ever supposed to make money selling his pizzas at a loss?
Delivery via smartphone is one of those venture-funded sectors where business executives appear to have taken seriously the old joke about “losing money on every transaction but making it up on volume.” Normal rules of capitalism about maximizing profits do not apply. This has led to a strange situation where restaurants feel squeezed by the fees charged by delivery services (when, unlike Roy’s friend, they participate voluntarily on a delivery platform) and yet the delivery services themselves manage to keep losing money. Why is this even happening?
………
I think the missing element for profitability is different: productivity. The hope with a lot of business models that bring app intermediation to a preexisting element of the economy like ride services or food delivery is that technology will make workers more productive. You can see instances where this is obviously true: a Peloton instructor who teaches a class to tens of thousands of people is more productive than a SoulCycle instructor who can only teach about 60 people at a time. But with a lot of apps, the promised boost to productivity never materializes. The worker still has to render personal service to one customer at a time, and the app doesn’t do much to reduce the worker’s downtime or help him or her complete the task faster. As such, the productivity boost that is needed to make the financial model pencil — paying the worker a high enough hourly rate while charging a fee the customer is willing to pay and still having a positive profit margin — does not materialize.
Consider a few examples. In the traditional model, restaurants use their own employees to deliver food. DoorDash and its competitors offer a different approach: DoorDash contracts with the delivery person, sending him or her to whatever restaurant has orders at any moment. In theory, this should lead to better matching of labor to work: Restaurants don’t get backed up with too many orders, because DoorDash can send over extra staff as necessary; the restaurant also never has to pay a worker to sit around and not deliver food. But there are offsetting disadvantages to this outsourced model. A restaurant-employed delivery person knows the menu and can tell quickly whether a bag appears to contain what is listed on a receipt. He has a rhythm with the staff he’s picking up from. He knows the neighborhood and knows the addresses of frequent customers. He has the right equipment — if he’s delivering pizza, he has an insulated bag so the pizza is hot when it gets to the customer. A third-party delivery person is more likely to screw these things up: slower, less accurate, lower-quality delivery. At the very least, this mutes the productivity gains from better staff matching; it could offset them entirely.
………
But what if the main reason the value proposition for these services has changed is that a third party is weirdly willing to lose money on the transactions? That doesn’t seem like a sustainable situation — and yet it has been sustained for years at this point. If it ends, if investors in app-based service companies start demanding profits, then we should expect the size of the personal-service part of the economy to contract. Some restaurants that came to rely on app-based delivery may find it makes sense to take delivery in-house. But others may find delivery isn’t worth it if they actually have to employ the delivery person. And then customers, revealed to be unwilling to pay the true economic cost of having their food delivered, may have to go pick it up.
What is going on here is that eventually, one of these companies will be the last one standing, and then they hope to extract even more from fees, with the threat that if your restaurant isn’t a customer, then they will deliver cold pizzas stuck to the top of the boxes and ruin your reputation, because they will hijack your Google and Yelp listing anyway.
This is not innovation, this is a f%$#ing Ponzi scheme.
The good folks at Payday Report have COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map.
This is a profoundly useful resource:
You can zoom in and clicks on the strikes 
and protests 
to get the details of all of the labor actions.
This is worth checking out, as is the whole Paycheck Report, a publication dedicated to covering the labor movement
Cable company legal arguments.
Case in point, Charter Communications, whose only value to society is that it makes Comcast looks good, who is now claiming that refusing to give refunds is necessary because it saves their customers money.
Seriously, on this makes the demand by the man who murdered his parents mercy as an orphan look like an amateur:
Charter is suing Maine to block a new state law that requires prorated refunds when cable customers cancel service mid-month, claiming that the requirement is a form of rate regulation and is preempted by federal law. The preemption question will be at the heart of the case, but Charter also told the court that its no-refund policy prevents its prices from rising even more than they usually do.
“Charter’s decision not to provide a partial-month rebate for cancelling subscribers reflects the fact that Charter’s service is sold on a monthly basis,” the company, which operates Spectrum TV service, said in its complaint against the state government. “It also reduces administrative costs and thus ultimately reduces the upward pressure on rates for Charter’s continuing subscribers.”
Charter further said that its policy minimizes price increases “for continuing subscribers by reducing costs associated with implementing pro-rata rebates for mid-month cancellations.” Charter said that subscribers who cancel in the middle of a monthly billing period can continue to receive the service until the end of the month.
Charter made a similar argument in a motion for preliminary injunction, saying that its no-refund policy “reduce[s] its transaction and back-office costs and thereby ease[s] upward pressure on rates for existing and future subscribers.”
The fact that they don’t care enough to fall prey to these transparent censorship actions indicates that there should be a sh%$ load more regulation of their activities:
A Google search, at one time, could locate a news article on a man accused of attempted child rape, another on someone charged with fraud and still others on Ukrainian politicians facing corruption allegations. Googling certain keywords in March would find an article detailing the movements of two coronavirus-infected British tourists in Vietnam and warning others who visited the same places to take precautions.
Then the stories vanished.
Google stopped listing them in searches after it received formal requests that it scrub links to the pieces, a Wall Street Journal investigation found.
The Journal identified hundreds of instances in which individuals or companies, often using apparently fake identities, caused the Alphabet Inc. unit to remove links to unfavorable articles and blog posts that alleged wrongdoing by convicted criminals, foreign officials and businesspeople in the U.S. and abroad.
Google took them down in response to copyright complaints, many of which appear to be bogus, the Journal found in an analysis of information from the more than four billion links sent to Google for removal since 2011.
Google’s system was set up to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. The 1998 law gives tech firms immunity from claims in copyright cases as long they quickly take down copyrighted material once alerted.
Takedown requests to Google are often from media companies legitimately requesting that pirated copies of a movie or album be removed from search results. Publishers and news outlets, including the Journal, have also asked Google to scrub allegedly infringing material from Google Search.
Yet some requests, the Journal found, appear to be from people manipulating the system in ways it didn’t intend, resulting in Google’s taking down lawful content.
When a Colorado man, Dak Steiert, faced state-court charges of running a fake law firm in 2018, he sent Google a series of copyright claims against blogs and a law-firm website that discussed his case, claiming they had copied the posts from Mr. Steiert’s own website. That wasn’t true, the Journal determined, but Google erased the pages from its search engine anyway.
Last year, Mr. Steiert, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, pleaded guilty in Colorado state court to one count of false advertising in his business. The Colorado Supreme Court closed his practice. The articles remained invisible in Google searches until the Journal flagged the cases to Google, which then reinstated the links.
………
“If people can manipulate the gatekeepers to make important and lawful information disappear,” said Daphne Keller, a former Google lawyer and now a program director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, “that’s a big deal.”
………
After the Journal shared its findings with Google, the company conducted a review and restored more than 52,000 links it determined it had improperly removed, she said. Google said its review identified more than 100 new abusive submitters, declining to discuss individual cases.
………
A Google search for reputation managers turns up firms claiming to be able to remove negative content from popular search engines including Google—even though typically Google only removes links for alleged copyright violations or to comply with other relevant laws.
The Journal dug into the world of takedown requests by reviewing electronic records of copyright-removal notices that Google shares with Harvard University researchers. The Journal cross-referenced those requests with separate data Google releases regularly in a “transparency report,” which discloses whether it granted each request.
………
Financial-news site Benzinga fell victim to a common tactic to trick Google: backdating. Someone wanting Google to hide a webpage will find a little-trafficked blog and post a copy of the content from the legitimate webpage. After backdating the plagiarized post, the complainant will file an electronic notice with Google claiming the real article is a copyright violation.
A simple change to the DMCA, requiring fines against those who file false claims, and fines against entities who fail to use diligence with regards to a take-down notice, (the latter would cover Google) would shut this crap down.
Meaningful regulation, and the right for private recourse would go a long way to shutting down this.
Yelp, which is in a partnership with Github, and hence shares a portion of the revenues, is publishing false phone numbers for a restaurants in order to generate promotional fees with Github.
This is flat out fraud. They are generating false calls to make fees for their partner, who kicks the money back to them.
It probably won’t result in criminal charges, but it really is Silicon Valley Douchebaggery in its truest form:
A few months ago, I opened the Yelp app, typed in the name of my favorite sushi restaurant, and clicked on the phone number. Two options popped up: “Delivery or Takeout” and “General Questions.”
That’s new, I thought. I dialed the number for “Delivery or Takeout,” which played a perky greeting—“This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness”—before a woman at the restaurant picked up. I asked why they were recording the call for awesomeness; she had no idea what I was referring to. I asked about the number I had just dialed; she didn’t recognize it.………
The Yelp app lists a restaurant’s direct phone number on the actual listing. That’s (212) 262-8300 in the case of Judge Roy Bean Public House. But when you click on the phone number, this dialogue shows up: Delivery or Takeout and General Questions.
When a user clicks on the “Call” button labeled “Delivery or Takeout,” they are taken to a different number, (646) 394-9837, which is owned by Grubhub.
The “Call” button next to “General Questions” leads to the restaurant’s real number.
Even though restaurants are capable of taking orders directly—after all, both numbers are routed to the same place—Yelp is pushing customers to Grubhub-owned phone numbers in order to facilitate what Grubhub calls a “referral fee” of between 15 percent and 20 percent of the order total, I learned while researching an episode for the podcast Underunderstood.
Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews. But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.”
This is fraud.
State Attorneys General should be proffering criminal charges under fraud statutes against Yelp and Grubhub, and federal prosecutors should be pursuing them under RICO statutes.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organization that oversees the Internet’s domain name system, has rejected a controversial proposal to sell the .org domain to a private equity group for more than $1 billion. It’s a serious—quite possibly fatal—blow to a proposal that had few supporters besides the organizations that proposed it.
Currently, the .org domain registry is run by the Public Interest Registry, a non-profit subsidiary of another non-profit called the Internet Society. PIR was created in 2002 to run the .org domain and has been doing so ever since. But last fall, the Internet Society stunned the non-profit world by announcing it would sell the PIR—and, effectively, ownership of the .org domain—to a new and secretive private equity firm called Ethos Capital for more than $1 billion.
The announcement created a swift and powerful backlash. In its resolution formally rejecting the transaction, ICANN says it received its first letter opposing the deal just two days after it was announced. The group would eventually receive letters from at least 30 groups opposing the deal, as well as numerous negative comments during public hearings. Meanwhile, ICANN says, the deal has received “virtually no counterbalancing support except from the parties involved in the transaction and their advisors.”
Also, the California Attorney General strongly implied that there might be a criminal investigation to follow if they approved this.
My 89 y/o grandmother, who is isolated at home in CT, just told me she reads the replies to my tweets and then investigates the profiles of people who leave rude replies. So don’t be mean to me or my grandma will judge you.— Ben Conarck (@conarck) March 26, 2020
I would note that the whole thread interludes his Grandma’s banana bread recipe.
People: "I want 2020 to be like the roarin' twenties!"
Earth: "Alright, infectious disease is spreading."
People: "No, not like that."
Earth: "The US stock market is tanking."
People: "Wait…"
Earth: "LMAO Bars can't be open anymore."
— Quinoaluigi (@synthandlasers) March 17, 2020
Welcome to the Roaring 20s.