covid – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives

from the the-layers-of-wrongness-we-need-to-unpeel dept

Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you’re likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself.

And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no spine when it comes to Republican pressure on Meta’s moderation practices. He falsely plays into their fundamentally misleading framing, all to win some temporary political favors by immediately caving to pressure from the GOP.

You may have seen a bunch of headlines in the past couple of days claiming that Mark Zuckerberg “admitted” that the Biden White House pressured him about “censoring” content and he wished he’d stood up to them more. It got plenty of coverage. Unfortunately, almost none of that coverage is accurately reporting what happened, what’s new, and what was actually said.

The reality is pretty straightforward: Mark Zuckerberg folded like a cheap card table, facing coercive pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan to modify Meta’s moderation practices. What he says misleadingly plays into Jordan’s mendaciously misleading campaign. In short, Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.

First, it’s necessary to understand the history. It’s no secret that the White House sought to persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices. They said so publicly. Hell, there was just a big, giant, massive Supreme Court case about that, where the details of government requests to social media were on full display.

But, as the Supreme Court Justices themselves made clear during the oral arguments, the White House reaching out to media providers and trying to persuade them on editorial decisions is nothing new, nor is it problematic. The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if it failed to comply.

Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan were talking about this during the oral arguments:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: You’re speaking on behalf of the United States. Again, my experience is the United States, in all its manifestations, has regular communications with the media to talk about things they don’t like or don’t want to see or are complaining about factual inaccuracies.

[….]

JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean, can I just understand because it seems like an extremely expansive argument, I must say, encouraging people basically to suppress their own speech. So, like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had some experience encouraging press to suppress their own speech.

You just wrote about editorial. Here are the five reasons you shouldn’t write another one. You just wrote a story that’s filled with factual errors. Here are the 10 reasons why you shouldn’t do that again.

I mean, this happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.

And just the fact that the Supreme Court did not see any evidence of this being coercive should say something.

Nothing in what Zuckerberg said changes any of that. He simply repeats what was already known and already public: that, yes, White House officials sought to persuade Meta in how it handled some moderation elements. Much of that pressure was public, and even the pressure that was private has been revealed before.

Remember, Jim Jordan has spent the last couple of years weaponizing the House Judiciary Committee to misleadingly claim that the government was “weaponized” to suppress conservative speech. He’s sent dozens upon dozens of subpoenas, almost all of which misleadingly demand responses or data based on his false belief that basic, fundamental trust & safety work is somehow an attack on free speech rights.

But make no mistake about Jordan’s end goal here: it is to prevent websites from ever doing anything to try to counter the spread of disinformation. We’re not even talking about removing or blocking content. He doesn’t want there to be any effort to fact check or debunk nonsense. And that’s because the party that he is a part of is the largest producer and purveyor of complete and utter bullshit. And having people point that out is seen as an attack.

So Jordan has framed any attempt to refute nonsense as “an attack on free speech.” Tragically, much of the media (and plenty of tech execs) have fallen into this trap and accepted Jordan’s framing.

Finally, that brings us to Zuckerberg’s letter from this week. In it, he admits (again) what has been widely known and widely reported on, and was central to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case: that some people in the White House sought to persuade Meta to take Covid misinfo more seriously.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

So what is actually revealed here? Literally nothing new at all. It was already widely reported that the White House tried to persuade Meta to be more responsive. And there were reasons for this. People were dying from Covid, and internal documents show that Zuckerberg himself was hoping that Facebook would be helpful in getting people vaccinated. But the platform was being bombarded with conspiracy theories, lies, and nonsense that was misleading people into putting lives at risk.

So, yes, of course the White House would reach out to Meta and suggest that the platform should do better in stopping the flood of misleading, dangerous info. None of that should be revelatory or even noteworthy.

And if you read what Zuckerberg says here, he still says that they didn’t do anything because of pressure from the White House: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decision, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement…”

But then he says, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

And what does that even mean? First of all, Meta was pretty fucking outspoken. When Joe Biden accused Meta of “killing people,” Meta went all out in calling that claim crazy. They said that the Biden administration was “looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals” and “we will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts.”

So, what’s new here? It was widely known that the White House wanted Meta to be more responsible about Covid and vaccine misinfo. They said so publicly and privately. The private emails were widely reported on and subject to a landmark Supreme Court case that was just decided less than two months ago. None of that is new.

Zuckerberg also says that they made their own decisions and it wasn’t due to White House pressure, which confirms what was said during the Supreme Court case.

The only “new” thing here is Zuck suggesting he regrets not being more aggressive in… what…? In making sure more people saw misinformation that might lead them to make bad decisions and get sick and possibly die? And again, it’s not even that Meta didn’t push back. They pushed back hard.

And yet, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary are claiming that this was some big revelation:

So, again, neither of the first two points are new or even meaningful. It was public knowledge that the White House spoke to Meta. And, of course Meta moderated (not censored) the speech of Americans, because those Americans violated Meta’s policies. And, as a private entity, they’re free to do that. That’s American freedom, something Jim Jordan seems unable to comprehend.

Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, that’s the next paragraph of Zuckerberg’s letter:

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.

Again, literally nothing in this is new. All of this was known at the time. Indeed, Meta admitted it at the time and admitted that it had probably been too quick to limit the spread of the story (just as Twitter had done, admitting the very next day that the policy was a bad one and needed to change). We’ve covered all this in great detail before.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg said this exact same thing on Joe Rogan two years ago. This also led people to falsely claim that he admitted that they blocked the spreading of that NY Post story due to pressure from the White House, even though he said no such thing.

Both times, he said that the FBI gave general warnings about “hack and leak” operations that the Russians were working on, which is no surprise given that the Russians did exactly that during the 2016 election in releasing the DNC emails. The FBI (unsurprisingly!) also said that there were a number of potential targets, including Hunter Biden. And that was also obvious. Anyone in the President’s family and political circle would be obvious targets. At no point has anyone suggested that the FBI said that they should suppress this particular story.

And, remember, the original Hunter Biden story was weakly sourced. Multiple news organizations, including Fox News, had turned down the story. That was because there were all sorts of questions about its legitimacy. And given what had happened in the past, it seemed wise to be cautious.

Indeed, these days Republicans seem oddly quiet about news organizations still holding back on reporting on the documents that were hacked from top Republicans like Roger Stone by the Iranians in this election cycle. Is Jim Jordan going to accuse companies of illegally interfering in the election because they won’t publish those documents that are embarrassing to Trump? Why the silence Jim? Oh right.

Even more to the point, at the time of that NY Post story, the Trump administration was in charge. It was October of 2020, a month before the 2020 election. So, this “truth” from Donald Trump is absolutely insane, because he appears to be accusing himself of “rigging” the election against himself:

If you can’t see that, it’s Donald Trump posting on Truth Social:

“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.

Again, that is Trump saying “the White House” in 2020 “rigged” the Presidential election. So far, the only reporter I’ve seen call this out is Philip Bump at the Washington Post. This is Trump being so confused, he’s accusing himself of rigging the election.

Finally, Zuckerberg’s letter concludes with even more nonsense.

Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

Why is he even bringing up his personal donations if this is about Meta? And, furthermore, is he really saying that he won’t do any more donations simply because “some people believe” that donations for safe voting benefit one party or another?

This is the most spineless response to a mendacious, targeted campaign by a politician who is weaponizing the power of the government to pressure a media company over its editorial policies. And Zuck folds like a cheap card table. And it’s doubly ironic, because part of that folding is claiming he won’t fold again (something he didn’t even do in the first place, but is doing now).

Oh, and of course, Elon jumps in to say this “sounds like a First Amendment violation.”

Dude, the Supreme Court literally just covered this in a case that talked quite a bit about your own site and said (pretty fucking clearly) that the record did not support any claim of a First Amendment violation.

All of this is stupid. That letter is written in the worst possible way. While it does not state anything fundamentally false, it makes it sound like things that have been public knowledge for years are somehow a new admission. It further directly enables idiots like Trump, Jordan, and Musk to claim false things about what happened. And, finally, it just contributes to a totally unnecessary news cycle.

The only actual “news” out of all this is (1) Zuckerberg has no spine and simply cannot stand up to bad faith government pressure to change his moderation practices when it comes from Republicans (he was fine doing so when it came from Democrats) and (2) Donald Trump has accused himself of rigging his own election against himself.

Zuckerberg has to know how this would play out. After all, the same misleading reaction happened two years ago when he went on Rogan’s podcast. The only reasonable interpretation of this is that he sent this letter, knowing how it would be interpreted, to give Jordan/Trump red meat to continue believing their own false and misleading claims in case Trump wins in the fall. It’s stupid and cynical, but that’s the kind of politics Meta seems to play these days.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, coercion, content moderation, covid, donald trump, elon musk, hunter biden, jawboning, jim jordan, mark zuckerberg, persuasion, vaccine disinformation
Companies: facebook, meta

ISPs Are Still Ripping Off A COVID Broadband Discount Program

from the oh-look,-telecom-subsidy-fraud dept

Fri, Oct 6th 2023 05:34am - Karl Bode

During peak pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), giving lower income Americans a 50(50 (50(75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users if they qualified.

But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise to readers) ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very much in character.

The EBB was rebranded the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) as part of the Infrastructure Bill (the payout to the general public was dropped to $30 a month). But late last year, the FCC Inspector General issued a report saying that ISPs and wireless carriers were consistently and artificially inflating the number of qualified users in order to take taxpayer money they didn’t deserve.

A year has gone by, and another FCC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report has emerged noting that, yes, ISPs and wireless providers are still ripping the program off. When a low-income user stops using a provider’s broadband service, the ISP is supposed to report this back to the FCC so that funding can be repurposed for folks who actually need it.

The OIG found that’s very often… not happening, and that dozens of ISPs were exploiting the FCC’s lack of follow through:

“We made a startling and troubling discovery: dozens of participating mobile broadband providers de-enrolled few, if any, ACP subscribers for non-usage and, like Provider X, claimed reimbursement for all or nearly all their ACP subscribers (the suspect providers).”

The OIG also found that a large number of ISPs continue to take taxpayer money for users they never actually served in the first place; part of an ongoing investigation they’ll provide more details on down the road.

There’s an ongoing debate as to whether to renew the ACP program. Generally its been widely supported because it not only helps (some) low-income families, it throws a big chunk of additional taxpayer money into the laps of industry giants.

On the one hand, low-income users genuinely do benefit from a $30 monthly drop in their broadband bill. On the other hand, we’re effectively giving money to giant telecoms in exchange for temporarily lower rates; rates that wouldn’t be high in the first place if these same giants hadn’t spent decades dismantling most meaningful competitors and competent government oversight.

It’s why it’s important to target the real problem with U.S. telecom: consolidated telecom monopoly power (and the corruption that protects it). Instead, the FCC (in this case at the behest of Congress) often engages in regulatory theater, applying superficial external fixes to the symptoms of telecom monopoly power, while rarely taking meaningful aim (or even acknowledging) the underlying disease.

Filed Under: Affordable Connectivity Program, broadband, covid, fcc, high speed internet, low-income families, subsidies, telecom

Congress May Not Renew Low-Income Broadband Program Birthed During COVID

from the strike-at-the-root dept

Mon, Jul 10th 2023 05:19am - Karl Bode

During peak pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), giving lower income Americans a 50(50 (50(75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users if they qualified.

But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise to readers) reports are that big ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very much in character.

The EBB was rebranded the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) as part of the Infrastructure Bill (the payout to the general public was dropped to $30 a month). And, once again, not at all surprisingly, the FCC discovered that “dozens” of U.S. broadband providers were ripping the program off to the tune of millions of dollars across Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.

That said, the program was still a good thing for millions of people. Data routinely indicates that affordability is the biggest obstacle to broadband adoption, and $30 off their bill was a huge deal for many. Especially in tribal areas long neglected by the private sector and government alike.

Everybody’s experiences with COVID home education and telecommuting briefly shined a bright spotlight on substandard U.S. broadband and policy issues. But with our attention on COVID waning, its impetus for reform on broadband access is as well. ACP money will run out soon, and the debate has begun as to whether Congress should renew the ACP program:

Nineteen million households have enrolled in the government’s broadband benefit system as of June, but that figure is well under the estimated 49 million eligible. The program and a predecessor initiative have “suffered persistent abuses … as telecom giants have induced price hikes, speed cuts, and fraud risks,” a Post investigation found.

Consumer groups and Democrats unsurprisingly want to renew the program. And why not; in a country that endlessly throws subsidies at a wide variety of industries (especially military) and billionaires for doing absolutely nothing, why not spend some cash on a program that (mostly) helped the poor. Republicans are generally split on whether the program should be extended.

There’s some nuance here though. The problem remains that the program isn’t actually fixing the underlying problem. U.S. broadband is expensive and spotty because both parties have historically allowed telecom giants to monopolize access and crush competition. The result of this monopolization isn’t surprising: high prices, spotty service, slower speeds, and comically terrible customer service.

Enter the ACP, which basically throws billions of dollars at companies responsible for the very problem we’re trying to fix so that they’ll temporarily lower high prices they’re directly responsible for. Yes, the end result still helps a low-income family struggling to get online, but it’s important to understand you wouldn’t need this kind of program if the two parties were willing to challenge monopoly power.

Democrats are often better than the GOP on telecom policy. But even they have a comical aversion to acknowledging that the real problem here is consolidated, concentrated monopoly power. Democratic FCC leaders will talk endlessly and ambiguously about their dedication to “bridging the digital divide,” but they’re literally incapable of making public statements calling out the monopolies responsible for it.

So yes, I do think it makes sense to renew the program. As a country we spend a lot more money on significantly dumber ideas. But it would be lovely if that extension was paired with some base level realization that progress isn’t actually being made unless you strike at the real root of the problem: telecom monopolies and the bipartisan corruption that protects them from competition.

Fewer monopolies, more competition, and competent regulatory oversight generally means lower prices, and no need for the ACP in the first place. But we’re not really interested in cracking down on monopolies, government support for pro-competitive policies is limited at best, and industry continues to successfully defang telecom regulators and consumer protection standards year after year.

Filed Under: ACP, broadband, covid, digital divide, ebb, fcc, high speed internet, low income, subsidies, telecom

Colorado Finally Kills Dumb 2005 Comcast-Backed State Law Banning Community Broadband Networks

from the counterproductive-bullshit dept

Thu, May 4th 2023 01:36pm - Karl Bode

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either banned or heavily hamstrung towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly failed to upgrade or expand their broadband networks.

This dance of dysfunction was particularly interesting in Colorado. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contained a provision that let individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. So they’ve been doing exactly that, en masse, for years.

This week, Colorado state leaders finally passed a law eliminating the restrictions entirely, eighteen years after they were first introduced:

“Today, the state took a big step in establishing a competitive economy for generations to come. SB23-183 removes the biggest obstacle to achieving the Governor’s goal to connect 99% of Colorado households by the end of 2027,” said Colorado Broadband Office Executive Director Brandy Reitter. “Each local government is in a unique position or different phase of connecting residents to high-speed internet, and this bill allows them to establish broadband plans that meet the needs of their communities.”

That leaves sixteen states with laws banning community broadband, after both Arkansas and Washington state eliminated their restrictions in 2021. Such laws are almost always ghost written by heavily taxpayer subsidized telecom monopolies, which have routinely tried to portray grass roots annoyance at monopolization and market failure as some form of vile socialist boondoggle.

It’s a scenario where giant telecoms get to have their cake and eat it too; often refusing to upgrade their networks in under-served or minority areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), while simultaneously ghost writing shitty laws preventing these underserved towns from doing anything about it — even if local voters, long struggling to gain access to broadband, vote in favor of it.

These communities wouldn’t be building broadband networks if they weren’t annoyed by decades of market failure. Or decades of federal regulators too captured to embrace policies that competitively challenge the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies.

Telecom monopolies could have responded to this by providing better, cheaper service, but given the nature of widespread U.S. corruption, it was simply easier to buy terrible state laws.

The home schooling and telecommuting boom of peak COVID put the counterproductive stupidity of these bills in very stark relief. As has the $42 billion in looming broadband funds made possible by the recent passing of the infrastructure bill. If that money is to be spent effectively, eliminating pointless, monopoly-backed restrictions on creative broadband alternatives is a good first step.

Filed Under: broadband, colorado, community broadband, covid, high speed internet, home schooling, market failure, municipal broadband, telecom

Silicon Valley School District Files Laughable, Vexatious RICO Claims Against Big Social Media… But Not Facebook Or Instagram

from the just-make-an-angry-youtube-video-or-something dept

Back in January, we wrote about the Seattle public school district filing an absolutely laughable lawsuit against basically all of big social media, based on a bunch of misread and misunderstood studies, and general moral panic that social media must be “bad” for kids. In February, we wrote about the school district in Mesa, Arizona filing a very similar lawsuit (using the same law firm). We wondered if we were going to see a flood of such lawsuits.

Also, we pointed out how these school districts were effectively announcing publicly to all parents that they had given up on actually educating their children on how to understand the modern digital world, and were basically caving to moral panics and admitting that they don’t know how to prepare children for today’s world. As I noted in both of those stories, if I were a parent in either district, I would be furious.

Well, be careful what you wish for, because last week, at least two* more such lawsuits were filed, including one by the San Mateo County Board of Education, which oversees the school district that my children attend. So, yeah, now I’m furious. As I told the superintendent in an email last week, I had been actually quite happy with how the schools my children attended had taught digital citizenship, and how to they seemed to have good programs designed to prepare kids for a digital future. But, filing such a ridiculous lawsuit is the opposite of that and now has me concerned that the district is so unprepared to teach kids about the modern world that I should be worried about their education.

It gets even worse. The San Mateo County lawsuit is similar to the ones filed in Seattle and Mesa, but with a few differences. While both of the others mainly focused on (already laughable) “public nuisance” claims, San Mateo… also includes a RICO claim.

Yes. RICO.

As regular readers of Techdirt well know, IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT. It’s never RICO. But it’s especially not RICO in this case. RICO means something. It most certainly does not mean “a lot of these companies have been bad for the kids I’m supposed to be teaching how to live in the modern world, which we can only support by cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence.” You need to show conduct of an enterprise, through a pattern of racketeering activity called predicate acts causing injury to the plaintiff’s business or property. And you need to show all five elements in there.

Here’s how the San Mateo County Board of Education — which is responsible for educating my children — handle that. They claim each of the defendants (Google, Snapchat, and TikTok — but not Meta, which we’ll get to, and not Twitter, which, hrmph, I guess I’ll also get to) have formed “an association-in-fact” with the “shared goal… to preserve and enhance the market for its social media platforms and RICO Defendants’ own profits.” I mean, under that definition companies in any industry have “an association.” But that’s not how the law actually works.

What about the “pattern of racketeering?” Well… again, they basically say these companies wanted more users, and that’s racketeering. Oh, and then at the very end they just randomly accuse these social media companies of wire fraud. I wish I were joking.

RICO Defendants had the common purpose of preserving and enhancing the market for their platforms and for youth as consumers for RICO Defendants’ own profits, regardless of the truth, the law, or the health consequences to the American people, including Plaintiffs’ students and the communities Plaintiffs serve.

RICO Defendants deceived consumers to use RICO Defendants’ platforms while concealing and/or suppressing the relevant findings and research. RICO Defendants deceived consumers, particularly parents and children, adolescents, and teenagers, by claiming that they did not market to children, adolescents, and teenagers, while engaging in marketing and manipulation of their platform algorithms with the intent of causing children, adolescents, and teenagers to engage in excessive use of their platforms, regardless of the health or safety concerns.

RICO Defendants achieved their common purpose through co-conspirators’ actions in deceiving consumers, regulators, and the general public about the dangerous nature of their platforms. Through the enterprise, RICO Defendants engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity consisting of numerous acts of racketeering in the Northern District of California and elsewhere, including mail fraud and wire fraud, indictable offenses under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343.

That’s not how any of this works.

How about the “predicate acts?” Well, here they claim that social media companies… use the mail “to mislead the public.”

From a time unknown and continuing until the time of filing of this complaint, in the Northern District of California and elsewhere, RICO Defendants and others known and unknown did knowingly and intentionally devise and intend to devise a scheme and artifice to mislead, and obtain money and property from, members of the public by means of material false and misleading pretenses, representations, and promises, and omissions of material facts, knowing that the pretenses, representations, and promises, were false when made.

The “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” seem to be based on the laughable claim that these companies… sent promotional material through the mail. Really.

For the purpose of executing and attempting to execute the scheme and artifice described herein, RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators would and did: knowingly place and cause to be placed in any post office or authorized depository for mail matter, matters and things to be sent and delivered by the United States Postal Service (and its predecessor, the United States Post Office Department); took and received therefrom such matters and things; and knowingly caused to be delivered by mail according to the direction thereon, and at the place at which it is directed to be delivered by the person to whom it is addressed, any such matter and thing, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1341.

They also fail to plead how any of these harmed SMCBoE’s business or property, meaning they didn’t actually plead all the elements of RICO anyway.

After reading this, I asked defense attorney, and RICO specialist, Ken White whether he thought the lawsuit, and especially the RICO claims had any merit. Ken did not hold back:

It’s a mish-mash of junk science, nanny-statism, and pro-se-style and likely sanctionable legal buffoonery. The RICO claims are preposterous and betray the vexatious intent of the entire — pun definitely intended — enterprise. This is the worst that modern pandering, performative litigation has to offer. Jesus, just make an angry YouTube video or something. This is exactly why judges need to be much more aggressive sanctioning lawyers and reporting them to the bar.

The RICO claims are definitely the most preposterous, but that doesn’t mean the other parts of the lawsuit are any better. As Ken notes, it’s full of junk science. It takes correlations to be proved causation (despite tons of evidence to the contrary — such as the fact that adolescent suicide rates were way higher in the 1980s and 90s than they are today). It cherry picks unsubstantiated claims regarding social media and focuses on extreme cases that have been overplayed in the media.

Just as an example, it calls out the infamous “devious licks” TikTok challenge that got a lot of attention in the fall of 2021. The complaint implies, without any evidence, that the devious licks challenge caused a problem in San Mateo schools based entirely on the headline in one school newspaper. Really. Of course, as we covered back in 2021, the whole devious licks thing was mostly a silly moral panic spread by adults. Kids in schools actually responded to the few cases of actual vandalism (which has happened in school probably going back to the beginning of school) and many turned it around and created the “angelic yields” challenge of getting kids to help clean up their schools.

The complaint also ignores that TikTok banned anything related to “devious licks” as soon as it started getting any attention. It was moral panic reporting from news reporters and adults that spread the concept.

So why is the San Mateo County Board of Education suing the news?

There is, of course, the ever popular comparison to tobacco:

It is apparent that when the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies were faced with a choice about making a change, they decided to stay the course. They simply put profit over the health and safety of children. Like the public health crisis caused by Big Tobacco, the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies have endeavored to shift blame and shirk responsibility through a concerted effort to withhold and distort the facts. Despite their advanced knowledge of the disaster they are causing, the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies have made no meaningful attempt to address this exploding crisis. As they look for new and ingenious way to leverage their unmatched access to technology to keep children addicted to their platforms, Defendants feed their own addiction, to profits and ever larger user bases. Due to the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies’ unwillingness to address the crisis of their making, the San Mateo Board of Education and its Superintendent feel they have no other choice than to bring this lawsuit to ensure the health and safety of children in their care.

Except that almost every sentence in this paragraph is false. It’s embarrassing. First of all, tobacco has no redeeming value. Social media is about speech. Not smoking a harmful product. Kids have free speech rights as well, though apparently my local school board wishes to deny them of that right.

Second, all of these companies have large trust and safety and research teams that actually do tons of work to try to limit any harm, especially to kids. I already mentioned how TikTok stopped the spread of the “devious licks” concept almost immediately. The complaint ignores that.

The complaint also ignores copious studies that show most students get tremendous value out of social media, not harm. Just recently the Pew Research Center released a massive report showing how the vast majority of students found they benefited from social media, and only a small minority found it problematic. Or how about this massive study from 2019 of over 12,000 students, that could find no evidence to support the idea that social media made kids depressed.

Incredibly, the complaint does mention the recent Pew study, but totally misrepresents what it says. It does not mention how the majority of students found they benefited from social media, and only 9% said it had a negative impact on their lives. You’d think such a stat would be relevant. Instead, the complaint focuses just on how many teens say they use social media and don’t want to give it up, and then leap to insisting that this proves that social media is addictive and that the companies are nefarious.

But, uh, try asking that same question about… watching TV, hanging out with friends, or even reading books, and you’d likely get pretty similar answers. Kids do it because it’s fun and it’s how they socialize. Hell, ask the same questions about going to school. Indeed, kids go to school every day, and I’d bet they’d report that school leads to a higher level of depression than social media.

Maybe the School Board should be suing itself? Or at least, be willing to do the same kind of research that Meta did to try to learn about its own impact on teenagers’ well being. No, instead, it would rather stick its head in the sand and insist that it must be social media to blame for the school not being prepared to educate and take care of kids following a pandemic.

You’d think that these other studies might give the people behind this lawsuit pause. Indeed, I asked the superintendent if she had read those studies and if she had any comment on them. Instead, she passed me on to a San Francisco PR shop and said they’d answer my questions. I asked the PR guy in question on Friday. On Sunday he told me that his client (which appears to be the law firm, rather than the school board) would not debate this with me (I wasn’t asking for a debate, I simply said I was hoping he could explain some of the decisions, since they appeared incomprehensible). Despite follow ups to both the PR guy and the Board, asking for simple answers to straightforward questions, no further responses were given.

Specifically both of them also failed to reply to my question about who actually initiated this process: was it the school or the law firm of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy? The law firm put out a silly press release about it. It is a different law firm than the one that filed the Seattle and Mesa cases, but at least that law firm didn’t… do the RICO.

The only one of my questions that was answered by the Board in an FAQ they posted, was that this is (not surprisingly) being handled on contingency, meaning that the law firm isn’t getting paid unless they win this case. Which they won’t. So, really, this just seems like an attempt by a terrible, mockable law firm, which deserves to be sanctioned, to try to score some cheap advertising.

And, now, we get to the very, very notable absence of Meta (Facebook and Instagram) in the defendant list. It’s… you know… kind of a glaring omission, given that it’s the largest social media platform, and so many of the studies that the complaint relies on are actually about Meta’s platforms and not the ones in the actual lawsuit.

Incredibly, the complaint uses (a misreading of) Meta’s own research… against those other companies! There are literally 5 pages of the lawsuit talking about the research leaked by Frances Haugen about Meta. And, of course, yet again, this research is misleadingly presented and cherry picked.

In 2021, a whistleblower and former employee of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”), known formerly as Facebook, Inc., leaked documents to journalists at the Wall Street Journal and government officials. These documents showed that Meta was aware as early as 2019 that one of its platforms, Instagram, caused body image issues to worsen for at least one third of teenage girls on the platform based on its own research and analysis. These documents settled what scientists had long suspected about Instagram’s harmful impact on children, in addition to confirming that Meta was completely aware of this issue based on Meta’s own studies. The leak confirmed that Meta designed Instagram in a way to risk the mental and physical health of children because that is what makes Meta profitable.

Except… that’s not what the leak showed at all. As we’ve highlighted in great detail over and over again, the study actually showed that in every category they studied for boys, Instagram made more teen boys feel better about themselves than worse (by a significant amount). And in 11 out of 12 categories, they made more teen girls feel better, rather than worse. There was only one category in which more girls felt worse, and it was body image, where the breakdown was still pretty close to equal. And, the whole freaking point of the study and the internal report that Haugen leaked, was that Facebook found this one category making girls feel worse to be unacceptable. That’s why they called it out!

Even as the complaint highlights how Meta was carefully studying this to understand what was happening and look for ways to fix the problems, the complaint pretends that they learned this… and ignored it.

And then to try to tie all this research from Meta (who again, was not sued in this complaint!) back to the companies that were actually sued, the complaint literally just says the other companies are all the same… “on information and belief.”

Defendants’ platforms operate similarly or in the same way as Meta’s platforms. On information and belief, Co-conspirators were and continue to be fully aware of the negative consequences of their platforms and their effects on minors’ health. Co-conspirators intentionally designed their platforms to exploit children and leave them riddled with mental and emotional health issues. Co-conspirators have endeavored to shift blame and shirk responsibility through a concerted effort to withhold and distort the facts, saying one thing publicly while admitting privately that the mental health issues detailed herein are caused by their platforms. Co-conspirators have conducted research and analysis, and have compiled data and documentation further substantiating the harms they cause to minors, and have falsely represented that they would disclose this research. Co-conspirators have intentionally withheld this information from the American people in a coordinated campaign to protect their profits from public scrutiny.

On information and belief indeed. Once again, this is not how any of this works.

And, of course, this raises the question of why Meta is not included in the lawsuit. I asked the superintendent and the PR guy, and neither would respond. I wondered if it could have something to do with the number of Meta employees who are parents with kids in San Mateo schools? It’s possible, though YouTube is also headquartered in the county and it’s still being sued.

As for the absence of Twitter, well, Twitter was never quite as big as the other big social media companies and always much less interesting to teens anyway, so one way to read this decision is as something of an insult to Elon Musk and his social media toy. Twitter is barely even mentioned in the complaint at all with the only mention coming to note that TikTok was bigger than Twitter. But… much of the research on social media happened around Twitter, in part because Twitter was the social media app with the most open API (which has since changed under new management). So, once again, we’re in a situation where the complaint uses research done on other platforms to hold YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok to blame, despite little shown connection. As Ken White noted above, this is sanctionable behavior, and the kind of thing you expect in a pro se filing, not one from a formerly reputable law firm.

The only attempt the SMCBoE makes towards showing harm to the schools is by noting that… their own school districts weren’t prepared for the mental health crisis of the pandemic. Yes.

More than 8 in 10 public school reported that, due to the pandemic, students exhibited stunted behavioral and socioeconomical development. Sixty-one percent (61%) of schools perceived that general misconduct had increased. Schools reported substantial increases in the frequency of tardiness, skipping class, rowdiness, bullying, fighting, threats of fighting, use of electronic devices during class, and other classroom disruptions. Thirty-six percent (36%) of schools recorded an increase in vandalism.

And so we have to… sue social media? The same social media that… enabled your schools to stay open and relevant during the pandemic? The same social media that allowed kids across San Mateo County to continue to communicate with their social circle while they were locked down in their homes for over a year? The same social media — especially YouTube — that was critical to helping teachers continue to provide lessons to kids online? I know my kids were regularly assigned to watch science and history YouTube videos during remote learning, and many of those videos were fantastic! Way better than most science and history lectures I had in school.

That’s who you’re suing?

Like other school districts, Plaintiffs bear the cost of the increased need for youth mental health services. Operating under pre-crisis budgets, Plaintiffs have scrambled to reallocate resources to address the mental health crisis. Plaintiffs have diverted time and funds to hire additional health care professionals, to train teachers and staff on how to educate students on their mental health, to develop mental health curriculum and materials, and to keep students and parents notified and informed about mental health issues that arise.

Again, what does that have to do with social media? We had a pandemic. That’s been kinda stressful for everyone. And that’s true of kids as well. But social media actually helped tons of kids get through the pandemic and still stay in contact with their social circle.

Indeed, the complaint even admits all this:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, due to lockdowns, remote schooling, and physical isolation from friends, young people drastically increased their use of social media. One study explained its findings: “adolescents augmented their social media use, including general screen time.

But, then it blames all the mental health problems… on social media, and not the “physical isolation from friends” or the stress of, you know, a freaking pandemic.

This use of social media is accompanied by detrimental mental health effects

Again, studies show the opposite. The very Pew study that this complaint relies on to show that kids use social media a lot… showed that it did not have detrimental effects on the vast majority of kids.

Also, it turns out more people are absent from school… and somehow that’s also social media’s fault rather than a deadly, contagious virus.

Absenteeism also became a problem during the Covid-19 pandemic. Public schools reported both student and teacher chronic absenteeism increased compared to prior school years. Seventy-two percent (72%) of schools reported an increase in chronic student absenteeism compared to pre-pandemic school years.

The complaint details high rates of absenteeism at some of its schools, and makes zero effort to actually connect that to social media. It just acts as if it must be true, despite no reason to believe they’re connected, and many, many fairly obvious reasons to suggest that the pandemic is actually to blame.

The complaint also tries to connect bad behavior in schools to social media… and fails in almost hilarious ways. It mentions that since 2020 the entire county (which has a population of over 700,000 with between 85k and 100k enrolled students) there were… OMG… TWELVE threat incidents involving the internet.

Most egregiously, since 2020, Plaintiffs’ schools have had 72 Student Threat Assessment Training (“STAT”) Level 2 cases, 12 of which (16.7%) were a direct result of negative social media use.

Wait. Wait. Wait. So, with nearly 100,000 students, across three separate school years, you had… twelve incidents from social media? That’s an average of… four a year? From at least 85,000 students? I’m shocked it’s that low!

They also blame two hoax shooter phone calls… on the internet?

In addition to vandalism, social media has been tied to active shooter hoaxes. In October 2022, two San Mateo County high schools—Woodside High School and South San Francisco High School—had to go into lockdown when hoax phone calls to police departments reported possible active shooters on the campuses.

You don’t think it’s got more to do with the rise in actual high profile school shootings?

And, I mean, kids do stupid stuff like this. When I was in junior high school, a kid I knew from around the corner called in a bomb threat because he wanted to get out of a test he wasn’t ready for. We didn’t blame anyone, but him. Because he did it. Some kids are always going to do something like this. It happened before social media, and literally nothing in this lawsuit shows that social media has increased this kind of thing. Nor does it even attempt to link these claims to the internet, rather than just generally assuming they must be connected.

This whole lawsuit is a mess. And it’s a joke. And I’m sad because the people who brought this lawsuit are the people in charge of educating my kids. And anyone who thinks this lawsuit makes sense has shown a real failure. It’s a failure of critical thinking. It’s a failure of understanding evidence. It’s a failure of being carried away by a moral panic instead of evidence. It’s a failure in passing the blame. It’s a failure in not doing your damn job as educators.

It’s just shameful all around. I’m hoping more parents call out this nonsense. Yes, it’s difficult to manage schools these days, especially with all the nonsense culture wars and craziness. But any school board member who thinks this is how they should be spending their time will never receive my vote again, and makes me think it’s time to actively campaign against them in the future. They are failing our children.

* As noted above, this wasn’t the only such lawsuit filed last week. Bucks County, Pennsylvania filed one, as well. And, you know, it’s dumb too. Though, they did sue Meta as well. And went with the whole “public nuisance” claim like everyone else, but weren’t so crazy to go for the RICO nonsense. It’s still ridiculous and should fail easily in court, but this post was long enough, and frustrating enough that Bucks County gets off with just this one footnote paragraph.

Filed Under: covid, moral panic, nancy magee, protect the children, rico, san mateo, san mateo county, san mateo county board of education, social media
Companies: facebook, google, instagram, meta, snapchat, tiktok, youtube

Following Massive Protests Against COVID Policies, Chinese Government Again Ramping Up Its Censorship Efforts

from the pushing-back-against-the-pushback dept

A deadly fire in an Urumqi apartment complex has led to something rarely seen in China: massive protests across the nation against the Chinese government’s actually draconian COVID restrictions. Most of the city of Urumqi is on lockdown, with residents banned from leaving their homes. These restrictions may have contributed to the death toll. Witnesses (and one video) claimed lockdown barriers prevented fire trucks from getting to the scene of the fire.

Elsewhere in the country, people have been forced to sleep at work due to quarantine conditions. Others have been bused from their homes to quarantine facilities. Meanwhile, COVID numbers continue to climb, suggesting the recently instituted “zero COVID” policies aren’t actually addressing the problem.

Starting in Urumqi, protests soon spread across the country. Faced with open expressions of anger, the Chinese government is reacting the way it always reacts when it is faced with dissent: by increasing the footprint of its jackboot.

Internet and phone use is heavily regulated (and heavily surveiled) in China. Whatever was already working is being intensified. And whatever hasn’t been applied yet is being put into motion. No longer will it take creating or sharing content the government doesn’t like to earn police visits, criminal charges, or both. Now, as CNN reports, it will only take a nearly passive sign of approval directed at content the Chinese government dislikes to attract the government’s negative attention.

Internet users in China will soon be held liable for liking posts deemed illegal or harmful, sparking fears that the world’s second largest economy plans to control social media like never before.

China’s internet watchdog is stepping up its regulation of cyberspace as authorities intensify their crackdown on online dissent amid growing public anger against the country’s stringent Covid restrictions.

The new rules come into force from Dec. 15, as part of a new set of guidelines published by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) earlier this month.

The Chinese government would prefer an airtight stranglehold, and this is just some expected tightening of its grip. As the government has certainly noticed, the more it tries to censor, the more creative citizens are when circumventing the efforts. Rotated videos, screenshots of content, coded language, unexpected communication platforms… all of these help keep citizens one step ahead of the censors.

So, the rules continue to roll out. And they get more extreme with every iteration.

The regulationis an updatedversion of one previously published in 2017. For the first time, it states that “likes” of public posts must be regulated, along with other types of comments. Public accounts must also actively vet every comment under their posts.

However, the rules didn’t elaborate on what kind of content would be deemedillegal or harmful.

This vagueness is a feature, not a bug. You’ll know you’ve violated the new rules when uniformed officers swing by the house to inform you that you’ve violated them. The solution is to stop liking other people’s posts: winning by not playing.

But there’s an upside to China’s ever-expanding censorship programs, especially when they’re trailing ever-expanding dissent. Even China’s massive surveillance apparatus can’t possibly hope to catch them all.

However, analysts also questioned how practical it would be to carry out the newest rules, given that public anger is widespread and strict enforcement of these censorship requirements would consume significant resources.

“It is almost impossible to stop the spread of protest activities as the dissatisfaction continues to spread. The angry people can come up with all sorts of ways to communicate and express their feelings,” Cheng said.

The Chinese government has the power. But it also has billions of people to keep an eye on. Dissent will never be completely silenced. And as long as that’s true, there’s still hope for the nation.

Filed Under: censorship, china, covid, free speech, intermediary liability, internet, protests

Ohio Court Says Distance Learning ‘Room Scans’ Violate The Fourth Amendment

from the things-Kyllo-couldn't-even-have-envisioned dept

The COVID pandemic changed the way America does business. And that includes the educational business. Many schools are publicly funded but those public funds are used to purchase intrusive surveillance tools for the sole purpose of preventing distance learners from somehow “cheating” on their own education.

Never mind the fact that cheating doesn’t guarantee success. That’s beside the question. The real question is why educational institutions believe such intrusion is necessary. Being a distance learner means having your every internet move scrutinized. It means allowing (in some cases) every keystroke to be logged. It means proving over and over again you are who you are and that you are trying to earn an honest education. In the most intrusive circumstances, it means allowing educators and administrators to virtually enter your home, look around your bedroom, and unilaterally declare certain facial expressions and body movements to be evidence of cheating.

And for what? What do we get? Obviously, students have a vested interest in succeeding, even if it ultimately means nothing more than fewer uncomfortable conversations with parents. For students attending public colleges, success just means moving themselves one step closer to crippling debt and a job market unlikely to value their degree as much as the institution that sold it to them.

Anti-cheating software is a joke. It is predicated on the hilarious notion that the United States is a meritocracy and that only those who earn their wins honestly should be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it’s unclear how a student googling the details of an obscure historic event is any different than an employee googling how to insert an Excel table into a Word document, despite the employee ensuring their employer during interviews that they had “excellent” Microsoft Office skills.

Anyway, this long rant brings you to this decision [PDF], which is sure to alter the long-accepted “we can do what we want” assumptions of education providers and their preferred tech “solutions.” (via Courthouse News Service)

Proctoring software used by Cleveland State University demands access to students’ homes. There are multiple providers at play. Respondus locks down students’ browsers during testing, preventing them from surfing the web (or other software) for answers to tests. Honorlock uses AI to detect cheating via laptop cameras. It also allows educators and administrators access to these cameras to view students’ rooms for things that might indicate students are cheating.

Even though nothing in the Cleveland State student manual mandates room scans prior to testing, both of these products require a scan before testing can proceed. The process requires the student to allow access to the camera while holding up their school ID so administrators can verify their identity. Then, via a private chat channel, administrators demand access to the contents of a student’s room via webcam to look for anything that might be used to cheat on tests.

Aaron Ogletree, a student with health issues impacting his immune system that made his more susceptible to COVID infection, continued his education from home. Being a distance learner, he was subjected to virtual searches of his room prior to testing. He objected to these “room scans.” His objections were ignored by the school.

Ogletree sued. And he has obtained a ruling stating virtual room searches by publicly funded schools in Ohio violates the Constitution.

Although the record shows that no student, other than Mr. Ogletree, ever objected to the scans, the facts also implicate the core places where society, to the extent it can agree on much these days, recognizes reasonable and legitimate privacy interests—namely, the home. Though schools may routinely employ remote technology to peer into houses without objection from some, most, or nearly all students, it does not follow that others might not object to the virtual intrusion into their homes or that the routine use of a practice such as room scans does not violate a privacy interest that society recognizes as reasonable, both factually and legally. Therefore, the Court determines that Mr. Ogletree’s subjective expectation of privacy at issue is one that society views as reasonable and that lies at the core of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against governmental intrusion.

While it’s understandable the university might have been caught off guard by a legal challenge to processes no other student had even questioned, it’s completely incomprehensible that it decided to argue so vehemently (and so poorly) to defend intrusive surveillance of students’ homes and bedrooms. But it did. And the court doesn’t find any of its arguments remotely (intended) persuasive.

First, the school argued there was no violation (and no expectation of privacy) because the school did this all the time when deploying its proctoring tech. It (and I am not kidding) compared its peering into internal rooms of houses to overland flights by aircraft.

For this proposition, Defendant cites California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207, 215 (1986), in which the Supreme Court held that it was unreasonable to expect that marijuana plants were constitutionally protected from being observed from an altitude of 1,000 feet “in an age where private and commercial flight in the public airways is routine.”

But a bedroom of a house is never in “plain view” of the public. And the Supreme Court’s 2001 Kyllo decision made it clear use of tech to peer into people’s homes was a violation of rights.

The school even cited Kyllo, claiming its “general public use” proctoring tech was different from the far more novel (at that point) thermal imaging tech at the center of the case. But that misses the point of the Supreme Court decision, the Ohio court says. It’s the intrusion that matters, not whether or not the tool used for the intrusion is well-known or easily obtained.

But the Supreme Court did not hold the inverse—that the use of a technology “in general public use” could not be a Fourth Amendment search. To the contrary, Katz held, as relevant here, that the procedural antecedents to a search that the Constitution requires apply even where new technologies make accessible places and information not otherwise obtainable without a physical intrusion. While cameras might be generally available and now commonly used, members of the public cannot use them to see into an office, house, or other place not publicly visible without the owner’s consent

The school also tried to compare surveillance of students’ rooms to the monitoring of device usage and email communications by government employees using government-owned devices. WTF says the court, pretty much blowing by this argument to state two obvious things: (1) if the college wants to alter the contours of the Fourth Amendment, it’s going to need the assistance of a much higher court, and (2) this was a student in his own room, not a government employee.

Finally, the school claimed the search of rooms pre-testing was mostly “regulatory” or “administrative,” not unlike the entry of private homes by government employees required of recipients of certain welfare benefits. It’s an imaginative invocation of precedent definitely not on point. And federal courts rarely award points for creativity.

[U]nlike Wyman and its progeny, this case involves the privilege of college admission and attendance and does not involve a benefit made available to all citizens as of right. Additionally, the record here shows a variable policy—enforced, unevenly, in the discretion of a combination of proctors and professors—of using remote scans that make a student’s home visible, including to other students, with uncertain consequences

The process Cleveland State uses to test distance learners isn’t that much different from other programs in place elsewhere in the country. This initial victory places a litigation target on the backs of publicly funded schools that believe the only recognized right is their right to demand whatever they want from students. This is going to change things. Unfortunately, that change will likely manifest as fewer schools offering remote learning options, rather than a recognition that mitigating cheating need not involve violating students’ rights.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, aaron ogletree, anti-cheating software, covid, distance learning, honorlock, proctor software, respondus, room scans, surveillance, webcams
Companies: cleveland state university

Too Little, Too Late, WTO Finally Eases Patent Rights On COVID Vaccines

from the like-it-even-matters-now? dept

In what definitely feels like a case of way too little, way too late, the WTO last week finally decided to grant the TRIPS waiver on COVID vaccines, allowing others to make more of the vaccine without violating patent rights. The WTO has long had this ability to issue a patent waiver as part of its Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. The idea is that in an emergency, when patents or copyrights are getting in the way of real harm, the WTO can say “hey, let’s grant a waiver to save people.”

You would think that a global pandemic where people are dying would be an obvious time to use such a waiver grant, but that’s because you’re not an obnoxious IP maximalist who cares more about their precious monopoly rents than the health and safety of the global populace. The big pharma and medical device companies freaked out about the possibility of a waiver, and even worse, Hollywood also flipped out about it, with their typical worry that any proof that removing an intellectual monopoly might be good for the world cannot be allowed.

It took forever, but in May of last year (already a year and a half into the pandemic), the US agreed to support the TRIPS waiver. This caused much gnashing of teeth among the maximalists, and then it still took over a year before this agreement was reached, and of course, now it’s both greatly watered down, and very much too late to make much of a difference. But kudos Hollywood and pharma lobbyists. You let thousands of people die, but you sure protected your IP. Good work!

But experts said the proposal was weakened significantly over months of negotiations. They said they did not expect the final agreement to encourage manufacturers in developing countries to start producing Covid vaccines, in part because it does not address the trade secrets and manufacturing know-how that many producers would need.

Even worse, the agreement is limited just to vaccines, and does not apply to either testing or therapeutics — both of which are way more important today than vaccines.

Even as this version is basically close to useless, Big Pharma continued to freak out.

The industry’s main lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, sharply criticized Friday’s agreement. Stephen J. Ubl, the group’s head, called it one in a series of “political stunts” and said it “won’t help protect people against the virus.” He noted that the industry had already produced more than 13 billion Covid vaccine doses.

Yeah, it won’t help protect people because you and your lobbyists spent two years trying to block it, so that when this finally happened it was way too late, and even when it did happen, you watered it down and limited it to the point of uselessness. The “political stunt” was yours, Stephen. I hope all those dead people were worth it.

And, of course, you have the WSJ journal to jump in… and laughably claim this was “Biden’s gift to China.”

The World Trade Organization was created to protect free-trade rules to spread prosperity. Now it’s becoming a vehicle to raid U.S. innovation. See Friday’s agreement by the WTO’s 164 members that lets developing countries, including China, steal intellectual property for Covid vaccines.

The White House is flogging the deal as a diplomatic victory. But it’s an enormous defeat for U.S. national interests that will benefit China and set a precedent that erodes intellectual property protection. This won’t be the last time global grifters seek to pilfer U.S. technology.

What are you even talking about? If it took two and a half years in the middle of a pandemic to get an agreement on life saving vaccines, that still has massive limits, and is both way too little and way too late, the idea that this is setting a precedent that “erodes intellectual property protection” is idiotic to the point of laughable.

And, again, all this does is remove some patent barriers (not other manufacturing barriers) on vaccines that are saving lives. Yes, it may help save lives in China, but is the Wall Street Journal editorial board really arguing that we should let them die because they’re Chinese? It sure sounds like it.

In short, there’s nothing legally binding to stop China from stealing U.S. mRNA technology, using it to develop its own vaccines including for other diseases, and then selling the shots under their own brands. The agreement lasts five years so it could potentially cover a future combined mRNA vaccine for Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus.

Newsflash to the WSJ editorial board: I know that you’re among those pushing the idea that the pandemic is over, but it is not. Keeping the world healthy, including in China (which the US economy still relies on heavily) is good for the US economy too. When China runs into problems with the pandemic, then you get more supply chain problems that are currently a huge part of the economic difficulties in the US. Maybe that’s fine for you because it’s another thing you can falsely blame on Biden, but this editorial is literally complaining that this minor reduction in patent rights might help Chinese people stay alive. It’s pretty disgusting.

Filed Under: china, covid, covid vaccines, pharma, trips, trips waiver
Companies: wall street journal

Automated Moderation Means Distance Learning Students Are Being Called Cheaters Because Reasons

from the let's-make-an-uncontrollably-bad-situation-worse dept

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic in America was, at best, inadequate. Many voters who felt subservient to a failed businessman chose to view the pandemic as a conspiracy meant to unseat Donald Trump. Millions died. Many more millions continue to suffer.

Schools reacted by offering a variety of learning options to students, including the opportunity to avoid breathing the same air President Trump believed to be innocuous, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But schools felt they needed to punish students who had opted out of superspreader events by remaining at home and trimming down their COVID exposure possibilities to immediate family members. Assuming every distance learning student was a cheater, schools signed contracts with private companies to vastly increase the amount of in-home surveillance they could perform under the heading of “education integrity.”

Donald Trump no longer fails the country on a daily basis. He has been replaced by a Democratic moderate who will likely fail the country on a weekly basis. Joe Biden is a more capable statesman and continues to monitor the COVID situation in the US, but there’s little he can do to undo the status quo.

Students still need to follow through on classes. And contracts signed during the height of the pandemic still remain operative. For whatever reason, school officials still seem to believe students pursuing studies at home are only in it for the cheating opportunities. Rather than dial things back, officials have let the COVID status quo remain in place. This is good for students who’d rather not be exposed to COVID. But it remains bad for students who’d rather remain home than spend time in crowded classrooms, rubbing elbows with the infected.

Kashmir Hill says the status quo is going to hurt students. Her report for the New York Times shows how surveillance software, embedded in distance learning options, continues to punish students who’ve chosen (either by their own choice or the choices of their guardians) to remain home and out of harm’s way.

A Florida teenager taking a biology class at a community college got an upsetting note this year. A start-up called Honorlock had flagged her as acting suspiciously during an exam in February. She was, she said in an email to The New York Times, a Black woman who had been “wrongfully accused of academic dishonesty by an algorithm.”

What happened, however, was more complicated than a simple algorithmic mistake. It involved several humans, academic bureaucracy and an automated facial detection tool from Amazon called Rekognition. Despite extensive data collection, including a recording of the girl, 17, and her screen while she took the test, the accusation of cheating was ultimately a human judgment call: Did looking away from the screen mean she was cheating?

This is symptomatic of any effort made to engage in moderation at scale. It remains impossible, whether it’s Facebook dealing with billions of users or educational spyware meant to keep distance learning students from getting a leg up on their in-school competitors by doing a bit of Googling.

So, when things seem questionable, it’s always the end users that suffer. In this case, human moderators likely backstopped algorithmic decisions. But when moderators are employed to stop distance learning cheating by third-party contractors, there’s no better way to show you’re paying attention than punishing students for things that would otherwise be considered normal behavior by kids during standardized tests. In a physical classroom, a student looking in another direction (other than straight ahead) would be viewed as harmless. Under the scrutiny of algorithmic tools that cannot actually perceive efforts to cheat, it looks like cheating.

Honorlock is cheap. That’s a boon for educators who often have very limited budgets. But you get what you pay for, even if you’re using other people’s money to buy it. The name suggest results the company is seemingly unable to deliver. But bang-for-buck pricing says it’s worth the roll of the (public) dice.

Honorlock, based in Boca Raton, Fla., was founded by a couple of business school graduates who were frustrated by classmates they believed were gaming tests. The start-up administered nine million exams in 2021, charging about $5 per test or 10perstudenttocoverallthetestsinthecourse.Honorlockhasraised10 per student to cover all the tests in the course. Honorlock has raised 10perstudenttocoverallthetestsinthecourse.Honorlockhasraised40 million from investors, the vast majority of it since the pandemic began.

The company will likely continue to secure funding. It offers an unbeatable price point with little downside. While it may eventually be sued for punishing students for non-cheating movements declared to be cheating by its AI, the suing students will need to demonstrate financial loss and other harmful outcomes of the system’s faulty AI before securing wins. This is unlikely to happen because standardized test scores mean little to nothing out in the real world and students branded cheaters by schools will always have to the opportunity to move to other schools. Courts don’t really seem to care how burdensome moving schools is on parents and their students. As long as the option remains, schools using third-party spyware are likely to escape lawsuits over their intrusive distance learning software.

Hill’s article lists other victims of third party spyware deployed by schools. But as long as students have options (no matter how unrealistic), courts will likely side with the purveyors of spyware and the public entities that have spent public money to prevent cheating via algorithms and always-on surveillance of public school students.

That doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. In-home spying, engaged in by schools under the theory it will prevent cheating, is highly problematic.

When the student met with the dean and Dr. Orridge by video, she said, she told them that she looks down to think, and that she fiddles with her hands to jog her memory. They were not swayed. The student was found “responsible” for “noncompliance with directions,” resulting in a zero on the exam and a warning on her record.

“Who stares at a test the entire time they’re taking a test? That’s ridiculous. That’s not how humans work,” said Cooper Quintin, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization. “Normal behaviors are punished by this software.”

The question is: will courts care? The COVID pandemic is an anomaly. And when things go weird, the government is given considerable latitude to maintain normalcy. That means encroachment on rights will be ignored, if not rewarded, until everything settles down. Students will be victims, even if courts won’t recognize this fact at this point in time. By the time everything actually returns to a pre-2020 “normal,” all of this intrusion is likely to be forgotten. But make no mistake: the COVID pandemic did almost as much for surveillance as the 9/11 attacks. The difference is most of the involved parties were private contractors. Every crisis is an opportunity, and the government will always make the most of departures from the mean.

Filed Under: covid, distance learning, proctors, remote testing, surveillance
Companies: honorlock

FCC Wants To Put WiFi On School Busses

from the something-is-better-than-nothing,-but... dept

Wed, May 18th 2022 03:55pm - Karl Bode

The FCC has announced that it would be backing a plan to put WiFi on school busses in an attempt to bridge that pesky rascal ambiguously called the “digital divide.” According to the plan, the proposal would use the dwindling money available in the FCC’s E-Rate program to deploy hotspots on busses, allowing them to aid students and be used as portable hotspots on demand.

20-42 million Americans lack access to broadband. 83 million live under a monopoly. The end result of this market and policy failure was painfully clear during the home education and telecommuting boom during the COVID crisis. Our solutions to this problem often don’t involve fixing the cause (monopolization, corruption) but implementing a rotating array of somewhat helpful band-aids.

But even rudimentary, simple, common sense fixes often take decades to materialize in a system that largely panders to monopolies, not competition, innovation, or the public.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the nation’s libraries asked the Trump FCC if it would be ok to (1) leave their hotspots overnight to boost access, (2) use in-school hotspots to expand broadband beyond school grounds, and (3) utilize mobile hotspots to help provide on demand broadband access. You know, basically just do the bare minimum to help people struggling during COVID.

The Trump FCC said the first was fine, but effectively punted on the other requests, implying FCC rules wouldn’t allow it. This was an FCC that routinely broke the rules when trying to kill media consolidation or consumer protection rules, but balked at the request because it viewed community broadband efforts of any kind (including expanded library access) as a threat to monopoly hegemony.

The DNC, which is often notably better on telecom, is at least allowing these common sense solutions to move forward, based on a speech recently given by FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel. The speech goes to great lengths to outline the problems folks’ had trying to embrace home education with shitty, pricey, spotty broadband:

I took my on-the-road learnings back to the office and I combed through all the data I could find. I found that seven in 10 teachers were assigning homework that required internet access. But FCC data consistently demonstrated that one in three households do not have broadband at home. I started calling where those numbers overlap the Homework Gap because I felt that this portion of the digital divide really needed a phrase to describe it because it’s so important to fix.

Rosenworcel is 100% doing a good thing by working on revamping and expanding the E-Rate program to help people, something her predecessor Ajit Pai generally seemed disinterested in. But again, notice how this “digital divide” is framed as a nebulous, causation free problem, and not, say, the direct result on 30 years of government policy that coddled and protected regional telecom monopolies.

This government failure to specifically call out the cause of mediocre broadband generally gets passed along to the press. For example, Gizmodo isn’t an outlet that shies away from calling a duck a duck, but their article on the FCC plan mirrors the FCC framing. As in, it doesn’t specify why U.S. broadband sucks (again, lack of competition thanks to monopolies) and adopts ambiguous digital divide terminology:

As the pandemic begins to maybe, hopefully, wind down, the digital divide—the gap between certain demographics and access to technology like high-speed internet—is still wide.

Again, why does this “digital divide” exist? Why is it still “wide” after countless government initiatives and untold billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies thrown at industry?

Because telecom monopolies have waged a thirty-year campaign to crush any and all meaningful competition, often with the help of very corrupt state and federal lawmakers. This isn’t hyperbole, or opinion, it’s provable, documented fact. We throw billions in subsidies and tax breaks at these monopolists in exchange for half-built networks or nothing at all.

The solution to the “digital divide” involves aggressively disrupting monopoly dominance by any means necessary, including (as a majority of the public does) supporting community broadband, cooperatives, utility broadband, and various other ad-hoc, localized solutions (instead policymakers often demonize them). The solution also involves acknowledging corruption is a real thing that needs addressing.

It’s hard to fix this problem when your policy leaders, lawmakers, and press can’t even be bothered to mention that monopoly power is the primary cause of the problem they’re trying to fix. It’s also hard to do that when policymakers have failed for thirty years to accurately map the impact of this monopoly power and its impact on coverage and affordability — especially in marginalized communities.

That we can’t and won’t meaningfully address telecom monopolization is particularly weird given the recent obsession (by the Biden camp and the GOP alike) with “antirust reform.” But only, apparently, as it relates to “big tech.” The Biden executive order pays some passing lip service to broadband competition, but again the cause of this limited competition is left nebulous, unexplainable, and free of causation.

So again, putting Wi-Fi on school busses is great, sure. But it’s still representative of our tendency in telecom policy to treat symptoms instead of the disease. In large part because seriously challenging giant monopolies bone grafted to our intelligence gathering comes with a political cost most career-oriented DC regulators and lawmakers aren’t willing to pay.

Filed Under: covid, digital divide, e-rate, fcc