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OK State Superintendent Ryan Walters Wants Even More Bibles, Prayers For The Dear Leader

from the holy-shit dept

Whatever your politics, there can be no arguing that the election of Donald Trump once more to the highest office in the land has served as a permission slip for some of the worst people in the country to behave badly. We’re already seeing this in all sorts of ways, from incel fuckwits telling women that it’s “Your body, my choice, forever“, to obviously racist and antisemetic public displays, and so on. Note that I am not laying these occurrences squarely at the feet of Donald Trump as though he specifically ordered that any of this occur, but it is a simple, inconvenient fact that these assholes pulling this crap are his fans and voters. And until the man specifically decries these horrible things, he tacitly endorses them.

The same would be true of Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ actions. We last discussed Walters over his plans to use taxpayer money to buy 55,000 bibles for the state’s public schools. Notably, the initial ask included a very specific set of specs for these bibles, with which essentially only Trump’s perverse God Bless The U.S.A. Bible complied. After a bipartisan backlash, which Walters of course blamed on “leftists,” the spec list was changed so that more bibles would fit the bill. But if you thought that this signaled that Walters would stop treating Trump’s boots like a lollipop, you were wrong.

The most recent news is that Walters has announced that 500 bibles have already been purchased for public schools, specifically for AP courses on government. This comes with language that attempts to couch the purchase as being for historical purposes, which is absolutely absurd.

In a news release, Walters said the Bibles would be used in Advanced Placement government classrooms across the state. He said the move represented “the first in the nation Bible purchase explicitly for use in schools as an academic and literary resource,” and described the purchase as “the first step toward providing Bibles for every classroom in the state.”

“We are focused on ensuring we get Bibles available in every classroom in our state as quickly as we can,” Walters said in a news release.

Notably absent from the announcement was any indication of how many copies of other religious texts had been purchased for schools as well. No mention of any purchases of the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Torah, the Talmud, the Vedas, the Adi Granth, the Avesta, nor even the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And that’s sort of a big problem when it comes to what Walters is attempting here, given the collision course he is currently on with the First Amendment. The government is to take no stance on matters of religion and forcing exactly one very specific religious text into classrooms is as naked a violation of the First Amendment as I can recall.

And Walters can attempt to portray this as necessary in order to teach the foundational history of America, but that is plainly bullshit. One does not need the full copy of a religious text, to which not all founding fathers subscribed mind you, in order to learn about the importance of religion to the history of the country. You can find evidence of its importance in the same fucking First Amendment that Walters is currently attempting to violate. That amendment’s inspiration, Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, was specifically designed to uncouple his state’s government from the Church of England, with a primary aim to protect other religions in the state, such as Catholicism and those of Jewish faith. Hell, at least some number of the founding fathers weren’t Christian at all, but rather Deists. So where the hell are the Deist texts in Oklahoma classrooms? You know, for historical purposes and such?

Conversations on the historical nature of religion in America are perfectly valid and fun, frankly, but they would also be entirely wasted calories when it comes to Walters. He’s not interested in any of this. And if you think he is, that is belied by his other demand of the public schools under his care.

State Superintendent Ryan Walters sent superintendents an email Thursday afternoon mandating districts show students a video of him announcing the new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism and inviting students into a prayer for President-elect Donald Trump, among other topics.

In the video, Walters says the “radical left” is attacking religious liberty in schools, patriotism is being “mocked,” and there is “a hatred for this country pushed by woke teachers’ unions.”

He invites the students to pray with him, clarifying they don’t have to join in.

“I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions,” Walters said. “I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country.”

Nothing like a little newspeak mixed in with a healthy dose of hypocrisy, apparently. The name of his manufactured office is negated by his own actions. This isn’t practicing religious liberty; that’s what Jefferson did. This is the state government favoring one specific religious text as the expense of every other religious text. That’s the opposite of religious freedom.

And to demand, nay, mandate what is essentially the indoctrination of school-aged children into the political opinions of one man, from one party, with not a care in the world for the 32% of voters who didn’t vote for Walters’ preferred candidate or party, is bonkers. And before we get comments about how “Wah, the left has been indoctrinating kids in schools for years,” please show me where a member of the left mandated the viewing of a video by school children that specifically negatively portrays the other political side as hating the country, or attacking religious liberty. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

All the worse is subjecting these same children to a call for prayer for a man who is quite plainly as un-Christian a person as we’ve ever had serve in the Oval Office. This is pure boot-licking behavior from a person whom everyone agrees is merely vying of a position in Trump’s government.

Republican President-elect Donald Trump is quickly filling out his incoming Cabinet, and Walters’ name has been mentioned by some national news outlets as a potential pick for education secretary or adviser.

Exactly correct. Walters is using both the real religious beliefs of those within his state and freaking children in order to advance his own political career.

Somehow, it strains the mind to imagine Christ approving of any of this. Regardless of that, all of this should be struck down as violating the Constitution.

Filed Under: bibles, donald trump, oklahoma, prayer in school, religion, ryan walters, schools, separation of church and state

Daily Deal: The Learn to Paint Course

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Alfred Robert (A.R.) Quinton was an English watercolor artist, famed for his stunning paintings of British landscapes and villages. Following along a professional artist with more than 35 years of experience, the Learn to Paint Course will guide you through painting A.R. Quinton’s Scenes with watercolor and enhancing them using pastel pencils. From the sky and trees to foliage and brickwork, you’ll learn how to paint a variety of different elements and make them even more vibrant and stunning with pastel pencils. It’s on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

ExTwitter’s New Lawsuit Accurately Argues California Deepfake Law Violates First Amendment, Section 230

from the broken-clocks dept

Elon Musk’s ExTwitter has filed an important First Amendment lawsuit against California over its unconstitutional law regulating deepfakes. This follows Musk’s earlier successful challenge to the state’s social media “transparency” law. Yes, sometimes Elon Musk actually does file good First Amendment cases that help protect free speech. I’m just as amazed as anyone, but it’s worth calling it out when he does the right thing.

It’s true of his newest lawsuit against California for yet another bogus First Amendment-ignoring law, this one having to do with deepfakes.

We similarly cheered on Elon Musk’s earlier lawsuit against California over its unconstitutional social media transparency law and were vindicated when the Ninth Circuit said the law violated the First Amendment.

The complaint filed by ExTwitter makes a compelling case that AB 2655 is unconstitutional on multiple fronts:

Like in that first lawsuit, ExTwitter has hired Floyd Abrams, one of the most well-known First Amendment lawyers out there, protesting one of California’s new anti-deepfake laws:

AB 2655 requires large online platforms like X, the platform owned by X Corp. (collectively, the “covered platforms”), to remove and alter (with a label) — and to create a reporting mechanism to facilitate the removal and alteration of — certain content about candidates for elective office, elections officials, and elected officials, of which the State of California disapproves and deems to be “materially deceptive.” It has the effect of impermissibly replacing the judgments of covered platforms about what content belongs on their platforms with the judgments of the State. And it imposes liability on the covered platforms to the extent that their judgments about content moderation are inconsistent with those imposed by the State. AB 2655 thus violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution; the free speech protections of Article I, Section 2, of the California Constitution; and the immunity provided to “interactive computer services” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c).

Worse yet, AB 2655 creates an enforcement system that incentivizes covered platforms to err on the side of removing and/or labeling any content that presents even a close call as to whether it is “materially deceptive” and otherwise meets the statute’s requirements. This system will inevitably result in the censorship of wide swaths of valuable political speech and commentary and will limit the type of “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” “debate on public issues” that core First Amendment protections are designed to ensure. New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). As the United States Supreme Court has recognized, our strong First Amendment protections for such speech are based on our nation’s “profound national commitment” to protecting such debate, even if it often “include[s] vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

The complaint is strong and presents a clear explanation of the myriad problems with this law.

AB 2655 suffers from a compendium of serious First Amendment infirmities. Primary among them is that AB 2655 imposes a system of prior restraint on speech, which is the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.” Nebraska Press Ass’n v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 559 (1976). The statute mandates the creation of a system designed to allow for expedited “take downs” of speech that the State has targeted for removal from covered platforms in advance of publication. The government is involved in every step of that system: it dictates the rules for reporting, defining, and identifying the speech targeted for removal; it authorizes state officials (including Defendants here) to bring actions seeking removal; and, through the courts, it makes the ultimate determination of what speech is permissible. Rather than allow covered platforms to make their own decisions about moderation of the content at issue here, it authorizes the government to substitute its judgment for those of the platforms.

It is difficult to imagine a statute more in conflict with core First Amendment principles. As the United States Supreme Court has held, “it is a central tenet of the First Amendment that the government must remain neutral in the marketplace of ideas.” Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 56 (1988). Even worse, AB 2655’s system of prior restraint censors speech about “public issues and debate on the qualifications of candidates,” to which the “First Amendment affords the broadest protection” to ensure the “unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.” McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U.S. 334, 346 (1995).

If challenging these deepfake laws sounds familiar, there already was one challenge to AB 2655 from a user whom California Governor Gavin Newsom directly called out as someone the law was designed to silence. In that case, two of the laws were challenged, and the court (very, very quickly) issued an injunction against the other one, AB 2839, which was set to go into effect immediately. The challenge to 2655 was put on the backburner, since it wasn’t set to go into effect until January 1st of next year.

Now ExTwitter is jumping in to challenge it as well, and hopefully it succeeds. The complaint is well done and makes good points, and I’m happy that Elon is challenging the law in this way. One hopes that perhaps the legal team representing him could do more to explain to him how the First Amendment actually works so he stops misrepresenting it in other contexts.

It’s also good to see that the complaint makes a big deal of how Section 230 protects ExTwitter from such laws, especially given how Elon’s best buddy, Donald Trump, has made noises about stripping Section 230 protections from websites.

AB 2655 directly contravenes the immunity provided to the covered platforms by 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1), which prohibits treating interactive computer service providers as the “publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

AB 2655’s Enforcement Provisions violate Section 230(c)(1) because they provide causes of action for “injunctive or other equitable relief against” the covered platform to remove or (by adding a disclaimer) alter certain content posted on the platform by its users. See §§ 20515(b), 20516. AB 2655 thus treats covered platforms “as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).

Section 230(c)(1) bars such liability where the alleged duty violated derives from an entity’s conduct as a “publisher,” including “reviewing, editing, and deciding whether to publish or withdraw from publication third-party content.” See, e.g., Barnes v. Yahoo!, Inc., 570 F.3d 1096, 1102 (9th Cir. 2009) (finding that Yahoo! was entitled to immunity under Section 230(c)(1) from claims concerning failure to remove offending profile), as amended (Sept. 28, 2009); Calise v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 103 F.4th 732, 744 (9th Cir. 2024) (finding that Meta was immune under Section 230(c)(1) from claims that would require Meta to “actively vet and evaluate third-party ads” in order to remove them).

The complaint also praises the Supreme Court’s good ruling in the Moody case about how social media sites have a First Amendment right to present content how they want:

Even if AB 2655 were not a prior restraint, it still violates the First Amendment because it runs counter to the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, in which the Court held, in no uncertain terms, that when a social media platform “present[s] a curated and ‘edited compilation of [third party] speech,’” that presentation “is itself protected speech.” 144 S. Ct. 2383, 2409 (2024) (quoting Hurley v. IrishAm. Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Grp. of Boston, 515 U.S. 557, 570 (1995)); see also id. at 2401 (“A private party’s collection of third-party content into a single speech product (the operators’ ‘repertoire’ of programming) is itself expressive, and intrusion into that activity must be specially justified under the First Amendment.”); id. at 2405 (quoting Miami Herald Pub. Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241, 258 (1974)) (“‘The choice of material,’ the ‘decisions made [as to] content,’ the ‘treatment of public issues’ — ‘whether fair or unfair’ — all these ‘constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment.’ . . . For a paper, and for a platform too.”). Because AB 2655 impermissibly replaces the judgments of the covered platforms about what speech may be permitted on their platforms with those of the government, it cannot be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s decision in Moody.

AB 2655 disregards numerous significant First Amendment holdings by the Supreme Court in Moody — specifically, that (i) it is not a “valid, let alone substantial” interest for a state to seek “to correct the mix of speech” that “social-media platforms present,” id. at 2407; (ii) a “State ‘cannot advance some points of view by burdening the expression of others,’” id. at 2409 (quoting Pac. Gas & Elec. Co. v. Pub. Utilities Comm’n of California, 475 U.S. 1, 20 (1986)); (iii) the “government may not, in supposed pursuit of better expressive balance, alter a private speaker’s own editorial choices about the mix of speech it wants to convey,” id. at 2403; (iv) “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others,” id. at 2394; and (v) “[h]owever imperfect the private marketplace of ideas,” a “worse proposal” is “the government itself deciding when speech [is] imbalanced, and then coercing speakers to provide more of some views or less of others,” id. at 2403.

Again, this seems important, given that the ruling in Moody was shooting down problematic GOP-pushed bills to force social media companies to host speech they didn’t want to host.

All in all, this is a strong complaint that is completely consistent with strong First Amendment principles. I’m glad that Elon was willing to have ExTwitter step up and bring it, even if he’s doing so for purely selfish reasons.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, ab 2655, california, content moderation, deepfakes, elon musk, free speech, gavin newsom, section 230
Companies: twitter, x

from the can-you-do-better/ dept

We’re excited to announce the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game: One Billion Users. In this fast-paced and entertaining card game, you take on the role of a social media mogul competing to build the most successful social network. We’ve spent much of this year designing, testing, and refining the game and it’s almost ready to hit the presses — so now we need your help. If you want to try your hand at running a social media network, please back our Kickstarter campaign and secure your copy of One Billion Users.

In One Billion Users, your goal is simple: gain users and attract influencers to grow your platform. But watch out: other players will try to slow you down by playing cards that create obstacles in your path. And you’ll have to be careful about the communities you attract — the toxicity they bring could hurt your platform in the long run.

This game is a follow-up to CIA: Collect It All, which we successfully Kickstarted a few years back. That game was based on public domain material created by the US government to train CIA analysts about the surveillance tools at their disposal. One Billion Users is also based on a public domain game: 1906’s Touring from William Janson Roche, which was a card game involving racing cars to see who could get the furthest distance, while overcoming obstacles placed by opposing players. It’s widely considered the first card game using the “Take That” game mechanic.

In the 1950s, a game based on Touring, called Mille Bornes, briefly became the best-selling game in the US. If you’ve played Mille Bornes or Touring, the basics of One Billion Users will be familiar to you, but we’ve introduced many updates to modernize the game and to make it fit with the social media theme.

In One Billion Users, you’re trying to build up your userbase rather than chasing miles on the road. But all users are not equal: they bring different levels of toxicity with them, and that toxicity can overwhelm your network and limit your opportunities to grow or find advertisers. Other players can try to stop you with various blockers like overloading your servers or causing you to be low on funds.

We’ve also added a new twist: the concept of influencers who want to join particular networks. During the game, there are opportunities to steal influencers (and their legions of followers) away from other networks, but that means they can be stolen from you as well.

On top of that, a variety of events can occur throughout the game that can impact all players. Some events, like a tech bubble that blocks bad press, can be helpful. But others, like regulations that limit how much toxicity you can play, can seriously limit your growth options and force you to rethink your strategy.

One Billion Users delivers whether you’re a social media aficionado, a tabletop gaming enthusiast, or just looking for a fun new game to enjoy with friends and family. It’s designed to be not only entertaining and engaging, but also highly replayable, ensuring hours of enjoyment.

Also, backing this project will help support Techdirt and our reporting. So, rather than just joining yet another premium tier for a news website, you’ll be getting a fun game you can play for years to come!

Filed Under: one billion users

Streaming TV Enshittification Will Continue Until Morale Improves

from the pay-more-for-less dept

Tue, Nov 19th 2024 05:29am - Karl Bode

We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of their depths.

With streaming subscription growth saturated, the market has been forced to get “creative” in order to feed Wall Street its expected quarterly returns. That has meant sagging quality control for streaming services like Max, and a steady parade of price hikes that generally haven’t been worth it.

Speaking on the company’s recent conference call, Time Warner Discovery executives are making it clear that all manner of new restrictions and price hikes are on the way, just in case you were looking forward to more of that sort of thing. Among them will be a crackdown on the diabolical “password sharing” the industry used to view as helpful free advertising:

“During the earnings call for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) for its fiscal Q3 2024, which ended on September 30, WBD signaled that it’s gearing up to roll out its next strategy for growing streaming revenue—charging subscribers extra for sharing passwords—over the next few months. This will start with “very soft messaging” toward Max users before the crackdown intensifies in 2025 and 2026, WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said.

Wiedenfels admitted that on their own, password crackdowns are “a form of price rises.”

Executives say they’re also exploring, like Amazon, steadily increasing the number of ads paying customers see. And they will, of course, just be rising prices steadily until they see a mass exodus of subscribers:

“WBD also hinted at potential price hikes for Max today. During the earnings call, JB Perrette, WBD’s CEO and president of global streaming and games, noted that although Max has raised US subscription prices twice in the past two years, WBD believes it can get away with even higher prices: “We think the premium nature of our product in particular lends us to be – to have a fair amount of room to continue to push price.”

Except the “premium nature” of the product doesn’t exist anymore. Any cachet enjoyed from the HBO brand has largely been killed off thanks to executives’ prioritization of lower-quality reality TV dreck as they pursue lowest common denominator engagement bait at scale. There’s still occasionally good art on Max; but the heyday of HBO as a prestige production empire is long, long dead.

Meanwhile the kind of things that customers actually want (lower prices, better quality, better customer service) cost money and erode those sweet quarterly returns. The kinds of things customers and labor don’t want (price hikes, sagging quality, layoffs, weird new restrictions on access) are where the current growth and revenue boosting resides. So guess what you’re going to get.

It’s not enough for a publicly traded company to provide an affordable product that people really like. That doesn’t achieve exponential, impossible growth. To get that (or the illusion of that) requires a certain aggressive creativity. And if streaming can’t obtain it via annoying price hikes and restrictions, as Time Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav has made clear, they’ll achieve it with pointless new harmful mergers under Trump. These folks insist they’re just engaging in the cold calculus of cost efficiency, but you’ll notice that excessive and unwarranted executive compensation somehow always avoids scrutiny.

Again, I suspect what’s next for the industry is a whole bunch more consolidation and mergers to try and minimize any serious price competition and to nab tax breaks. From there I suspect you’ll start seeing a greater fixation on finding creative new ways to “reduce churn,” which will likely (now that the FTC will be lobotomized under Trump) include complicated new tricks to make cancelling services more difficult.

When customers inevitably revolt and flock back to piracy (which is already starting to happen), execs will freak out and blame everyone but themselves for the trend (VPNs! Generational entitlement! The wokes!), and the innovation and disruption cycle will repeat itself all over again.

Filed Under: cable, competition, consolidation, disruption, mergers, streaming, time warner discovery, tv, video
Companies: warner bros. discovery

Epic Allows Internet Archive To Distribute For Free ‘Unreal’ & ‘Unreal Tournament’ Forever

from the was-that-so-hard? dept

One of the most frustrating aspects in the ongoing conversation around the preservation of older video games, also known as cultural output, is the collision of IP rights and some publishers’ unwillingness to both continue to support and make available these older games and their refusal to release those same games into the public domain so that others can do so. It creates this crazy situation in which a company insists on retaining its copyrights over a video game that it has effectively disappeared with no good or legitimate way for the public to preserve them. As I’ve argued for some time now, this breaks the copyright contract with the public and should come with repercussions. The whole bargain that is copyright law is that creative works are granted a limited monopoly on the production of that work, with that work eventually arriving into the public domain. If that arrival is not allowed to occur, the bargain is broken, and not by anyone who would supposedly “infringe” on the copyright of that work.

Why would game publishers do this sort of thing? There are plenty of theories. The fad of retro-gaming is such that publishers can claim they are reserving their rights for an eventual remastered version, or otherwise a re-released version, of these games. Sometimes they even follow through on those plans. In other cases, some companies are just so ingrained in IP protectionism that they can’t see past their own nose (hi there, Nintendo!). In still other cases the companies that published the game no longer exist, and unraveling who now holds the rights to their games can be an absolute nightmare.

But it just doesn’t have to be like this. Companies could be willing to give up their iron-fisted control over their IP for these older games they aren’t willing to support or preserve themselves and let others do it for them. And if you need a real world example of that, you need look only at how Epic is working with The Internet Archive to do exactly that.

Epic, now primarily known for Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, has given permission for two of the most significant video games ever made, Unreal and Unreal Tournament, to be freely accessed via the Internet Archive. As spotted by RPS, via ResetEra, the OldUnreal group announced the move on their Discord, along with instructions for how to easily download and play them on modern machines.

Huge kudos to Epic for being cool with this, because while it shouldn’t be unusual to happily let people freely share a three-decade-old game you don’t sell any more, it’s vanishingly rare. And if you remain in any doubt, we just got word back from Epic confirming they’re on board.

“We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org,” a spokesperson told us by email, “and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.”

Importantly, OldUnreal and The Internet Archive very much know what they’re doing here. Grabbing the ZIP file for the game sleekly pulls the ISO directly from The Internet Archive, installs it, and there are instructions for how to get the game up and running on modern hardware. This is obviously a labor of love from fans dedicated toward keeping these two excellent games alive.

And the size and success of these games is important, too. It would be all too easy for Epic to keep this IP to itself with a plan for a remastered version of each game, or for a forthcoming sequel, or anything like that. Instead, Epic has just opened up and allowed the internet to do its thing in preserving these important titles using one of the most trustworthy sources to do so.

But this is just two games. What would be really nice to see is this become a trend, or, better yet, a program run by The Internet Archive. Don’t want to bother to preserve your old game? No problem, let the IA do it for you!

Filed Under: archives, internet archive, preservation, unreal, unreal tournament, video game preservation, video games
Companies: epic, internet archive

Texas PD’s Massage Parlor Sting Operation Ends With 13 Officers Disciplined, All 23 Criminal Cases Dismissed

from the doing-their-best-thinking-from-the-waist-down dept

Cops like to pretend they’re winning the war on sex trafficking. Whether or not there’s enough sex trafficking to justify law enforcement expenditures is, at best, still an open question. And most sex trafficking operations tend to end with the arrest of the people they’re supposed to be saving: the sex workers.

Then there are the investigations themselves. A bunch of vice cops are given permission to do whatever needs to be done to gather evidence, even if that means further exploitation of the people they’re supposed to be saving. Then there’s the collateral damage, which ranges from civil forfeiture targeting cars driven by people who happen to pass through, um… “high sex areas” to grabbing whatever cash happens to be lying around when officers storm massage businesses.

Then there’s this chain of events, which is as hilarious as it is infuriating. Here’s the only narrative I’m sure the Lewisville, Texas police department wanted to surface following its long-term sting operation against local businesses:

Lewisville Police Chief Brock Rollins said that in October 2022, the former street crimes unit was assigned to uncover alleged prostitution at nine massage parlors in the city, as well as one in neighboring Flower Mound. The operation lasted until June 2024, resulting in 32 criminal charges against 28 suspects.

Oh, if only we could freeze time! What a game changer that would be! This would be victory against sex trafficking, even it’s there’s nothing in here that suggests the 28 “suspects” might have been people being sex trafficked, rather than the traffickers themselves. Best case scenario (if we accept these assertions as true): 28 people were arrested for allegedly participating in consensual sex acts in exchange for money. That’s the best case scenario.

But there’s no best case here. In fact, there are no cases at all! This is literally the next paragraph in CBS’s coverage of this debacle:

However, the Denton County District Attorney’s Office told Rollins they wouldn’t be able to prosecute any of the 23 cases because undercover officers had engaged in “inappropriate physical contact” with suspected prostitutes.

LOL. I haven’t laughed this hard since I paid someone to make me laugh this hard in a transaction involving two consensual adults. Chief Rollins: we have made inroads against the scourge of consensual sex acts in Lewisville. DA’s office: your boys are the problem tho.

In response to having every single case dropped by the DA, the PD opened an internal investigation. The only surprise here is that it found some cops worth disciplining.

Three Lewisville police officers were fired and several others were disciplined after it was found there was “inappropriate touching” between some of the officers and alleged prostitutes they were investigating, authorities said Friday.

An internal affairs investigation was launched into the officers’ conduct, which spanned more than a year, and found that 13 officers had violated one or more of the department’s policies. The violations involved covert officers, a captain and sergeants, along with nearly two dozen prostitution cases that had more than 30 criminal charges against 28 suspects.

Chief Rollins still somehow believes he has the moral upper hand, though. He claims there’s “no evidence” officers had sex with any of the alleged sex workers (presumably because no rape kits or UV lights were deployed during this investigation). He also claims — quite ridiculously — that the entire department shouldn’t be judged by the actions of the 13 officers disciplined and the 54 officers interviewed during the investigation.

“This is not us,” Rollins said. “This is not the Lewisville Police Department. This is not normal activity for us. This is a very small subgroup of employees that ended up in an area of misconduct and we’ve remedied and rectified that.”

But it is you. The LPD only has 188 sworn officers. This means almost a third of those were interviewed and almost 10 percent of them are facing discipline. Since it’s impossible to believe the entire staff of sworn officers was engaged in this prostitution sting, we’re left to assume that most of the officers involved in this operation engaged in inappropriate conduct.

So, it is very much representative of the whole. The only difference is that every single case generated by this operation is being tossed due to officer misconduct. Until the next scandal surfaces, it is entirely logical to assume what’s been observed here is representative of the whole and is not limited to a “very small subgroup” of employees.

There’s no better support for this conclusion than the fact that the PD has yet to inform the public how many officers in total were involved in this operation. Instead, it has merely chosen to point to the total number of sworn officers in hopes of minimizing the impact of seeing nearly 10 percent of its entire force disciplined for misconduct following a single law enforcement operation.

Maybe it’s time for the chief to start asking tough questions of officers angling for vice-related posts. Because we’ve seen enough evidence everywhere else in law enforcement that suggests people who have vices they’d rather satisfy on the public’s dime tend to be drawn to enforcement efforts that will allow them to scratch their particular itches. It’s only the willfully ignorant that pretend uncovering widespread misconduct in operations that lend themselves to abuse is nothing more than stumbling across an anomaly that isn’t reflected elsewhere in the law enforcement agency.

Filed Under: brock robbins, lewisville police department, police misconduct, rights violations, sex work, texas, thin blue line

from the slow-down-california,-and-read-the-constitution dept

Earlier this year, California passed SB 976, yet another terrible and obviously unconstitutional bill with the moral panicky title “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act.” The law restricts minors’ access to social media and imposes burdensome requirements on platforms. It is the latest in a string of misguided attempts by California lawmakers to regulate online speech “for the children.” And like its predecessors, it is destined to fail a court challenge on First Amendment grounds.

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Nancy Skinner, has a history of relying on junk science and misrepresenting research to justify her moral panic over social media. Last year, in pushing for a similar bill, Skinner made blatantly false claims based on her misreading of already misleading studies. It seems facts take a backseat when there’s a “think of the children!” narrative to push.

The law builds on the Age Appropriate Design Code, without acknowledging that much of that law was deemed unconstitutional by an appeals court earlier this year (after being found similarly unconstitutional by the district court last year). This bill, like a similar one in New York, assumes (falsely and without any evidence) that “algorithms” are addictive.

As we just recently explained, if you understand the history of the internet, algorithms have long played an important role in making the internet usable. The idea that they’re “addictive” has no basis in reality. But the law insists otherwise. It would then ban these “addictive algorithms” if a website knows a user is a minor. It also has restrictions on when notifications can be sent to a “known” minor (basically no notifications during school hours or late at night).

There’s more, but those are the basics.

NetChoice stepped up and sued to block this law from going into effect.

California is again attempting to unconstitutionally regulate minors’ access to protected online speech—impairing adults’ access along the way. The restrictions imposed by California Senate Bill 976 (“Act” or “SB976”) violate bedrock principles of constitutional law and precedent from across the nation. As the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held, “minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection.” Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 794 (2011) (cleaned up) (quoting Erznoznik v. Jacksonville, 422 U.S. 205, 212-13 (1975)). And the government may not impede adults’ access to speech in its efforts to regulate what it deems acceptable for minors. Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656, 667 (2004); Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 882 (1997). These principles apply with equal force online: Governments cannot “regulate [‘social media’] free of the First Amendment’s restraints.” Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 144 S. Ct. 2383, 2399 (2024).

That is why courts across the country have enjoined similar state laws restricting minors’ access to online speech. NetChoice, LLC v. Reyes, 2024 WL 4135626 (D. Utah Sept. 10, 2024) (enjoining age-assurance, parental-consent, and notifications-limiting law); Comput. & Commc’n Indus. Ass’n v. Paxton, 2024 WL 4051786 (W.D. Tex. Aug. 30, 2024) (“CCIA”) (enjoining law requiring filtering and monitoring of certain content-based categories of speech on minors’ accounts); NetChoice, LLC v. Fitch, 2024 WL 3276409 (S.D. Miss. July 1, 2024) (enjoining ageverification and parental-consent law); NetChoice, LLC v. Yost, 716 F. Supp. 3d 539 (S.D. Ohio 2024) (enjoining parental-consent law); NetChoice, LLC v. Griffin, 2023 WL 5660155 (W.D. Ark. Aug. 31, 2023) (enjoining age-verification and parental-consent law).

This Court should similarly enjoin Defendant’s enforcement of SB976 against NetChoice members

As we’ve discussed, the politics behind challenging these laws makes it a complex and somewhat fraught process. So I’m glad that NetChoice continues to step up and challenge many of these laws.

The complaint lays out that the parental consent requirements in the bill violate the First Amendment:

The Act’s parental-consent provisions violate the First Amendment. The Act requires that covered websites secure parental consent before allowing minor users to (1) access “feed[s]” of content personalized to individual users, § 27001(a); (2) access personalized feeds for more than one hour per day, § 27002(b)(2); and (3) receive notifications during certain times of day, § 27002(a). Each of these provisions restricts minors’ ability to access protected speech and websites’ ability to engage in protected speech. Accordingly, each violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has held that a website’s display of curated, personalized feeds is protected by the First Amendment. Moody, 144 S. Ct. at 2393. And it has also held that governments may not require minors to secure parental consent before accessing or engaging in protected speech. Brown, 564 U.S. at 799;

So too do the age assurance requirements:

The Act’s requirements that websites conduct age assurance to “reasonably determine” whether a user is a minor, §§ 27001(a)(1)(B), 27002(a)(2), 27006(b)-(c), also violate the First Amendment. Reyes, 2024 WL 4135626, at 16 n.169 (enjoining age-assurance requirement); Fitch, 2024 WL 3276409, at 11-12 (enjoining age-verification requirement); Griffin, 2023 WL 5660155, at *17 (same). All individuals, minors and adults alike, must comply with this age-assurance requirement—which would force them to hand over personal information or identification that many are unwilling or unable to provide—as a precondition to accessing and engaging in protected speech. Such requirements chill speech, in violation of the First Amendment. See, e.g., Ashcroft, 542 U.S. at 673; Reno, 521 U.S. at 882.

It also calls out that there’s an exemption for consumer review sites (good work, Yelp lobbyists!), which highlights how the law is targeting specific types of content, which is not allowed under the First Amendment.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta insisted in a statement to GovTech that there are no First Amendment problems with the law:

“SB976 does not regulate speech,” Bonta’s office said in an emailed statement. “The same companies that have committed tremendous resources to design, deploy, and market social media platforms custom-made to keep our kids’ eyes glued to the screen are now attempting to halt California’s efforts to make social media safer for children” the statement added, saying the attorney general’s office would respond in court.

Except he said that about the Age Appropriate Design Code and lost in court. He said that about the Social Media Transparency bill and lost in court. He said that about the recent AI Deepfake law… and lost in court.

See a pattern?

It would be nice if Rob Bonta finally sat down with actual First Amendment lawyers and learned how the First Amendment worked. Perhaps he and Governor Newsom could take that class together so Newsom stops signing these bills into law?

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Filed Under: 1st amendment, addictive feeds, age assurance, algorithms, moral panic, nancy skinner, parental controls, rob bonta, social media, social media addiction
Companies: netchoice

Trump Tags Brendan Carr To Dismantle What’s Left Of Broadband Consumer Protection At FCC

from the here-we-go-again dept

Mon, Nov 18th 2024 12:22pm - Karl Bode

Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation’s top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there’s zero daylight between Carr’s policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of “regulatory capture” as you’re going to get (with a few additional wrinkles we’ll get to down below).

You might recall that Trump’s team promised it would “blacklist” any participants in Project 2025, back when it was pretending to distance itself from the unpopular policy platform. That promise is already out the window, given Carr wrote an entire Project 2025 chapter on how he planned to use the FCC to harass any tech and media companies that didn’t adequately bend the knee to Trump authoritarianism.

Carr’s top priority will be dutifully dismantling all remaining FCC broadband consumer protection efforts, whether that’s net neutrality, the FCC’s recent inquiry into shitty broadband usage caps, broadband consumer privacy protections, efforts to stop broadband “redlining” (read: racism in fiber deployment), good faith efforts to help the poor afford broadband, and efforts to stop your cable, phone, wireless, or broadband provider from ripping you off with shitty fees.

FCC’s consumer protection efforts have been on shaky ground for a while, but Trump 2.0 (read: “populism” that isn’t actually all that popular) will be the absolute death of them. The Trump-corrupted Supreme Court has already set the stage for telecoms (any U.S. company, really) to declare that absolutely any effort to protect consumers is a violation of the law. I wish I was being hyperbolic.

All fights over these sorts of issues now head to the state or local level, bogging the court system and regulatory reform down indefinitely (the entire point). If you live in a state that couldn’t care less about corporate oversight or consumer protection, you’re shit out of luck for the foreseeable future. Thank a Trump voter when the myriad impacts start to materialize. You may need to use pie charts.

Carr’s extremely likely to rubber stamp terrible media and telecom mergers, ensuring that your prices skyrocket and service quality suffers. He’ll also take a hatchet to whatever’s left of media consolidation limits, which Trumplicans only pretend to care about when they’re spreading bigoted conspiracy theories. The result of both will be higher prices, more harmful consolidation, and lower quality services.

Carr’s primary pet project on the telecom front will be to try to impose AT&T’s long-percolating plan to tax tech companies (read: you) in order to throw billions in new telecom subsidies at AT&T and Comcast. Subsidies, if his track record holds, he’ll fail utterly to ensure are spent intelligently. This will be framed as good faith reform by both Carr and gullible press outlets, starting sometime next Spring.

Mainstream media journalism is already sanewashing Carr. The Washington Post, as just one example, spends its first four opening paragraphs parroting the false Republican claim they’re being “censored,” and at no point really makes it clear to readers that the entirety of broadband consumer protection is on the chopping block. The New York Times breakdown of the appointment barely thinks Carr’s primary appointment goal — to make life easier on AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast — is worth a mention.

You’d think, were you a journalist paid to inform readers, you could work in a mention somewhere that Carr is the exact opposite of the “populist” leadership Trumpists deluded themselves into voting for. A status quo captured regulator whose primary function is to coddle telecom monopolies.

Carr does differ from traditional Republican and Libertarian mindless “deregulation” orthodoxy in a key way: he supports the Trump fascism project. That means he’s going to talk a lot about “small government” when it’s convenient to coddle and enable corporate Republican allies (AT&T, Comcast, Walmart, Oracle), then pivot on a dime to abuse government authority to harass companies authoritarians don’t like in the very next breath.

That means harassing journalists and media companies even lightly critical of Trumpism, or any tech companies that try and do the bare minimum to stop the spread of race-baiting Republican propaganda on the internet. Since their actual policies are routinely dogshit, a cornerstone of modern Republican power is the use of propaganda across old and new media to ensure that a disgruntled electorate has no idea what they’re voting for beyond the racism (I’d say that’s going pretty well, don’t you?).

Carr’s top job will be to protect that apparatus, and I suspect he’ll pursue it with the usual zeal reserved for sniveling sycophants in Donald’s orbit. I’d suspect Trump FCC 2.0 will be notably worse than the Ajit Pai era, given that Trumpism now has the backing of the Supreme Court (which can easily appear corrupted with a Winnebago), and potentially both houses of Congress, putting historically terrible legislation in play.

Again, Trump voters think they voted for status-quo disrupting populism, but you really can’t get any more unpopular status quo than Brendan Carr. He’s a water boy for the telecom industry’s least popular companies, and the end result of his tenure absolutely will not be inexpensive or subtle.

Filed Under: big tech tax, brendan carr, broadband, consumer protection, fcc, high speed internet, media consolidation, mergers, telecom

Police Chief Tries To Defend Torturing A Mentally Ill Man Into Confessing To Committing A Murder That Never Happened

from the too-awful-to-ever-admit-fault dept

Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD “investigators” spent 17 hours torturing Perez into confessing to a crime that hadn’t been committed… by anybody.

After discovering his father missing, Perez Jr. — who suffers from several health and mental issues — decided to the do the thing you’re supposed to do: report the missing person to law enforcement. The Fontana PD decided to treat this plea for help as an admission of guilt. Rather than devote resources to locating the missing man, investigators ganged up on Perez Jr., going so far as telling him his father was dead, strongly suggesting Perez Jr. had murdered him, and threatening to kill his pet dog (which was in the interrogation room with Perez Jr.) by having it “euthanized” as a “stray.”

Investigators secured the murder confession they wanted. Unfortunately for them, Perez Jr.’s father had already been found alive by his sister, who met him at the Oakland airport to pick him up from his flight to see her. She then informed the Fontana PD of these inconvenient facts, which only then decided to stop treating Perez Jr. as a murder suspect.

Perez Jr. sued and the federal court denied qualified immunity to the involved police officers, saying this in its June 2023 decision:

There is no legitimate government interest that would justify treating Perez in this manner while he was in medical distress, since the FPD already had two warrants to search his person and property, and he was already essentially in custody and unable to flee or tamper with any evidence.

[…]

Perez’s substantive due process right against psychological torture of this nature was “clearly established” at the time of the incident, to a degree that “every reasonable officer would have understood that what he was doing violates that right.”

With immunity denied and the violations so immediately egregious, the city decided to cut a check, rather than keep defending awful officers in court.

But that’s not the end of this story. Fontana Police Chief Michael Dorsey has decided — months after the lawsuit was settled — to defend his officers’ actions that resulted in a lawsuit that cost Fontana residents nearly $1 million dollars. And, of course, he went to the one of the bastions of “free speech,” ExTwitter, to sound off at length about the alleged “injustice” his officers and his PD “suffered” due to factual press coverage of Perez Jr.’s lawsuit, along with defending psychological torture in general as a law enforcement interrogation tool. (h/t Chris Perez of Law & Crime)

It’s all garbage but here are the worst parts of it, which include the parts that portray the PD’s actions as more forgivable than the presiding federal judge ruled they were:

Dear Neighbor, Our police department recently settled a lawsuit that generated misleading, one-sided headlines, telling the story from the point-of-view of the plaintiff’s attorney. In the interest of transparency, accountability, fairness and maintaining community trust, I wanted the community to have the facts. I understand how difficult it is to be heard through all the noise these days. This was a missing person’s case where officers and detectives followed unfolding evidence that pointed toward possible foul play. Fortunately, the man was ultimately located, alive and well. In the settlement agreement, the judge on the case noted that a reasonable juror would agree that officers had sufficient evidence to suspect a crime had been committed.

Not all that recently, actually. The settlement was paid in May. On November 7, Chief Dorsey decided enough time had passed he could try to un-besmirch his investigators by playing to the largely law enforcement-friendly crowd that remains on ExTwitter.

The plaintiff’s story is the one that matters when lawsuits are filed. Until the defendant presents evidence otherwise, the plaintiff’s version is the one courts side with. If the Fontana PD wanted to introduce evidence, it should never have asked for qualified immunity to be applied to the officers for their actions. If it wanted to introduce a competing narrative, it needed to allow the lawsuit to move forward and be placed in front of a jury, instead of grabbing for QI parachutes immediately after being served. It didn’t do this. And it’s extremely disingenuous to claim the court (and the journalists outlets reporting on the proceeding) didn’t have “all the facts.” The PD undercut its chance to present competing facts by trying to get out the lawsuit early. That the denial of QI resulted in a fast settlement doesn’t make the plaintiff wrong, nor does it make the reporting on the lawsuit’s allegations false.

Not only that, but interrogation recordings exist that undercut Chief Dorsey’s claims that the plaintiff’s allegations were exaggerated:

The last sentence of that paragraph says the court said a “reasonable jury” could believe the police had probable cause to perform a search and effect an arrest. But what’s not mentioned in Dorsey’s self-serving statement is that the court also said this same “reasonable jury” would also conclude the investigators engaged in “unconstitutional psychological torture” of Perez Jr. to coerce a bogus confession. That’s why he scored a settlement. And, unfortunately, that’s the same reason Chief Dorsey is mouthing off on social media.

It’s time to defend “unconstitutional psychological torture,” says Chief Dorsey of the Fontana Police Department:

In situations like these, it is acceptable and perfectly legal to use different tactics and techniques, such as ruses, to elicit information from people suspected of potential criminal activity. That was done in this case in order to gain resolution.

Oh, ok. But you’re wrong about “acceptable.” This definitely isn’t, even if it may be ultimately legal, in some cases. Unfortunately for you and your department, a federal court also said this was illegal. You have absolutely no legal ground to stand on when making this assertion. And you’re misreading the American room if you think it’s “acceptable” to torture someone by holding them for 17 hours (while simultaneously suggesting Perez Jr. was completely aware he could leave at any), battering them verbally by accusing them of murder, lying about a crime that never occurred, and threatening to have their pet put down unless the accused agreed to confess to a murder of a person who was still alive.