{"id":177289,"date":"2019-10-31T18:57:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T23:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/10\/31\/how-dare-they-criticize-their-betters\/"},"modified":"2019-10-31T18:57:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-31T23:57:00","slug":"how-dare-they-criticize-their-betters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/10\/31\/how-dare-they-criticize-their-betters\/","title":{"rendered":"How Dare They Criticize Their Betters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/technology-50228549\">the Silicon Valley social media companies were actively enabling the slave trade in the Persian Gulf principalities<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Drive around the streets of Kuwait and you won&#8217;t see these women. They are behind closed doors, deprived of their basic rights, unable to leave and at risk of being sold to the highest bidder.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">But pick up a smartphone and you can scroll through thousands of their pictures, categorised by race, and available to buy for a few thousand dollars.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">An undercover investigation by BBC News Arabic has found that domestic workers are being illegally bought and sold online in a booming black market.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Some of the trade has been carried out on Facebook-owned Instagram, where posts have been promoted via algorithm-boosted hashtags, and sales negotiated via private messages.<\/p>\n<p>Other listings have been promoted in apps approved and provided by Google Play and Apple&#8217;s App Store, as well as the e-commerce platforms&#8217; own websites.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What they are doing is promoting an online slave market,&#8221; said Urmila Bhoola, the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other companies are hosting apps like these, they have to be held accountable.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The social media companies still insist that they are engaged in a moral endeavor.<\/p>\n<p>They are not.  They are snollygosters engaging in humbug in order to enrich themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that the Silicon Valley social media companies were actively enabling the slave trade in the Persian Gulf principalities: Drive around the streets of Kuwait and you won&#8217;t see these women. They are behind closed doors, deprived of their basic rights, unable to leave and at risk of being sold to the highest &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[370,364,378,382],"class_list":["post-177289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-evil","tag-middle-east","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}