Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Here’s my bold statement for 2023:
Social media companies in the United States need to be regulated.

Before you start agreeing and explain why it’ll never happen… you should know Meta didn’t launch Threads in the EU. Because of the EU’s REGULATION. It would have led to massive NEW fines and Meta doesn’t want MORE massive fines. It was recently hit with an order to stop sending EU users data to the US for processing and was fined almost $1.3BN for breaching the GDPR’s requirements on data export.

When companies’ actions or inactions harm the public, the public demands something be done. In the EU they’ve recognized the harm being done by social media companies and enacted regulation. Short term, companies pay the fine and change their behavior to stop new fines. This is what we want, what the public deserves. Protection from harm.

Here’s a good piece by Natasha Lomas’ in Tech Cruch that spells out Meta’s current privacy problems and reminds us of the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Some regulations are currently in effect others are coming on August 25, 2023.

Meta’s Threads app is a privacy nightmare that won’t launch in EU yet,
TechCrunch July 5, 5th 2023

Here’s the deal, regulations force companies to change their behaviors. If they don’t, they pay a fine. Big fines gets their attention AND, if they are a public company, it gets the attention of the big shareholders who say “Stop the bleeding! Keep that quarterly revenue growing or we will punish you!”

I want companies to take action on threats of violence and hate speech. Meta has already defined what they consider a threat and hate speech and have said what they will do about them. I’m the nerd who read ALL of Meta’s / Instagram’s /Thread’s Terms of Use. and Community Guidelines . Check this part out:

“We remove content that contains credible threats or hate speech, content that targets private individuals to degrade or shame them, personal information meant to blackmail or harass someone, and repeated unwanted messages. violence, deadly disinformation and hate speech.”

Threads Community Guidelines on threats under Meta/Instagram

The good news is that it appears that Meta is trying to moderate the content on Threads. Read this great Media Matters piece pointing out the methods used by RWNJs & Nazis to test the moderation AND the rhetoric deployed to avoid regulation.

[They ] have posted about the limits of its moderation, while also questioning whether Meta will “censor” them — which is a false claim that right-wing media and figures frequently employ against social media platforms with moderation policies.

Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads by Camden Carter & Jack Winstanley

Meta wants Threads to be #BrandSafe, so they can get advertising revenue, but they get revenue from other ways, like collecting data on people. And, because Meta is so big, they can run Threads without ads for YEARS if they want while Nazis’ & extremists work the system.

Taylor Hatmaker did a GREAT analysis of Threads in TechCrunch

“The brands just need a Twitter-like experience stocked with users that they can point their delirious social media managers to. Their champion has arrived.”

And it’s not as if Meta has a great track record with Instagram. From the Media Matters piece.

In the last year, Meta, along with other major social media platforms, has noticeably deprioritized its content moderation and user safety practices. Instagram specifically has a long history of allowing hate speech and misinformation to prosper on the app, including permitting virulently anti-LGBTQ accounts, far-right extremists, and right-wing advertisers to post false and harmful rhetoric. 

Instagram has also failed to adequately moderate many aspects of its platform, with users easily sidestepping moderation with story features, the “link-in-bio loophole,” commerce functions, and comments sections. 

What kind of misinformation? Deadly vaccine misinformation. I spoke to Matt Binder about how RFK Jr. was the 2nd biggest spreader of disinformation , according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Back in 2021, the tech companies told Congress that they would deplatform the 12 biggest spreaders of disinformation on vaccines, but one month later 9 of the 12 were still posting. Including RFK Jr on Facebook. This was BEFORE he announced his run for President, which puts him in the “newsworthy” category. BUT even that category has rules for violations of their policies.

Remember when Meta made special “guardrails” for Donald Trump for when he returned to Facebook? If he violates them he MIGHT be banned again! For a month. Multiple violations maybe another 2 years!

What Meta DOESN’T have is outside punishments for failing to uphold its own policies. At least Meta is trying. But what about Musk’s Twitter, or Trump’s Truth Social? Rumble or Gab? They don’t care about profit from advertisers. They don’t have shareholders screaming at them for losing money to force content moderation on them.

Did you know that Truth Social has Terms of Service? Here are a few:

• your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.
• your Contributions do not depict violence, threats of violence or criminal activity.
• your Contributions do not advocate or incite, encourage, or threaten physical harm against another.
• your Contributions do not violate any applicable law, regulation, or rule.
• your Contributions do not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party.

If you’ve read Trump’s posts there you can spot the violations.

Truth Social says, “Any use of the Service in violation of the foregoing violates these Terms of Service and may result in, among other things, termination or suspension of your rights to use the Service and removal or deletion of your Contributions.”
But they don’t HAVE TO do anything.

Trump remains an extreme danger to others. When will law enforcement take appropriate measures to hold him accountable?

Glenn Kirschner did a podcast this weekend making the case that Trump should be in jail. He makes an excellent argument. He used specific examples and his history as a prosecutor of dangerous individuals.

Trump’s statements on Truth Social provide evidence to support why Trump should be in jail. Some of Trump’s posts SHOULD get him suspended from Truth Social. AND, if he posted them natively on other platforms like Threads, should get him banned from posting there too. TFG posts threats on Truth Social knowing that management ( Devin Nunes!) won’t suspend his rights to post, even when they violate Truth Socials own Terms of Service. When Trump’s threats gets reposted on other platform with added context, it’s news. But too often there IS no added context. It’s often just a straight up repeating of the threats and disinformation verbatim.

So what are we going to do about the need for regulation on social media? In America we know how money rules, but we can’t count on “The Market” alone to stop companies from enabling the spread of threats of violence, deadly disinformation and hate speech.

Musk’s Twitter is NOT brand safe, is losing money, has welcomed Nazi supporters, allows and encourages attacks on trans people, and because there is no outside regulation, it keeps going.

Will Meta enforce their own policies? If they don’t, how do we pressure them to be enforced? Do like the EU did and pass regulation! While it’s NOT happening we need to tell the stories of violence, incitement & hate speech coming from RWNJs that are being left up to spread. Show the harm that is being caused because of it. File lawsuits. Work on legislation in the US. Point out that it exists in the EU. Learn from them. It’s not an impossible task.

Companies make decisions every day about who is protected and supported by their products and services. Part of the role of government is to step in and stop the entities that are causing harm to the public.

Oh, btw I did join Threads so I could report violations of their community guidelines… threads.net@spockomichal
spoutible.com/spocko
Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

Seriously???

Trump is honest and trustworthy enough to run the most powerful country in the world but you couldn’t trust him or his people to do business with your software company. Is this guy for real?

These people are so far gone it’s beyond all reason. Luckily, this cipher isn’t going to be in the race very long but it’s instructive to hear him speak anyway. They are all so tribal that they are willing to twist themselves into pretzels to stay in the GOP fold for Dear Leader but grasp at these straws to show that they are somehow different. It’s pathetic.

I hope you enjoy looking in the mirror Bergum. If it looks a little bit distorted, check your conscience.

And yes, I’m talking about Chris Christie

He may not try to overturn an election but if you think this guy wouldn’t use his power to go after his enemies you are mistaken. He hasn’t changed:

GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie weighed in on the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the plea deal reached in the case, calling the probe as well as the U.S. attorney who oversaw it not truthful or incompetent.

“U.S. Attorney [David] Weiss has to explain himself and he has to explain himself in public,” Christie told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday. “You know, the fact is that this investigation of Hunter Biden in Delaware is either a lie or it’s incompetent. There’s no way that it should take five years to get to a two count misdemeanor tax plea and then to dismiss the gun charges.”

Christie, himself a former federal prosecutor, also blasted Democrats for pushing for stricter gun laws while they “won’t even enforce the gun laws that exist,” adding that the president’s son “should have been charged under those gun laws.”

“So either David Weiss is incompetent in taking five years to do that, or he’s not telling the truth. And [Attorney General] Merrick Garland is not telling the truth. Either way, there’s a lot more work to be done on this case,” Christie said.DeSantis on reports of stalled 2024 campaign: ‘Media does not want me to be the nominee’Kaine says he has ‘real qualms’ about Biden admin sending Ukraine cluster bombs

Biden’s son agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanors for failing to pay income taxes in 2017 and 2018. He also agreed to enroll in a pretrial diversion program for possessing a firearm while being an unlawful user or addicted to a controlled substance.

Many Republicans have railed against the plea deal made between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors, with some pointing to former President Trump’s recent federal indictment and calling it a double standard. Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 federal counts of mishandling classified documents and attempts to keep them from the government.

Christie launched his bid for the White House last month to join a growing number of GOP candidates willing to challenge former President Trump in 2024. He has also been a staunch critic of the former president since he lost the 2020 election.

It’s fine with me if he spends his time tearing into Trump. It doesn’t seem to be doing him any good but it’s lots of fun to watch.But I can’t say that I’m upset that he’s not going to win. He’s a bullying jerk and always has been and I’m sick of these guys. With the exception, maybe, of Asa Hutchinson, that is a defininf characteristic of every single GOP candidate, including that creepy ghoul Nikki Haley who keeps telling her audiences that Biden is going to drop dead any minute. She’s just a loathsome as Trump and DeSantis.

Don’t ever forget who Chris Christie really is. From 2015:

Dan Pfeiffer with the bad news: Why Threads Won’t Solve the News Crisis

Like more than 70 million other refugees from Twitter, I downloaded Threads — Meta’s new Twitter clone — and immediately started “threading.” This wasn’t an easy decision. I generally believe that through a toxic combination of avarice and incompetence, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have done tremendous damage to the world. My most recent book was subtitled “How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are Destroying America.” So, it’s safe to say that I am not exactly a Zuck stan. But despite my trepidation, I started using Threads.

Compared to other erstwhile Twitter replacements — Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc. — Threads was a huge success. It was easy to set up and even though I joined only a few hours after it launched, many people and media outlets were already posting on the app. The utility of a Twitter-like product is dependent on two interconnected questions — one, will enough interesting people share interesting content; and two, is the audience large and engaging enough to make sharing feel worth it? Because Threads leverages Instagram’s user base of two billion people, it was able to bring both influential and interesting people and an audience to the table from the outset.

I went to Threads because I wanted Twitter circa 2010-2020. I wanted to follow the news, hear politicians, pundits, and experts respond to the news, and offer my own opinions on both. Don’t get me wrong; Twitter was far from perfect in that period. It was filled with abuse and harassment. The rules to the extent there were any, were applied in unfair and unpredictable ways. But because I made a living following, writing, working in, and talking about politics, Twitter was an essential tool.

No longer.

Elon Musk rendered Twitter largely unusable. The app is constantly buggy. The decision to take away verification badges from everyone under a million followers and those unwilling to pay $8 a month undermined Twitter’s primary purpose for most users — following the news. Twitter thrived during big, fast-moving news events. But during the search for the Ocean Gate submarine and the coup attempt in Russia, it was largely impossible to discern what information to trust, an obvious problem when you click on a tweet, and the first several replies are from Elon fans who paid $8 to get a blue checkmark and make their tweets more visible. Anecdotally, at least, the decision to pay for increased relevance seems to correlate with being a particularly rude dipshit.

It’s too early to make any bold declarations. Threads will likely be better than Elon-era Twitter, yet I am skeptical it will solve the problem we all need solving — the news and information crisis.

The Death of the Current Events Monoculture

There is no question more important in politics or media than “how do people get their information?” In the Social Media era, information was found on major platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The content may have been originally created by the New York Times or the local paper, but the platforms were the delivery mechanism. Even less politically engaged folks bumped into the news as they scrolled (particularly on Facebook). That is no longer the case. Facebook deprioritized news in its algorithm in recent years and Twitter is broken. Instagram and TikTok have never been optimized for distributing news.

People seeking news no longer have a central place to go to follow current events. There is no current events monoculture.

My job is to follow the news closely, and it has become incredibly difficult – and nearly impossible – to stay informed with context and nuance. I can no longer count on the algorithms and the tastes of the journalists and others I follow to surface the news for me. There is no delivery mechanism of consequence.

The chasm between the political junkies and the non-news consumers widens still. This change has real implications for a Democratic Party that depends on persuading less politically engaged voters (and doesn’t have the existing media infrastructure of the Republicans).

Our national news vacuum is one reason I started creating information guides for my subscribers – like this one on the Biden Economy and this one on the Trump Indictment to help provide accurate, easily understood information amidst our algorithmic hellscape.

Threads is Not the Solution

Meta/Facebook helped create the problem by sucking blood out of the business of journalism and building a platform optimized for outrage instead of accuracy. They have no interest in solving the problem. Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive in charge of Instagram, posted the following on Threads on Friday morning:

Mosseri’s comments came as a harsh surprise to the political Twitter refugees who had migrated to Threads for news and politics. He went on to explain in a follow-up post:

Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.

News and politics invite controversy. Controversy requires the platforms to take a stand on questions of accuracy and intent — to render judgment about what stays up and what comes down. Mosseri is being unusually honest — it’s all about the bottom line. Meta has a more Republican user base than any other major social media company. They do not want to litigate the absurd statements and conspiracy theories spouted by the twice-indicted, twice-impeached frontrunner for the GOP nomination.

These platforms evolve over time. They adjust to reflect the desires of the audience (and the advertisers and shareholders). There will be communities on Threads talking about politics and sharing the news. If the people in charge don’t want a carbon copy of the old Twitter, it will not be. 

Even if Zuck and Mosseri wanted to build a news and politics platform, it could never achieve the same relevance and impact of Twitter in its halcyon days. The media changed and our consumption habits changed with it.

Like the traditional media, the digital ecosystem is splintering into smaller communities — sort by ideology and interest. The days when we all gathered on a couple of big platforms are gone, much like the days when we all watched one of the four available broadcast networks. Instead of hoping for a return to a simpler past, we must adjust our expectations, habits, and strategies to account for this new, more complicated reality.

Twitter has been invaluable to the work I do and as it falls apart I feel the loss. I’ve never been much of a Facebook user — it just didn’t click for me. As time went on it actually made my work more difficult when I tried to use it. So I’m not particularly enthused about Threads particularly since I read that post Pfeiffer referenced above. They are not going to build it for my needs although I don’t know if they can really control how the thing develops. There’s an organic quality to social media growth that’s quite difficult to control. But it doesn’t sound as if they are going to be interested in creating the various features that power users like me find useful.

So who knows? I’m sure I’ll use whatever works well for what I do and I think Pfeiffer is right that the days of the social media platforms mono culture are over. We’ll have to see what comes next.

We will not allow you to exploit the innocence of our children to advance your agenda.

When you come after our kids, we fight back.

We are no longer silent.

We are united.

We are Mamas for DeSantis.

…and we will elect @RonDeSantis President of the United States.

Join our… pic.twitter.com/jo6HUATaVa

— Casey DeSantis (@CaseyDeSantis) July 6, 2023

I’ll just leave that here.

We’re not as right as we think we are

Loss of the ability to laugh at oneself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. It’s a personal maxim that has served well. Not unrelated is a shtick that comes in handy now and again. Jab your finger in the air toward someone as if punctuating an argument, and declare confidently, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m not as smart as I think I am.”

Let’s back up.

Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” installment for July 9 observes that on this date in 1868, Americans ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. It eradicated the infamous Dred Scott decision by a Supreme Court then controlled by states’ rights advocates and “southerners and Democrats … adamantly opposed to federal power.” The drafters meant to ensure that southern states who recently fought a war to preserve slavery could not reimpose it under color of law in their legislatures.

They did anyway for the next 100 years under Jim Crow until the post-World War II Supreme Court flexed the equal protection and due process clauses to dismantle it.

Nevertheless:

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm. 

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Whose ideas are being forced on whom is clearly at issue today. Particularly among a humorless, religious right faction as sure of its own righteousness as it is of the depravity of any who disagree. It is another “unpopular minority” bent on taking over national government. Through insurrection, if necessary, as the world saw on January 6, 2021. Humility is not a virtue with this crowd.

It is not often I reference David French, formerly a staff writer for National Review and a southern evangelical. Once opposed to same-sex marriage, he is, however, not so rigid as not to change his mind. It seems French, too, is put off by the Christian right’s fundamentalist fervor and embrace of authoritarianism (New York Times):

When I was a younger lawyer, conservatives fought speech codes that often inhibited religious and conservative discourse on campus. Now, red state legislatures are writing their own speech codes, hoping to limit discussion of the ideas they disfavor. When I was starting my career, my conservative colleagues and I rolled our eyes at the right-wing book purges of old, when angry parents tried to yank “dangerous” books off school library shelves. Well, now the purges are back, as parents are squaring off in school districts across the nation, arguing over the words children should be allowed to read.

Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.

The dominionist paranoia that enemies on the left are “coming after” their children and their families views censorship as protective, French writes. The threats come from without. They would be wise to attend to their own scripture in which Jesus says in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”

French references G.K. Chesterton’s acknowledgment that what’s wrong with the world might be him. “The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world,” French writes. “Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy — Christians as fully as those who do not share our beliefs.” Awareness of our own flaws must “temper our confidence that we either can control or should control the public square.”

The framers constructed the Constitution around the idea that, as James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

One need not be a cultural anthropologist of American Christianity to be aware of molestation among fundamentalists and Catholic clergy, as well as within religions communities walled off against corrupting influences from the outside. Evil lurks inside the walls as well.

French concludes:

This recent legacy of scandal and abuse should be more than enough evidence of the need for existential humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue. Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings.

Who is wrong? I am wrong. We are wrong. Until the church can give that answer, its political idealism will meet a tragic and destructive end. The attempt to control others will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.

Fundamentalism of any flavor, left or right, is not about what one believes, but how. It is rigid, dogmatic, unforgiving, especially of nonconformity. It is humorless and cannot admit error.

Humility is underrated. None of us are angels. People’s drive to dominate others prevented the equal protection and due process clauses from having teeth for 100 years. The same old-time political religion still resists tolerance of others’ views as it does treating all persons as created equal, and with an equal right to share in governance. That expression from our public scripture never took root in many hearts.

Nothing to see here

Without comment.

Plowable hail.

Speaking of fascism:

Former President Trump said Friday for the first time publicly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would bring back a travel ban “even bigger than before,” alluding to his administration’s restrictions on travelers from heavily Muslim countries. 

The first two bans faced steep challenges in court, but the third version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 2018. That ban barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries, in addition to North Korea and Venezuela. President Biden signed an executive order reversing the ban his first week in office. 

Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told his audience. “Well, how did that work out? We had no problem, right? They knew they couldn’t come here if they had that moniker. They couldn’t come here.”

“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers. We don’t want people blowing up our cities and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”

And that’s not all, when he says bigger and stronger this is what he’s really talking about:

 Donald Trump has announced a new campaign proposal on United States immigration — barring “communists” and “Marxists” from entering the country.

The Republican former president, who is making another bid in 2024, on Saturday said he would use “Section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act” to “order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists.”

“Those who come to enjoy our country must love our country,” Trump said during a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington, adding, “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”

He also said there needs to be a “new law” to address communists and Marxists who grew up in America, but didn’t elaborate on what it would include.

I’m sure a Republican congress (including a GOP Senate that has jettisoned the filibuster) will be happy to help with that. And he’s got some very good friends in the judiciary who owe him their lifetime sinecures.

He sure is making America great again, isn’t he?

Apparently, he wants to bring fascism faster:

“By refusing to speak to the needs of the poor and working people, the Democratic Party helps to facilitate and enable the Trumps and the DeSantises and others. So, you end up with neo-fascism being in some ways dependent on neoliberalism and vice versa.

That cycle, going around and around, means that we’re going to end up with fascism sooner or later. Every Democratic administration will just be a caretaker and a postponement for fascism to come. I am profoundly anti-fascist, and therefore I am trying to get at the roots of fascism.”

Right, yeah. That makes sense. Sure it does.

Meanwhile he’s running as the Green Party candidate and will probably be on the ballot in the swing states. And he could easily siphon off enough votes to put Donald Trump back in the white house. That’s how we’ll get at the roots of fascism?

I hope the Democrats take this threat seriously. Quite a few people think that protest votes are their way of sticking it to the powers that be. But the people who will be hurt won’t be those in power. I just hope that Donald Trump will be enough to keep most of these Green Party voters from playing with fire this time.