Metaphors Are Lies

Find Someone to Look at You the Way Tech Journalists Look at Section 230

Read Time:9 Minute, 38 Second

Free speech is under attack, apparently, and it is all the fault of politicians on both sides who want to reign in Big Tech:

Both sides of the political aisle are attacking long-accepted principles of speech law, frequently in ways that are both logically incoherent and deeply concerning.

…

Many of them profess to hate another law: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But the more they say about 230, the clearer it becomes that they actually hate the First Amendment and think Section 230 is just fine.

…

Removing Section 230 protections is a sneaky way for politicians to get around the First Amendment. Without 230, the cost of operating a social media site in the United States would skyrocket due to litigation. Unable to invoke a straightforward 230 defense, sites could face protracted lawsuits over even unambiguously legal content. And when it comes to categories of speech that are dicier, web platforms would be incentivized to remove posts that might be illegal — anything from unfavorable restaurant reviews to MeToo allegations — even if they would have ultimately prevailed in court. All of this would burn time and money in perhaps existential ways. It’s no wonder platform operators do what it takes to keep 230 alive. When politicians gripe, the platforms respond.
How America turned against the First Amendment – The Verge

This has all the bingo cards — 230 is actually free speech, both sides, opposing 230 is illogical and just a cover for people who hate free speech.

This is of course disingenuous nonsense. The criticisms of section 230, from the center and left at any rate, are largely focused on the fact that section 230 has been read in such an expansive way that product liability for websites and other platforms has ceased to exist. No matter how dangerous a product is, as long it is somehow related to user generated content, it is safe from scrutiny. As a practical matter this means

The author claims that any attempt to reign in this destruction of product liability will inevitably lead to the end of free speech. She gives as one example a quote form Biden, where he said that section 230 allowed COVID disinformation to spread unchecked. Aha! See, since what we knew about COVID was sketchy and uncertain, cracking down on platforms that push misinformation would mean that we would never have the chance to figure out what was actually true about COVID! Do your own research, man!

Well, no. Putting aside that the President hasn’t actually proposed anything like the end of free speech online Nothing in the product liability approach would prevent people from talking about COVID and learning the truth. It would, however, hold a company responsible for when it deliberately tells people that the vaccine causes miscarriages, for example. If I made a machine that you could ask a health question of and it constantly spit out dangerous or incorrect information, I would face, as I should, liability for that failure. That is not an attack on my free speech — that is a valid protection of my fellow citizens. Online algorithms should be no different.

The author does attempt to obliquely address the fact that these companies harm people for money by bringing up attempts to fight child pornography:

When lawmakers do take up serious issues around platform regulation, it’s often with the blatant ulterior motive of punishing “Big Tech” for perceived political misdeeds. Debate over the EARN IT Act targeting child sexual abuse material, for instance, was peppered with claims that Section 230 was a gift to Facebook or Google — when groups like NCMEC acknowledged that the popular “Big Tech” targets were some of the most responsive at reporting CSAM. Omnibus Section 230 reform bills are bizarre chimeras from lawmakers with conflicting goals, pushing sites to moderate more and less at the same time.

So, it’s bad when lawmakers go after illegal speech as well? It cannot be that people don’t want child porn to spread easily online. Of course not –that must be a bad faith argument mean to shut down your ability to post memes. That level of bad faith is distressingly present in this article. The tone is massively dismissive of anyone who doesn’t think section 230 is God’s gift to the world and it doesn’t take seriously the hard questions at the center of these debates. It is the worst kind of us vs. them tripe.

One argument she makes to take the heat off the failures of section 230 is that the law has not kept up with the internet.

To put it bluntly, the First Amendment doesn’t work if the legal system doesn’t work. Arguing over the rare exceptions to free speech doesn’t matter if people can’t be meaningfully censured for serious violations or if verdicts are vestigial afterthoughts in cases filed mostly for clout. And it’s especially useless if the courts themselves won’t take it seriously.

There is actually some truth to this — she discusses the Jones and Amber Heard trials — but it is also avoiding the question. One of the reasons the law is so bad at handling the internet is section 230. Maybe, perhaps, if section 230 didn’t protect companies that made harmful products online the law would work a little bit better.

Not that she seems to care. Her only solution in that section is anti-SLAPP laws. First, I find it amusing that someone who is so gung-ho about free speech online is intent on keeping poor people form speaking in courts. Because that is a known effect of anti-SLAPP laws. Now, that does not mean that such laws are not valuable. This is, like everything associated with the First Amendment, is complicated. It would have been nice if the author had acknowledged some of those complications

Take her discussion of the Texas and Florida laws the prevent large online platforms from banning conservatives even if they violate the platform’s terms of service. This is a bad law with bad motives. (And would be if the law came from the left.) But is it really such a bad thing that large companies that effectively control the public sphere of discussion face greater scrutiny about what they do and do not do with that control? She brings up the side of treating this companies as a public utility, but dismisses it with literally a shot about conservatives previously arguing against ISP being public utilities. She doesn’t even bother to discuss the idea. She just, as she does with everything else in the article, just dismisses it because regulation is bad, m’kay? If you are concerned about a loss of expression, maybe its worth treating social media companies as public utilities rather than leaving these decisions entirely to the whims of the people who care mostly, or sometimes entirely, about making money off them.

In the end, her argument appears to be that people suck, so the government cannot be trusted to do anything to deal with the thorny issues the massive online, algorithmically driven platforms can and have caused to individuals and the body politic:

When bad behavior goes unpunished, unaddressed, and spirals out into something worse and worse, people look for something to blame. And the reality is that no politician can blame the First Amendment, so they blame 230 instead. That’s the lesson, the takeaway: whenever politicians talk about regulating Big Tech or changing 230, they are almost always talking about imperiling the First Amendment.

The bigger issue, though not the only one, is that the internet allows people to speak to each other at a scale unprecedented in human history. The shortcomings and tradeoffs of the laws governing that speech have never been so evident, and their troublesome edge cases never so numerous. And instead of trying to reckon with a new world, the people who make and enforce those laws have abdicated their principles and responsibilities in favor of wielding raw power — and, often, abdicating a lot of their common sense as well.

Those last lines are rich in an article that spends effectively no time grappling with the actual hard questions these issues raise. Look, I am a socialist. I know how much most people in authority would like to shut down my kind of speech, and how far they have gone to do so in the past. I am not blind to the perils, here. But I am also not blind to the fact that defending section 230 as it is today is effectively saying free speech absolutism is worth this:

At the peak of the abuse Matthew Herrick suffered, 16 men showed up every day at his door, each one expecting either violent and degrading sex, drugs, or both. Herrick, a 32-year-old aspiring actor living in New York City, didn’t know any of them, but the men insisted they knew him — they’d just been chatting with him on the dating app Grindr. This scenario repeated itself more than 1,000 times between October 2016 and March 2017.

….

Protective orders and police reports against J.C. failed to stop the torrent of harassment. Herrick, his friends, and lawyers submitted 100 complaints to Grindr asking it to block J.C., but they received no response. Eventually, Herrick took Grindr to court in an attempt to force it to do something to stop the nightmare. Grindr argued that under federal law, it didn’t have to help Herrick, and in February 2017, a federal judge agreed.
Herrick Vs. Grindr Is A Section 230 Case That Could Change The Internet As We Know It (buzzfeednews.com)

I do not. I believe, just as you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater, online platforms must be held responsible for the products they build. I believe that private control of public discussion raises a lot of hard questions about free speech and the fate of our democracy. This article claims to be concerned about free speech, but it reads as if it doesn’t care about the hard questions. It only cares about making sure that essentially that no possible discussion of that id the digital equivalent of shouting fire in a theater can take place. I suspect the author believes that good speech always wins in the end (something that the last twenty years should have disabused her of) and/or that we must accept the harm done by these companies to have any free speech at all.

If you look at the rest of the liberal democratic world, though, you see that countries with no first amendment and no section 230, like Germany, are no less open and free and might even have healthier public spheres, than the US.

At the end of the day, it is clear from the insults and presumption of bad faith that the author does not trust any politicians, and thus does not trust any democratic arguing of these issues. I don’t find that compelling. These are hard issues with no clear answers. Refusing to grapple with them, as this article does, is an admission that you have no answers beyond telling people that their harm is not as important as your speech under any circumstances.

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Penguin Schuster Merger Defeat a Different Kind of Anti-Trust Win

Read Time:2 Minute, 34 Second

The department of justice has successfully blocked the merger of two of the big five publishing houses:

A federal judge blocked Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, arguing that the combination of the two book business giants would illegally reduce competition.
Judge blocks Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster | CNN Business

This is undoubtedly a good decision, for writers and readers (aside from the fact that we will not get a company Named Simon’s Random Penguin House. Sacrifices must be made in the pursuit of a just society). Allowing one publisher to dominate the market would result in lower pay for writers, shrinking the kinds of books that would be written, and inevitably less competition for readers to choose from.

What strikes me as unique about this case is that the Justice Department did not try to rely entirely on the right-wing driven notion of consumer harm in this case. Instead, they focused on the harm done to writers — i.e. labor.

In its lawsuit, the administration said the deal would give the combined company too much control over how much authors are paid.
The challenge emphasized the potential harm for authors since the merger would reduce the number of potential bidders for highly-anticipated books.
Judge blocks Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster | CNN Business

You might be surprised to see that an anti-trust case focusing on anything other than consumer prices. That is because right wing activist judges have succeeded in rewriting anti-trust law from the bench, discarding every other consideration but that of “consumer welfare” and business efficiency.

But anti-trust law was not written that way — it was purely an invention of judicial activists. The anti-trust laws actually take into account the power of large business not only in terms of consumer welfare but in terms of raw power, power over competitors and power of labor. These acts focused on ensuring competition in all its forms, because the best way to protect society is to ensure that no business becomes larger than society’s ability to control it.

The fact that the Justice Department focused on an aspect of competition and not just consumer protection and won is a hopeful sign. It is entirely possible that the Republican judges that invented the false reading of antitrust law and that still control too may appeals court, not to mention the Supreme Court, will overturn this on appeal. But law changes slowly, until it doesn’t. The fact that the DOJ brought this case combined with the fact that a judge accepted the argument is encouraging. It cements the approach of bringing back the actual meaning of antitrust laws. Mergers will now be evaluated on their effects on the whole of the economy, as they should be, as they were intended to be.

It will be a long haul to root out the lies that Robert Bork inflicted on antitrust enforcement, but a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. The DOJ and the judge have taken those first steps.

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Puerto Rico Grid and Will Federalism Destroy the US?

Read Time:1 Minute, 39 Second

The Verge has a fascinating and depressing article about the failure to modernize the Puerto Rican grid. A lot of it comes down to the fact that Puerto Rico is a colony and the Trump Administration treated it as such, restricting their ability to do the necessary work. But the Biden Administration has removed those restrictions and is acting to help. So why the problem?

Because every infrastructure project in the US is ultimately local:

“The caveat certainly is we are not the decision makers for the transmission investments or the distribution investments on the systems,” a DOE official replied. “Implementation would ultimately be the responsibility of the government of Puerto Rico, the public utility, the regulators, and public support.”
It’s a treacherous stretch for energy policies, not just in Puerto Rico. A lot of money is at stake, and complex bureaucratic processes provide ample opportunity for derailment and delay. Leah Stokes, in her book Short Circuiting Policy, likens it to “organized combat” between various factions battling it out in regulatory trench warfare. Many observers of the last five years of grid reconstruction worry the findings will simply be ignored.
Power struggle: Puerto Rico’s battle to fix the electric grid (theverge.com)

This is one of the reasons that sensible high-speed rail in places like Florida and Wisconsin were never started — the local governors rejected the projects for political reasons. In the US, the federal system means that localities have a lot of say in how, when and by whom infrastructure projects are developed. It might be that the Federal government can sidestep those issues, but so far, no government has.

There are other issues, of course, but it is hard to shake the feeling that federalism is too strong in the US. And if we cannot do something as obvious as save the Puerto Rican power gird, how can we be expected to react to the changes needed to get past the climate emergency?

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Starlink Demonstrates the Need To Rein in Capital

Read Time:2 Minute, 51 Second

Elon is having himself a hissy fit

The genesis of Elon’s little tantrum appears to be the Ukraine leadership did not appreciate him parroting Russian talking points about how the war should end. Ostensibly, this is about not being paid. But, well, that turns out to not be entirely believable:

Though Musk has received widespread acclaim and thanks for responding to requests for Starlink service to Ukraine right as the war was starting, in reality, the vast majority of the 20,000 terminals have received full or partial funding from outside sources, including the US government, the UK and Poland, according to the SpaceX letter to the Pentagon.
SpaceX’s request that the US military foot the bill has rankled top brass at the Pentagon, with one senior defense official telling CNN that SpaceX has “the gall to look like heroes” while having others pay so much and now presenting them with a bill for tens of millions per month.
Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab | CNN Politics

In other, surely unrelated news, it came out yesterday that Elon is being investigated by the SEC over his antics around his on-again off-again purchase of Twitter. I am certain the famously thin-skinned Elon would not be pulling his support for a critical piece of wartime infrastructure as a way to get the SEC to back off its investigation?

People like Musk clearly have too much power in our system. If you disagree with the policy of supporting the Ukraine, you are allowed to argue against it, to protest, to vote Republican, etc. You should not be allowed, as one person, to rip away a vital piece of national security technology on a whim, or as a chit or get out of jail free card.

And I don’t want to hear anything about how the government is taking his property. They are already paying for the service, and the invented most of the core technology that he is using to run those satellite. Nor do I want to hear about the sanctity of property. No right is completely absolute. No one is forcing Elon to march to the front, no one is moving soldiers into his home. They are paying for use of a small portion of his network to advance national security goals (and, incidentally, defend a largely democratic state against a quasi-genocidal invasion. That bears some mention here). Nor do I want to hear that the government should build a system itself. In o system, core infrastructure at every level, for good and ill, our build by allowing private people to profit from their construction and maintenance. It’s not the system I would want, but it’s the system we have. We cannot then turn around and allow those people to harm the overall society via their control.

Being part of a democratic society means you have obligations as well as responsibilities. Musk benefits form the basic research the government provides to make himself rich, builds his businesses under the protection of the rule of law and military might provided by his fellow citizens, and has received untold monies in subsidies and tax breaks to keep his businesses afloat. People who have been allowed to profit building critical infrastructure should not be allowed to use that infrastructure for their own personal whims.

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When Is Twitter Not A Platform? When It’s A Product

Read Time:3 Minute, 48 Second

The Supreme Court took up two cases that have the potential to revisit how products like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook can or cannot face liability:

The Supreme Court will take up two cases testing legal protections for apps and websites, according to a newly released list of orders. The first case is Gonzalez v. Google, a dispute over whether sites’ recommendation systems are covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The second is Twitter v. Taamneh, which covers the standard for finding a site illegally supporting terrorists.
The cases will offer the Supreme Court a chance to dramatically reshape the online legal landscape — not only for huge companies like Twitter and Google but also smaller web services that are protected by laws like Section 230.
Supreme Court takes up two cases on platform liability and terrorism – The Verge

The Verge headline is little bit misleading. What is at stake here is less about section 230 and more about the way section 230 has swallowed all other forms of product liability law. Section 230 basically says that if you are n online platform you cannot be held liable for doing two things: hosting other’s people content and moderating that content. On the surface, these seem completely unobjectionable: if you want to run a blog or social media site or ISP, you don’t want to be responsible when someone spams you with child porn or directions on how to build a nuclear bomb. Similarly, if you are hosting a forum dedicated to baking cupcakes and schmuck won’t shut up about the superiority of cakes as a dessert, you need to be able to boot him without fear of legal reprisal in order to effectively maintain your community. Now, these are actually more complicated issues once you get past the surface issues and you could frankly argue that Section 230 is not needed for a robust internet –after all, the US is largely alone in having this kind of law and the internet and community spaces do just fine in the rest of the liberal democratic world. But that is an argument for another day, as neither of these rights is at stake here.

The real issue is that judges have expanded the meaning of section 230 to invalidate product liability law. Very, very simply, product liability says that if you build a product and it causes harm, you are liable for the results of that harm. Judges have read section 230 to exempt online platforms from product liability laws if the product in question involves user generated content, as it does in both these cases. And that has lead to disastrous results for society, and a lot of unearned money for places like Twitter and Google and Facebook.

The issue here is not the user content — it is that Google and Facebook and twitter’s recommendation algorithms, in search of engagement and attention and thus ad and subscription dollars, choose to place that user generated content in front of other users. In doing so, they create harm for people. In other words, their decisions about how to design and operate their products have created harm and under normal circumstances they would be liable for that harm. But because courts have chosen to read Section 230 as invalidating all product liability claims as long as the product involves user generated content, such harm goes unpunished and is indeed rewarded.

Proponents of such a reading argue that any weakening of Section 230 inevitable means that the internet as we know it would die. That is not true. Some companies would be less profitable, but that is a feature, not a bug: companies that build harmful products should be less profitable, or not profitable at all. Punishing companies that hurt people with their products is good and I am frankly amazed I have to argue that.

Nor would holding internet companies to the same product liability standards every other company in the world is held to in the realm of online speech. Companies would still not be liable for user generated content — only how their product used their content to cause harm. And companies could still moderate — removing content is not the same thing as recommendation engine highlighting the content and surfacing it. They are, in fact, complete opposites, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous in the extreme.

There is nothing special about the internet. It is just a tool, like any other tool. And when companies create products with that tool that harm others, they should be held to the same standard.

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Polls are Fscking Useless: A Review of Strength In Numbers

Read Time:7 Minute, 10 Second

G. Elliot Morris would not want me to walk away with the notion that polls are fsking useless after reading Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them. Quite the opposite, actually. Morris has written a passionate defense of the polling industry and why we need polls. Unfortunately, it flounders on the fact that, by his own admission, most polls are garbage. It is a shame he doesn’t prove his point, because the book itself is largely a fascinating, well written exploration of the history of polls, their potential place in democratic government and why they, well, fsking suck.

The first part of the book is a review of the history of the debate about the value of public opinion, stretching from Plato to the enlightenment. After walking through a very high-level discussion of whether or not rulers should care about what the unwashed masses such as you and I think (and usurpingly coming down on the side of the unwashed), then whether or not our representatives should do as we say or substitute their expertise for our judgment (a more complex conversation that is one of the highlights of the book), Morris discusses the history of polling.

This section is fascinating. The focus is entirely American but given the audience that is understandable if a bit limiting. The evolution of polls from simple and unreliable straw polls to more and more rigorous and scientific and slightly less unreliable polls is a compelling read. And yes, Dewey Defeats Truman makes an appearance, but the true fallout of that headline is much more fascinating than you may have previously understood, on many levels.

The history, well compelling in its own right, does highlight one of the reasons that Morris considers polls useful: their ability to show politicians what the public is concerned about. Morris demonstrates that starting in the back half of the twentieth century, pioneered particularly by Nixon, American politicians came to reply upon polls and polling to replace their guts, random encounters, and newspapers/television reporting to determine how the public felt about them and the issues of the day.

To Morris, this is a good thing. Scientific, accurate polling acts as a potential check on out-of-control politicians between elections. It gives the public a means of making their feelings known and potentially redirecting a politician’s attention to what it considers import matters. Or putting breaks on politicians before they go too far down a path that the public does not with them to proceed along. Polling can act as a kind of non-binding referendum, a sanity check on the body politic. A representative can still choose to ignore such opinion, but then it is a choice. And the public can know that they made a deliberate choice and reward or punish them appropriately. In addition, Morris points out that policy polling can help inform representatives about what their constituents truly feel. He cites one study that shows representatives think their voters are almost 20 percentage points more conservative than they actually are. Letting representatives in on that secret would be an undoubted good.

Morris doesn’t really defend pre-election polls very strongly or clearly. I suspect that is because he does not have a lot of faith in them. He is probably right to. As he himself points out, many of the most common types of polls have failed miserably over the least two or three election cycles and may be permanently broken due to societal and technical factors. He himself admits that the only kinds of polls that might do better tend to be more expensive and harder to run. And even here, he mentions to organizations (YouGov and Civiqs) that do not rate as the amongst highest accurate pollsters (a B+ and a B- respectively) on 538’s accuracy ratings. Now, 538 is not the be all end all, but I do find it odd that Morris puts so mush stalk in polls that are only slightly above average compared to their more traditional peers.

Morris, to his credit, does not shy away from any of the problems with polls. The many, many, many ways modern polling fails are covered in delightful detail. The story of how one African American voter sent to 2016 averages on a roller coaster ride is almost worth the price of the book alone. But that coverage does highlight two major issues with Morris’s approach to election polls. First, he never considers voter suppression as a cause for poll failings. At a time when one party is trying to prevent voters from exercising the franchise in swing states, not exploring that possibility is confusing, to say the least. And it points out the other major issue with Morris’s approach: he doesn’t seem to understand or value one major use of pre-election polls — detecting fraud.

One of the reasons to pay attention to pre-election polls is to help determine if an election has been conducted fairly. If the election deviates significantly from the polls, then, possibly, it was not. Perhaps voter suppression was at play, or outright fraud, or some other factor. But you have polls to help you ensure that you know when to look deeper. Morris never brings that possibility up and I have to wonder if it is because he knows, at some level, that pre-election polling may be irretrievably broken.

Morris suggests, polls have significantly wider margins of error than are traditionally understood, the biases in polls (due to unresponsiveness and other social and technical factors) skew in the same direction, making aggregation less effective, and the more effective modeling and polling techniques are unlikely to be adopted due to cost issues (though this is more implied than stated). If Morris is correct, then the pre-election polls have precious little ability to predict anything. And if they cannot be understood to be a reasonable collective marker for the performance of elections, then they really do not have any value. They provide no meaningful information — you cannot look at something so broken and suggest that it indicates voter suppression or other forms of active fraud. What good are they, then?

Issue polling, while currently more accurate than election polling, has the same potential problems. Now that polling has become a culture war issue, how long until the right wing convinces people to stop answering issue polls, so that they can “prove” the country isn’t really pro-choice or pro-LGBQT? It is only a matter of time, even without a concentrated push, before the specific unresponsiveness to election polls driven by right-wing culture war mania drifts into a general unresponsiveness to all polling and issue polls suffer the same problems as elections polls.

And Morris is not wrong that we will lose something important when that happens. As he points out, a demagogue like Trump is bad enough when his claims to represent the will of the paper can be shown to be nonsense. But while Morris does have some technical fixes in his closing arguments, one of his suggestions is simply living with the notion that polls are just not very accurate. Well, Morris seems to do that in his book and as a result, the notion of polls as a check on election fraud is not even contemplated, because it is unviable given that advice. Pretty soon, we may lose the ability to discuss how issue polls can be used to check out of control politicians. Morris doesn’t seem to want to fully fac the implications of what he is describing — that perhaps polls cannot be saved, perhaps we need other methods of achieving what polls have previously given us. Maybe that is too much to ask in a book dedicated to arguing for the importance of polls, but it certainly feels as it would have made for a more honest look at the situation, we find ourselves in.

Despite the fact that I believe Morris failed in his objective, I do recommend this book. As I mentioned earlier, it really is well-written. The technical sections are explained well, the history and philosophy overviews are interesting, and Morris does cover important needs in a democracy that polling can and has helped fill. He is just doesn’t seem to be able to admit that his profession may no longer be in a position to practically fulfill them any longer. Maybe that’s another book, by another author, but I would have liked to see someone as well-versed in the need and the profession grapple with that question more openly.

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Time To Nationalize Professional Sports

Read Time:4 Minute, 22 Second

Okay, I can hear you saying, “Good one — that’s the hot take to end all hot takes.” But is it? What, precisely, do sports owners provide? They don’t inject capital into the teams — North American professional sprots are protected industries. Money is provided by the cartel like nature of the business. Once you are in, you are essentially guaranteed to make money and every major sport has some variation of a salary cap, ensuring you cannot spend your way to insolvency even if you wanted to. No owner invented the sport or the business model — they are long established, with most of the rise in revenues and team value being driven by the fact that television and entertainment are fragmented, and they have the only live events that the public cares about. Team owners meddling almost always makes the team worse. I am a Cowboy fan –ask me what its like to have the owner think he’s a competent general manger. It’s not good.

And the owners certainly don’t make the sport look good:

On Wednesday night, Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz gravely embarrassed himself and his team at a town hall event at the United Center. Mark Lazerus of The Athletic directed a question to Wirtz’s son, team CEO Danny Wirtz, about what steps the Blackhawks were taking to empower players in the wake of the Kyle Beach story. Rather than respond with any sort of consideration or information, Wirtz père jumped in and told Lazerus, “I don’t think it’s any of your business. You don’t work for the company. If somebody in the company asks that question, we’ll answer it. And I think you should get on to the next subject. We’re not going to talk about Kyle Beach. We’re not going to talk about anything that happened. Now we’re moving on.”
Rocky Wirtz’s Meltdown and the Illusion of Sports-Owner Accountability – The Ringer

At all:

The NBA announced Tuesday it suspended Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver for a year and fined him $10 million after verifying allegations of racism, sexism and other workplace violations.
The decision follows an independent investigation that found Sarver, who also owns the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, engaged in conduct that “included the use of racially insensitive language; unequal treatment of female employees; sex-related statements and conduct; and harsh treatment of employees that on occasion constituted bullying.”
NBA Suspends Phoenix Suns Owner Over Racism, Sexism Findings | HuffPost Sports

Not even a tiny little bit

Snyder, who has not been involved in day-to-day operations with the Washington Commanders since July 2021, is the subject of two more investigations looking into alleged misconduct. Mary Jo White, a former SEC chairwoman, is leading the investigations.
The NFL famously decided not to release a written report following a year-long investigation by Beth Wilkinson into workplace misconduct. The league fined Snyder $10 million, and he has not represented the team at league meetings or been involved in the day-to-day operations since.
The league said in February it would release a written report from White once complete. The first allegation centers on former team employee Tiffani Johnston, who alleged Snyder sexually harassed her at a work dinner in 2005 or 2006. The other investigation is looking into alleged financial improprieties regarding Washington’s ticket revenue.
How Commanders owner Dan Snyder and the NFL’s investigation could be impacted by Robert Sarver’s sale of Suns – CBSSports.com

Not even a little … you get the point

Four estranged adult children of Vancouver Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini have all alleged that he physically and psychologically abused them when they were young, a B.C. Supreme Court judge heard Tuesday.
The disturbing allegations came to light during a hearing over whether Aquilini is obliged to continue paying child support and covering university expenses for three of his children. They include claims he beat a sleeping child and threw a five-year-old across a bedroom.
Children of Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini say he beat and psychologically abused them, court hears | CBC News

The Green Bay Packers never seem to have these kinds of problems is all I’m saying.

Of course, outrages happen in publicly controlled institutions as well. Just look at Jim Jordan or USA Gymnastics or Hockey Canada. But at least in those cases, there is some hope of systematic change when the issues are brough to light. Having public control brings those organizations closer to accountability.

And there is no guarantee that publicly controlled teams won’t build white elephant stadiums — but if they do, at least all the profits will go to the local government. And wouldn’t it be awesome if general manager was an elected position? This rebuild better work, Davidson, or we’re coming for you ….

Seriously, what is the downside to this? We are already spending stupid amounts of money to build most of these teams stadiums that we won’t see the benefits from. Let’s just cut out these parasites, take over the teams, and run them as they should be run — as public trusts. And if the local budget gets too bad in Buffalo, say? Well, I’m sure Toronto would pay a hefty fee for the Bills ….

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Facebook, Genocide, and Accountability

Read Time:3 Minute, 25 Second

It looks like Facebook materially contributed to a genocide:

In a new report, Amnesty claims that Facebook’s algorithms “proactively amplified” anti-Rohingya content. It also alleges that Meta ignored civilians’ and activists’ pleas to curb hate-mongering on the social media platform while profiting from increased engagement.
Report: Facebook Algorithms Promoted Anti-Rohingya Violence | Time

Worse, Facebook executives knew about the effects their algorithms were having and did nothing to stop them:

In its report, Amnesty concludes that Meta was made aware as early as 2012 of how its engagement-based algorithms were contributing to serious real-world harm in Myanmar. It alleges that the company has over the last 10 years willfully disregarded known human rights risks on its platform and implemented inadequate solutions, prioritizing profit over users’ safety.
Htaike Htaike Aung, a digital researcher who documents the history of the internet in the Southeast Asian country through the Myanmar Internet Project, tells TIME she met with senior Facebook executives about the social media platform’s effects in 2012 and 2013. “It felt like talking to a void,” she says.
Report: Facebook Algorithms Promoted Anti-Rohingya Violence | Time

Facebook relied on one Burmese speaker to moderate all the content for the region. It’s decision to allow posting news items right to Facebook incentivized hate speech to flourish, because its algorithms prioritized engagement and the clickbait this feature encouraged drove engagement. They relied on AI to solve the content issue even though AI was demonstrably unable to do so because it was cheaper than hiring humans and would introduce far less friction and thus keep engagement and thus add revenue higher.

And nothing is going to happen to Facebook. Even though they ignored the issues in favor of profit, even though they designed a product that encouraged genocide and let it run for years, nothing will happen to them. No executives will face trail for their actions, the company will be allowed to continue to exist, and their business model will not be impacted at all. Even Amnesty International can only imagine Facebook paying restitution. A fine, in other words. And a fine is just a fee, a cost of doing business.

If we allow this kind of blatant evil to go unpunished, which we appear to be doing, it will happen again. Facebook is a corporation. If we are not going to hold the officers of the company personally liable for creating a product that assisted genocide despite knowing that it was assisting genocide, then we should destroy the company. Revoke its charter. If we are worried about the people who work there, social media is not a dying industry. I am sure Myspace will be happy to hire them. And if that seems too flip for you:

No one who works at Facebook can pretend, at this stage, to be unaware of what Facebook is or how it prioritizes making money at the expense of lives
Let the government seize its assets and run it, making it algorithms public as it does so to make sure we all know where the product when so horribly wrong, until it can be sold off. And of course, all proceeds of said sale go right into the government coffers, once reparations have been paid out. People who bought stock in Facebook did so knowing that they were buying into a compay designed ot be controlled by Zuckerberg — they took their chances.

None of this is going to happen, of course. Despite being the creation of governments, corporations have been successful at warping the law to such an extent that they are largely unaccountable to it, even in the most extreme cases such as this. That doesn’t make it right.

Facebook knowingly assisted in genocide. We should hound the company and the people who allowed that to happen until they day they die with that knowledge. And we should use this example to rededicate ourselves to the struggle to regain democratic control over these malefactors of wealth.

Because never again was supposed to mean never again by anyone — even smarmy little Silicon Valley hotshots.

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What Does Google Do With Your Kid’s Data?

Read Time:2 Minute, 44 Second

Wired has a fascinating story about a Danish school system that temporarily dumped Google because no one seems to know exactly what Google does with your kid’s data:

But he now finds Google’s involvement in Danish public schools sinister, and he wants the company out of the system. “Everything [children do] in school is in the cloud, via Workspace, which means everything they write in their machine is sent to Google,” he says. “We have given Google access to a whole generation.”
The main issue Graugaard has highlighted is that they don’t really understand what students’ Google data is used for or where it goes. “Google is always saying, we don’t use the data of pupils for targeted advertising. We do not sell the data to third parties,” says Jesper Lund, chair of digital rights group IT Pol Denmark. But there is concern that Google does use students’ data for other purposes, such as improving its services or training artificial intelligence, he adds.
A Danish City Built Google Into Its Schools—Then Banned It | WIRED

Google, of course, blames the schools:

It’s up to Helsingør to get Google to mend its products to be in line with GDPR, says Frank. Helsingør municipality did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment. But Google implies it’s the municipality that needs to improve. “We’re working with Helsingør municipality to answer questions, improve their technical settings, and share best practices from other European schools that have done risk assessments and use our products,” says Alexandra Ahtiainen, head of Google for Education for Northern Europe
A Danish City Built Google Into Its Schools—Then Banned It | WIRED

What the article does not do, because it is a Wired article and Wired has never gotten its early techno-utopian beginnings completely out of its system, is actually interrogate what google actually does with student data it collects.

Turns out, this is a moderately hard question to answer. In 2016, Senator Franken got the company to admit that, yes, they do use some student data for commercial purposes:

Online-services giant Google has acknowledged that it collects and data-mines for some commercial purposes a wide range of personal information on student users who log in through its popular Apps for Education service, then venture to the company’s search engine and other products.
Google Acknowledges Data Mining Student Users Outside Apps for Education (edweek.org)

In 2020, New Mexico sued Google over privacy concerns. The suit was dismissed on what appears ot b a technicality, and Google denied that the information was used for tarting ads. But that doesn’t mean that the information could not be used in perfecting ads or held onto and used later in life as part of the profile when the child reaches adulthood. Finding detailed information on those aspects of the data use eluded me.

Bluntly, Google, a company built on ad revenue is not especially transparent on how or when it uses your children’s data, only that it does use that data for commercial reasons, such as improving products. For a company that depends on keeping your attention, improving products often means keeping you addicted to them. For Google, the user is the product.

How comfortable are you with your children being products?

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Is Tanking Ethical?

Read Time:6 Minute, 12 Second

The Chicago Blackhawks have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in winning games this season. There one goal is to position themselves to win the draft lottery in the hopes of landing Connor Bedard, widely believed to be a sure-fire generational talent. Even if they don’t win the lottery, the draft is considered at least three difference makers deep, so the Hawks being abysmal is likely to jump start their rebuild.

In service of that rebuild, the Hawks have jettisoned any pretense that they are trying to be competitive. They traded away a 40-goal budding two-way superstar in Alex Debrincat. They signed two goalies who can charitable be described as bad despite having better options in the minors. Their big free-agent signings are players coming off bad years who still could be good, but the moment they are they will be shipped out to contenders for picks. Of the three really good players they have, the moment any of them even suggests they would waive their no-movement clauses, they would be shipped out so fast the breeze would melt the ice at the United Center. Their top prospect is almost certainly ready for the NHL and almost certainly will spend a significant portion of the season, if not all of it, in the AHL. In fact, none of their prospects, no matter how ready, are expected to play significant games in the NHL. I think one of their ticket promotions is four seats, four cokes, four hot dogs, and four shifts on the fourth line for 99 dollars a ticket.

They are dedicated, as an organization, to being bad. Is this ethical?

They didn’t have to do this. They had cap space – they could have kept Debrincat, they could have kept Dylan Strome. They could have tried to find players that complimented Kane and the style that their new coach wanted to play and tried to at least compete for playoff spot. A lot of things went wrong last season and before they traded away some of their better players at the deadline, they were winning at a pace that put them at the edge of the playoff race over the course of a full year. A few upgrades, some improvement from returning players like Kirby Dach (also traded) and Johnaton Toews (a former star fighting to return from poor health), and better coaching (Jeremy Coliton did an admirable job handling the fallout from the Kyle Beach sex scandal, answering questions from a time when he was not a member of the organization when others in the organization who should have been in front of the cameras ducked that responsibility. But he did a poor job coaching the team.) and you could convince yourself that this team could contend for a wildcard. And once you are in the playoffs, anything could happen, and often does.

Some people like Mark Lazarus of the Athletic think that is what they should have done, that tanking is a betrayal of the fans and the players. I don’t think that is actually the case. The team does have an obligation to the players and the fans, but I do not think that tanking violates those obligation to either.

The team’s obligations to the players are the easiest to dismiss with regards to tanking. The team is obligated to live up to the contracts they sign with the players — pay them, ensure their physical and mental wellbeing are protected as best as possible within the bounds of playing a physical dangerous and mentally taxing sport and live up to any side agreements they have with individual players — i.e. keep their word if at all possible. It could be argued that players sign contracts with the understanding that a team will try to win every year, or that they will play a certain style, or that they will get a certain rile ona team. But players also know that regimes can and do change, and that no coach or general manager is guaranteed to be in place for the length of their contract, nor is the relative strength of the team guaranteed to remain unchanged. So, players know that teams may trade them or tank or tread water or do any number of things that change their role on the team in service of a number of goals. It is an accepted part of the business of professional sports. Tanking, or any change in how a plyer is used or in the plan of the front office, is not an ethical violation with respect to the player/team relationship. It is an understood part of the life of a player.

What about fans? A team is an entertainment product, so the ethical relationship is obviously that the team takes the fans money with the promise of attempting to be as entertaining as possible. But what does entertaining as possible mean? As I said, tanking is not the only choice to playoff relevance. Teams like Vegas, Calgary and Tampa Bay have played games with the salary cap and reloaded over the last several years and never torn their team down to try and win. But Vegas and Calgary have never won a Cup, and Tampa was terrible before their Cup winning years.

Similarly, Columbus could have traded away players like Bobrovsky and Panarin for assets. They kept those players and made the playoffs. They got one round of magic before watching those players leave for nothing and have been stuck in the middle of the bad teams ever since, hardly sniffing the playoffs but not drafting low enough to get a truly transcendent player to help turn the team round. Or how about Toronto — a dynamic fantastic regular season team with at least one, maybe two superstars on it that always makes the playoffs and always loses in the first round. Are those teams as entertaining as they could be?

Maybe. Since this is an entertainment product, in Toronto, for now, the answer is yes, because the fans keep supporting that team. Same in Vegas and Calgary and to a lesser extent Columbus. Chicago fans, given the attendance numbers, conversely, seem to be okay with the idea of trying to rebuild a Cup contender through bottoming out. I personally agree with that sentiment. To my mind, being entertaining involves trying to contend for as many Cups as possible. Having lived through both a massive drought and three Cups in five years, I crave the latter. I don’t want a series of first round exists. I want meaningful games deep into the playoffs, even if they don’t win the Cup. After the wandering, wasted last five years, I am happy to have a plan to try and achieve that.

Besides, bad doesn’t have to mean unentertaining. Luke Richardson, the new coach, may very well have the team play hard and exciting, even if they cannot close out games. Organizations may tank, but players don’t. They can be entertaining even if they are not good.

As long as the fans, then, as a group, still watch games, still buy tickets, still pay for merchandise, then they ethical obligation to be entertaining is being met, as best as we can measure it. And as long as that is true, then the team isn’t violating their ethical obligations to the fans.

So no, tanking is usually not unethical.

Unlike stadium deals.

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