election – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Sorry, This Episode Will Not Cheer You Up

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Concentrix, the technology and services leader driving trust, safety, and content moderation globally. In our Bonus Chat, Dom Sparkes, Trust and Safety Director for EMEA, and David Elliot, Head of Technology, try to lighten the mood by discussing how to make a compelling business case for online safety and the importance of measuring ROI.

Filed Under: .politics, ai, artificial intelligence, content moderation, disinformation, election, misinformation
Companies: character.ai, facebook, meta

Trump, Musk PAC Swing State Ground Game Hampered By Shitty, Slow Local Internet The GOP Is Largely Responsible For

from the hoisted-with-my-own-petard dept

Wed, Oct 16th 2024 05:33am - Karl Bode

I’ve written extensively that U.S. broadband is slow, spotty, and expensive thanks to regulatory capture and regional monopoly power. Republicans have propped up this broken status quo at every opportunity, routinely working to undermine state and federal consumer protection, while letting companies like AT&T and Comcast quite literally write terrible state and federal telecom law.

So it’s a bit ironic that the GOP effort to cultivate votes in swing states using an Elon Musk PAC app is running into problems due to substandard, slow broadband access in those same states.

The Guardian notes that the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC use a management app called Campaign Sidekick to confirm that door to door canvassers are actually reaching “low information” voters in swing states. But the app keeps crashing because it requires bandwidth that a lot of these local areas simply don’t have:

“The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use “offline walkbooks” which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed, the people said.

As a result, the Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.”

So for one, that the app requires 40 Mbps in rural swing states to track canvasser movement means it’s a badly designed app. There are ways to do this using location movement data or lower resolution video that shouldn’t be anywhere near this bandwidth-intensive.

But here’s where I also remind you that Republicans are directly responsible for America’s sluggish, shitty, expensive, slow broadband access in the first place.

The GOP voted against the COVID relief and broadband infrastructure bills that were intended to bring affordable broadband to most of these areas (though they lie and take credit for among misinformed constituents anyway). And they’ve also opposed efforts to require that giant telecom monopolies ensure that networks built with taxpayer money are actually affordable.

The GOP is also currently helping the telecom industry dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this would somehow magically result in “free market innovation.” Lack of corporate oversight results in companies like AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon seeing little to no real world accountability for monopolistic behavior, harming broadband speeds, availability, and pricing.

The Trump arm of the GOP also just killed a popular program that was helping to provide affordable broadband access to low-income voters across these states. Republicans also routinely rubber stamp competition-eroding telecom mergers resulting in less price competition and spottier access.

Not that I expect local voters to make any of these connections (in large part because local and national journalism isn’t all that interested in telling them the truth), but it’s ironic the Trump GOP ground game is being inconvenienced by their own telecom policies. That’s probably as close as they’ve ever gotten to actually owning the real-world impact their shitty policies routinely have on their own constituents.

Filed Under: america pac, broadband, canvassing, donald trump, election, elon musk, gop, high speed internet, swing states, telecom, wireless

Delaware Court Says Dominion Voting Systems Can Continue Suing Fox News For $1.6 Billion In Defamation

from the hope-the-charade-was-worth-it,-Fox dept

Another one of Dominion Voting Systems’ many, many lawsuits against Trump loyalists will be allowed to continue. (For a pretty comprehensive rundown of Dominion’s election-related defamation lawsuits, check out these comments by Techdirt reader RP.)

This particular lawsuit was filed in Delaware state court against Fox News Corporation, alleging that many of its hosts and commentators lied about Dominion’s voting machines and its owners during coverage following Donald Trump’s election loss. These false claims continued to be made by Fox News personalities like Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo and amplified by guest commentators (who are also being sued by Dominion elsewhere) like former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.

Fox moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming there was no defamation here, just a lot of protected speech. Fox’s defense is that repeated lies by hosts and guests were heated hyperbole and statements of opinion rather than defamation. Also, Fox contends it can’t be held responsible for statements made by its employees. From the decision [PDF]:

Fox argues that multiple constitutional doctrines protect Fox’s alleged defamatory speech. First, Fox contends that truthfully reporting newsworthy allegations made by a sitting president and his legal team on matters of public concern is not actionable. Second, Fox claims that the media is completely protected when reporting and commenting about allegations made in government proceedings. Third, Fox asserts that opinion and hyperbolic rhetoric about newsworthy allegations are constitutionally protected. Finally, Fox claims that none of the challenged individual statements identifies actionable defamation against Fox.

But, as the Delaware Superior Court points out in its refusal to toss the case, Fox News and its hosts were provided facts that contradicted on-air statements. And yet these statements continued unaltered, with Fox News playing up the “stolen election” angle to drive viewers to its broadcasts.

It’s that refusal to correct on-air statements that may end up costing Fox News a whole lot of money. Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion, citing the amount of money it has spent fighting months of false claims about its software and hardware, as well as contracts dropped by state officials who bought into the “stolen election” narrative.

The judge says repeating false claims when you have facts in hand can be defamatory. That’s called “actual malice” and it’s definitely actionable. And the reporting on the election and Dominion Voting Systems was far from neutral, undermining Fox’s “neutral reportage” defense.

The Court, reviewing the Complaint’s allegations, notes that it is reasonably conceivable that Fox’s reporting was inaccurate. As alleged, Dominion attempted to factually address Fox’s election fraud allegations. After Fox began connecting Dominion to election fraud claims, Dominion sent Fox executives and television anchors its “SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT” emails. Dominion’s emails, which contained analysis from election and related experts, tended to disprove the election fraud claims. Nevertheless, Fox and its news personnel continued to report Dominion purported connection to the election fraud claims without also reporting on Dominion’s emails. When Fox guests spread or reiterated disinformation about Dominion, Fox did not use the information Dominion provided to correct its guests or to reorient its viewers. Instead, Fox and its personnel pressed their view that considerable evidence connected Dominion to an illegal election fraud conspiracy.

In addition, the Court notes that it is reasonably conceivable that Fox was not dispassionate. Given that Fox apparently refused to report contrary evidence, including evidence from the Department of Justice, the Complaint’s allegations support the reasonable inference that Fox intended to keep Dominion’s side of the story out of the narrative. Moreover, the Complaint alleges numerous instances in which Fox personnel did not merely ask questions and parrot responses but, rather, endorsed or suggested answers. Fox therefore may have failed to report the issue truthfully or dispassionately by skewing questioning and approving responses in a way that fit or promoted a narrative in which Dominion committed election fraud.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the neutral reportage defense is completely undercut. But at this point — with Fox having yet to actually respond to the allegations in Dominion’s complaint — Fox can’t make this lawsuit disappear.

First, Fox argues it was not required to “defend” Dominion from Fox’s guest by reporting Dominion’s refutations. Still, Fox’s possession of evidence demonstrating the election fraud claims were untrue supports the reasonable inference that Fox made or published statements knowing they were false or with a reckless disregard for the truth. Fox may not ordinarily have a duty to defend the targets of allegations on which it is reporting; however, Fox must report on those allegations accurately and dispassionately under the neutral reportage defense. Second, Fox argues there are instances in which Fox was critical of the allegations against Dominion and in which Fox reported Dominion’s refutations. Fox may end up being right. This is the pleadings stage though and, at this stage, this argument raises factual issues the Court must resolve in Dominion’s favor. Fox will have the ability to develop this argument during discovery as the case proceeds.

The “fair reporting” privilege also does not apply. This covers “substantially true” coverage of court proceedings. Hardly anything asserted by Dominion to be defamatory fits this description.

The Court recognizes that most of the alleged statements were made before a lawsuit had been filed (e.g., the Powell allegations). As a result, most of the alleged statements, even if true, were not “of” a judicial proceeding. That alone is enough to preclude the fair report privilege. Fox counters with decisions that, according to Fox, hold the fair report privilege applies to “anticipated” or “forthcoming” lawsuits as well as pending proceedings. To the extent Fox argues its personnel were referring to pending election fraud cases filed throughout the nation, and investigations initiated by the federal government, the Complaint alleges facts that Fox’s personnel did not tailor their comments to the allegations in those proceedings. By consequence, the Court finds there is ambiguity, from the viewer’s perspective, as to whether Fox was reporting on those proceedings.

Hyperbole and opinion? Maybe that defense will work for Fox News once discovery is underway and all the facts can be closely examined. But for now, the court finds too many of the statements made by Fox News hosts possibly actionable to toss out the entire suit.

[T]he Court finds it is reasonably conceivable that Fox and its personnel broadcasted mixed opinions that were based on either false or incomplete facts unknown to the reasonable viewer. Many of Fox’s reporters made broad election fraud statements that did not disclose their sources clearly, or clearly connect their statements to the election fraud litigations. Although Fox classifies its reporters’ remarks as “commentary” that used “loose and hyperbolic rhetoric” for entertainment value, even loose and hyperbolic language can be actionable if it rests on false statements of fact undisclosed to viewers. Accordingly, the Complaint supports the reasonable inference that Fox made unprotected statements of fact that defamed Dominion.

It’s those “false statements of facts” that bring in the “actual malice” component of defamation law. The court says Dominion has alleged enough to move forward. Fox’s defense that some of its commentators and hosts contradicted claims of election fraud — perhaps assuming this would mean Fox News as a whole can’t be sued — works against it.

In addition, the Complaint alleges that several of Fox’s personnel openly disclaimed the fraud claims as false. Yet, certain Fox personnel (e.g., Mr. Dobbs) continued to push the fraud claims. The nearby presence of dissenting colleagues thus further suggests Fox, through personnel like Mr. Dobbs, was knowing or reckless in reporting the claims.

That’s not to say this won’t ultimately result in Fox News escaping this lawsuit. But from what the judge has seen so far, Fox definitely has an uphill battle. Fox execs should have known they were playing with litigation fire by allowing their hosts to traffic in false claims about Dominion voting machines — especially after the network was given evidence that directly contradicted these claims. But the network apparently felt the “stolen election” angle was for more profitable and more likely to retain viewers unwilling to believe their president was no longer their president.

As multiple lawsuits continue to work their way through the court system, high-profile Trump acolytes are going to discover that their election conspiracy theories are going to cost them far more than their reputations.

Filed Under: actual malice, defamation, e-voting, election, fair reporting, fox news, substantial truth
Companies: dominion voting, fox

from the paper-tigers-asked-to-convert-allegations-to-USD dept

The failed insurrection may be over — all but the Capitol cops ending their own lives after being assaulted by “law and order” types, who thought they could bypass the peaceful transfer of power with violence. (Fuck all those people, by the way — all 500+ of them.) But the hope remains. It must have been stolen, say a collection of denialists and grifters. Let’s win back the election process, say those unable to count votes or put their faith in the institution that put their boy in the White House in the first place (looking at you, Electoral College).

So the grift continues. So does the denialism. But it’s going to start costing people some serious money. The people that decided that backdrafting Trump’s odorous emanations following the November election are still theoretically on the hook for besmirching the election process and the machinery behind it.

While it’s always appropriate to question the security and trustworthiness of election tech, it makes zero sense to air a bunch of insane conspiracies as actual fact. A bunch of acolytes thought they could call the presidential election into question if they amplified QAnon-level speculation into the public discourse. The stupidity of these actions has been called out by a frequent target of unvetted speculation: Dominion Voting Systems.

The challenges were only raised in areas where Trump expected to win but lost, indicating these “challenges” had nothing to do with election integrity. After all, if the integrity of the election was in question, wouldn’t these people be questioning election results where Trump won? Everyone knows it’s a façade — a carelessly edited sermon to the converted. Playing to the base usually pays off. But it may not in these cases.

Dominion has been suing over these false statements, implications, and complete, utter bullshit. The company first targeted Trump legal figures (both past and present) like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. Now it’s coming for Trump’s favorite non-gorilla-related programmers: One America Network and Newsmax. Both companies stepped up during Trump’s last couple of years mismanaging the country to prove they could be even further right than far-right mainstay Fox News.

Two more lawsuits have been filed by Dominion. They reiterate many of the same allegations raised against Powell and Giuliani. That shows “Republican” figureheads have all been operating off the same cheat sheet when it comes to contesting the parts of the election they don’t like.

I won’t quote the latest lawsuits by Dominion at length. We’ve already covered the lies and misinformation spread by defendants who now claim this was all just heated rhetoric and hyperbole (even when portraying these same claims as “evidence” of voter fraud in lawsuits where they were the plaintiff). It’s all more of the same: a debunking of literally incredible claims by defendants willing to sell out their credibility (if not their defamation insurance providers) by attaching themselves like so many remora on a shark in the midst of capsizing in its own wake.

Here’s one representative accusation (taken from Dominion’s suit [PDF] against One America Network):

OAN spread these lies by broadcasting and promoting interviews with discredited figures such as Sidney Powell, Rudolph Giuliani, Patrick Byrne, and Mike Lindell. But OAN went further, helping create and nurture the false and fabricated Dominion narrative by endorsing, promoting, and manufacturing these known falsehoods, including by pointing to the so-called “evidence” OAN was broadcasting in support of these lies and by falsely claiming the lies had corroborated “all of our investigations.”

To capitalize on the interest its target audience had in the false Dominion narrative, OAN effectively deputized its Chief White House Correspondent, Chanel Rion, as an in-house spokesperson for all Dominion-related content. After priming its viewers with a steady diet of post-election programming falsely claiming Dominion rigged the 2020 election, OAN and Rion began producing an entire line of programming exclusively devoted to defaming Dominion, descriptively named “Dominion-izing the Vote,” which branded OAN’s disinformation and defamation campaign against Dominion into a single catchy phrase that is now synonymous with fraudulently flipping votes.

How much of this will be determined to be defamation rather than heated electoral-related rhetoric remains to be seen. But enough Trump acolytes decided it was better to tongue the ex-presidential boot than protect themselves from billions of dollars of defamation damages. And that’s fine. The law protects the assertions of inveterate assholes. But it doesn’t protect the supposedly factual claims of people not in possession of actual facts. That’s libel. And that’s going to add up to real money should a court decide Dominion is in the right.

Dominion has also sued [PDF] Patrick Byrne, the Overstock.com founder. Someday the time capsule will be exhumed and our descendants will wonder how a pillow salesman and an internet entrepreneur became inextricably entangled in presidential politics. Wikipedia’s explanation of “dark money” will likely fail to clarify anything. But Byrne better have a satisfactory explanation for his decision to translate his late-stage-capitalism failures into election theft electioneering. LOL deeply at the opening sentence:

After blowing up his career at Overstock by having an affair with a Russian spy, Patrick Byrne soon found himself a new pet project: promoting the false narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen. In fact, as Byrne has publicly admitted, he had already committed to that narrative three months before the election took place. After the election, Byrne manufactured and promoted fake evidence to convince the world that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a massive international conspiracy among China, Venezuelan and Spanish companies, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), prominent Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Dominion, which, Byrne falsely claimed, committed fraud and helped steal the 2020 presidential election.

Don’t be shitty, Patty. You’re too smart for that, alleges Dominion.

Byrne was not hoodwinked by the ex-con or the conspiracy-theorists-for-hire. He is far too intelligent to buy the nonsense he has been selling to the American public. He is a Dartmouth-educated Marshall Scholar with a PhD from Stanford who, until he was pushed out in disgrace in 2019, had a national platform as the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. By lying about the 2020 election, Byrne catapulted himself back into the national spotlight, where he promoted himself as an “us-against-the-world” hero, and won access to the highest echelons of political power, including an in-person meeting with Trump at the White House.

LOL. This is Dominion preemptively striking any motions by Byrne saying he was just talking out of his ass. He had to know what he said was not only false, but demonstrably false. And yet he chose to do it anyway.

Dominion has a high bar to meet in its defamation lawsuits. Good. That’s the way it should be. If defendants can indicate they were just being hyperbolic when discussing election issues, that protects the rest of us who don’t have internet startups or pillow companies to absorb the blows of speech-related lawsuits. But Dominion’s suits appear to allege defendants knew they were trafficking in lies but chose to do so anyway. And that certainly shouldn’t protect the Sydney Powells and OANs of the world from putting their reputations (and liquid funds) at stake to stump for an obstinate failure and his inability to accept reality.

Filed Under: defamation, election, election integrity, patrick byrne, voting, voting machines
Companies: dominion, newsmax, oan, oann

Wednesday, January 6th: The Day The Game Of Politics Turned Into Insurrection

from the that-will-live-in-infamy dept

It’s Thursday, January 7th, one day after a group of thuggish, Trump-supporting hooligans stormed the nation’s Capitol building and attempted to take up residence in the vaunted halls of our self-governance. Already there is an effort to paint this attack on democracy as anything other than what it was: an attempt to either disrupt or overthrow a democratic form of government as dictated by the will of the people. Lin Wood, a lawyer who has been independently creating post-election craziness, suggested the rioters were actually Antifa without evidence, before heading to Parler to claim that a coup was underway. Sarah Palin suggested likewise on Fox News yesterday, while also taking to Twitter to cast doubt on the support these people had for Trump.

This follows weeks and weeks of Trump supporters, political leaders, and elected members of Congress engaging in different flavors of casting doubt on the 2020 election with reckless abandon. And reckless really is the word here. Lindsey Graham, who cynically took to the floor of Congress last night to give a tearful lecture on the importance of respecting our election process and institutions, was accused of calling Georgia election officials weeks earlier, attempting to get legitimate ballots thrown out. Josh Hawley happily waved to the rioters as he headed into the Congressional halls yesterday to voice his nonsense objections to counting electoral college votes, shortly before the rioting began. Ted Cruz likewise lodged objections to the democratic process, all for his own cynical political ambitions. Hours before the rioting began, Rudy Giuliani made reference to “trial by combat” at the rally from where the riots launched in a rambling diatribe claiming the election was stolen. Joe diGenova, Trump Campaign lawyer, was quoted as saying in early December that Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency former head, Chris Krebs, should be “taken out and shot” simply for acknowledging that the election was secure after being fired by Trump.

Many, if not all, of these same people have been quick in the recent hours to distance themselves from any actual violence or rioting that occurred. It should be clear that any such distancing is theatrical bullshit. They, be it has-beens like Sarah Palin or President Trump, simply don’t get to trade in the rhetoric of violence, doubt-casting, and conspiracy theories only to wipe their hands clean of what they created.

And what they created was a movement based on insurrection and violence. Trump sent those people to the Capitol Building and was only able to do so because of his enablers in the government and media.

The insurrection at the heart of America’s democracy, egged on by Trump’s rhetoric, represented a stunning show of force for the fringe movements and their adherents. Four people were left dead during the mayhem, according to the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, including one woman shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer and three other people who had medical emergencies.

One of the most recognizable figures in the videos and photos of the chaos on Capitol Hill was a man in his 30s with a painted face, fur hat and a helmet with horns.

That man is a known QAnon figure, Jake Angeli, who goes by the moniker QAnon Shaman. This is a crazy person, as should be obvious. But many, many GOP officials in very high places have played footsie with QAnon theories, whereas others, including newly elected members of Congress, have professed their faith in the theory directly. Other participants included members of hate groups like The Proud Boys, other white supremacist groups, and pro-gun militia groups. One of them managed to sit at Nancy Pelosi’s desk for a photo, leaving her a vulgar note. Others managed to sit at the dais of Congressional houses, looking for all the world like an occupying force. Four people died.

All the while, they referred to themselves as patriots and Donald Trump, though telling them to go home, professed his love for them all. Still others made the analogy to the Black Lives Matter protests that occurred over the summer, as though the situations were remotely similar.

They are not patriots. Black Lives Matter never forced its way into The People’s House as an occupying force. The wanton tear gassing of protesters that happened over the summer magically never materialized yesterday, save for extremely limited use. The federal response was delayed and lacking in the extreme.

Which is a hell of a way for a modern day America to treat terrorists invading the offices of government. Facebook and Twitter, too often the scapegoat for the actions taken by very real people, suspended Trump’s account for the remainder of his term, and yet the powers-that-be haven’t managed to ban Trump from office, even as the justification for doing so is right in everyone’s faces. Josh Hawley and his band of hapless misfits didn’t withdraw their objections to counting electoral ballots, even in the aftermath of the invasion into the Capitol building, still all too happy to play the fiddle that led these snakes to begin with. Other than some throaty words from the mouths of the very people who brought this danger to our door, little changed.

There is a cancer in America and it needs to be excised. Instead, one political party is quite busy figuring out how to make the best use of the tumor and then feigns outrage when the cancer metastasizes.

Don’t let them get away with it. Accountability must be a thing and political prices for the danger these people have created must be observed. This is no longer a political game, but a very real struggle to keep our Republic.

Filed Under: donald trump, election, insurrection, joe biden, mob, politics

'Law And Order' President Huddles With His Enablers, Considers Enacting Martial Law To Overturn His Election Loss

from the what-a-garbage-human-being dept

Great news, everyone! The outgoing president — the one who refuses to accept the results of the popular vote or the electoral college vote — has been horny on main for weeks. The only thing that could keep Trump in office is some sort of civil war, something he appears to be actively encouraging.

A bunch of politicians who’ve sold their souls for hospitality discounts at Trump properties are claiming the election is illegitimate. Multiple lawsuits have been filed. Most of them have failed. Those on the side of Trump seem to believe they can contest the legitimacy of the election without having any Trump votes nullified. Wild ass claims about voter fraud have yet to be proven.

None of this has worked. There’s a new person headed to the Oval Office. But that doesn’t mean Trump and his obsequious shitheels can’t throw a wrench into the works. The Executive Branch has a bunch of uncontested powers and it appears this Executive Branch is willing to test the extent of those powers rather than hand over the office to its challenger and be forced to clean up the hundreds of fast food wrappers littering the White House floor.

Let’s just check in with the “law and order” president — the one who’s respecting both aspects so much he’s willing to put boots on the ground… in the US of A.

President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump’s aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn’s more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden — an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said.

Nothing says “small government conservatism” or “law and order” like presidential calls for troops roaming the streets rounding up people who won’t pledge allegiance to the guy who lost both sets of votes. Thank ye various gods Trump pardoned Flynn, just so Flynn could pitch martial law to the failed autocrat who refuses to recognize a majority of the American voters don’t want him in office anymore.

Then there’s Sidney Powell — a so-called lawyer whose batshit lawsuits caused Trump to kick her to the curb in late November. Powell gathered evidence derived from conspiracy theorists and the person behind QAnon (but I repeat myself…) and saw every court she encountered kick her out for wasting their time. To the true believers, this indicated the courts were part of the “deep state.” To rational observers, this indicated Powell had spectacularly failed to find evidence of voter fraud.

To those less rational, this was “evidence” of something else. And now these morons are glomming onto a tweet from the equally moronic Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s advisors. It’s Trump looking at a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. And it’s supposedly an endorsement of martial law, something Lincoln declared during the midst of an actual CIVIL FUCKING WAR. And it was ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

Forget 4-D chess. This is a whole new era of CalvinBall. Every failure is a victory. Every judicial benchslap is an argument for the forcible subjugation of citizens unwilling to view an election loser as an election winner.

The White House is on fire. And this time, it’s not the Brits engaging in a last-ditch effort to reclaim authority over rebellious colonists. Instead, it’s the party that co-opted Boston Tea Party imagery to push back against government overreach. The Tea Party may have had some admirable goals. But they sold them out to become part of Trump’s entourage — people willing to raise Gadsden flags while welcoming the government’s attempts to take their rights (guns, voting, speech) away at gunpoint. I sincerely hope the end result of this four-year debacle is the ostracizing of every political opportunist who exchanged their principles for an opportunity to lick Trump’s size 6 platforms.

Filed Under: donald trump, election, law and order, michael flynn, sidney powell

from the this-is-what-we-do dept

If you’re looking for what the meltdown of a major political institution looks like in real time, you need look only to how the GOP is behaving in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive electoral loss. This trickle down freak-out was somewhat predictable, with nearly everyone agreeing that a Trump loss would not see a classy exit by the soon-to-be former President. But I’m not sure anyone would have predicted that the Republican Party writ large would refuse to admit what is an obvious electoral defeat, would seek to overturn a legitimate election in which they picked up all kinds of seats in the House of Representatives, nor cuddle up with all kinds of crazy actors wielding bizarre and easily disproven conspiracy theories.

But it’s worth noting something: it’s unlikely that the vast majority of the GOP players in this Riverdance of stupid are actually crazy. Whatever one might want to say about Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, they aren’t batshit insane, nor stupid. Neither is the vast GOP infrastructure around the country. More likely, they are simply cynical enough to play up the conspiracy theories in order to rev up their voters for future elections, hamper a Biden administration, and otherwise make life as difficult on the party that won the presidency as humanly possible. They’re liars, in other words, not psychos.

Case in point would be the audacious set of tweets sent out by the Arizona GOP recently. Tweets which, referencing a Rambo movie of all things, very much incite violence.

That account followed up on that tweet, indicating that Trump followed that creed and asking if any of its followers did as well. Sadly, many responded in the affirmative, appearing to indicate that there are folks out there ready to die for the cause of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, a large number of people both on Twitter and in public, including many public officials, many of which are Republicans, lost their collective shit over the tweet. The backlash was swift and severe, with condemnation over a tweet that appeared to actively incite violence coming from all political corners.

Which is why it was also not surprising that the Arizona GOP took the tweet down, though it’s reasoning is both absurd and indicates the content of the tweet itself is something that group has no problem putting out in the future.

In an email to the Phoenix New Times on Tuesday, Arizona GOP communications director Zachery Henry bypassed the backlash over the now-deleted tweet by saying that it was taken down “due to concerns about copyright and fair use law.”

“The Republican Party of Arizona condemns all forms of violence in the strongest terms. Fictional movie scenes should be weighed in their proper context,” Henry told the Phoenix New Times in an email. “However, due to concerns about copyright and fair use law, this clip has been removed.”

The AZ GOP is full of crap. Copyright concerns didn’t suddenly materialize between when the tweet was posted and when the backlash began. No DMCA takedown was issued over the tweet, nor the image within it. The tweet was taken down over the backlash.

Except the AZ GOP now also can’t take any credit for taking down the tweet, since it’s indicated that the tweet wasn’t a problem save the copyright concerns. It’s the worst of all worlds, in other words.

But the most important aspect of this is, again, just how cynical it all is. The GOP knows Trump’s claims of fraud are absurd. But they’ll use them anyway to try to score political points. And if someone in, say, the home state of Gabbie Giffords has to get shot in the meantime, then so be it.

Filed Under: arizona, arizona gop, copyright, election, fair use, rambo

Trump's FCC Nominee Asked Fox News To Help Destroy Section 230 To Help Elect More Republicans

from the free-speech? dept

We’ve written a few times about Nathan Simington, who is currently nominated to take over Michael O’Rielly’s seat at the FCC. As you’ll recall, O’Rielly’s renomination was withdrawn after he dared to give a talk in which he noted, accurately, that the 1st Amendment means that the government cannot regulate how private companies handle content moderation. Simington, in contrast to O’Rielly, has been at the center of various efforts to force social media companies to host speech they do not wish to host (a clear violation of the 1st Amendment, which does not allow for the government to compel speech).

Simington was the guy who apparently wrote the original executive order that kicked off the ridiculous (and still unconstitutional) FCC review process of Section 230. He also works at NTIA, which is run by Adam Candeub, a guy who has spent the last few years attacking (or misrepresenting) Section 230, after he filed a failed lawsuit against Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist. When the lawsuit was filed, Candeub appeared not to understand 230 when I engaged with him in an email exchange. Since then he’s spent the intervening years, trying to change 230 to match his false belief of what it should be.

So, perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that it’s now been revealed that Simington and Candeub appeared to spend some time over the summer trying to get Fox News’ bloviating talking heads to start attacking Section 230 as well, hoping that this would spur the FCC on towards action (again, which legally it cannot do) against the law.

Simington, a senior adviser in a key Commerce Department tech agency, wrote that the popular Fox News host could help sway the FCC to act on Trump’s proposal before Election Day. He also suggested that democracy hinged on the ability of the commission ? which has not traditionally regulated social media ? to target Silicon Valley companies.

The actual letter to a Fox News staffer, in which Simington notes that this is part of a scheme with Candeub (who is cc’d) is really stunning. Having a government official asking a media personality to assist the government in pushing through an unconstitutional attack on the 1st Amendment is staggering — and should immediately raise questions as to why either Simington or Candeub are part of the government. Simington flat out admits that he’s trying to force the FCC to take action to help support the President and others “down ballot” in the election.

That is not supposed to be how government officials act. Campaigning/electioneering efforts are not supposed to be done by current government staff who are paid by our taxpayer dollars. This is a hugely problematic stance, and should call into question both Simington and Candeub’s role in government. It certainly should preclude Simington from being considered for a position on the FCC itself.

As discussed, my boss, Dept. Ass’t Sec’y Adam Candeub (CC’d), is strategizing about how best to present the NTIA’s petition to the FCC re CDA 230. We hope that FCC rulemaking will uphold press and communication freedoms while restraining social media companies from behavior that, absent certain case law re CDA 230, would be illegal.

As you know, this is a hot issue right now, not merely per the President’s major social media executive order, but also (1) Senator Cruz’s recent actions re Twitter, coming out of his long-standing concerns about the partiality and bias emerging from social media’s de facto content creation via moderation, promotion and demotion, and (2) Senator Hawley’s new social media bill.

We therefore hope that there might be some way of engaging with Ms. Ingraham on our piece of this issue. Any additional support we might be able to obtain could help to get the FCC on board more quickly and thereby ensure a freer, fairer social media landscape going into the elections this fall. This is of concern both to the presidency and also down-ballot, and given the emerging role of social media as a replacement for mass media, our democracy will be weakened if we cannot respond to this issue quickly and effectively.

If you have some time tomorrow, I’d love to talk further about this, whether re engaging with Ms. Ingraham or generally for our own planning.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (a long term vocal critic of Section 230) seems to recognize how problematic this is:

?This email shows that Mr. Simington was an active and eager soldier in President Trump?s attempted assault on the First Amendment,” Blumenthal said in a statement to POLITICO. “Mr. Simington was willing to bully the very agency he?s been nominated to join in order to do the electoral bidding of the Republican party on the taxpayer dime.

“I am demanding that Mr. Simington explain himself in follow-up questions for the record, and I certainly hope he will be more forthcoming in his written responses than he was during his hearing,”

In any normal administration this would be a massive scandal, abusing the power of government to help a specific party/candidate. Remember all the (mostly exaggerated) fuss about the IRS paying extra attention to conservative non-profits? That was one of the biggest scandals of the Obama era, in part because it was government employees supposedly making decisions based on politics (even though the details showed it wasn’t quite that bad). This is worse. Here they are flat out admitting that they are trying to work with Fox News to use the levers of government to unconstitutionally change the law in order to help their preferred political party win in an election.

Filed Under: adam candeub, election, fcc, free speech, laura ingraham, michael o'rielly, nathan simington, ntia, politics, section 230
Companies: fox news

Trump Campaign Gets Laughed Out Of Court For Claiming A Bunch Of Unvetted Webform Submissions Is 'Evidence' Of Voter Fraud

from the who-needs-sworn-statements-when-you-have-a-CAPTCHA dept

The Trump Campaign is back in court, hoping to reclaim a presidency Donald Trump has lost. It spent plenty of time in court prior to the election, hoping to prevent as many people as possible from voting. Now, it’s doing the same thing, insisting (without evidence) there’s voter fraud everywhere.

Immediately following Election Day, the Trump campaign opened its own voter fraud hotlines. People who thought they observed voting fraud were encouraged to call the campaign or submit sworn statements via a handful of websites. Both offerings were immediately swamped by pranksters and other non-fans of Trump, tying up phone lines and filling the webform coffers with useless things like, say, the script from “Bee Movie.”

Undeterred by a lack of credible fraud accusations, the Trump campaign still attempted to submit some of its mostly unvetted webform garbage as “evidence” in its Arizona lawsuit. As Adam Klasfield reports, the judge wasn’t impressed by the campaign’s attempt to portray a bunch of statements from internet randos as something worth the court’s time and attention.

A Trump campaign attorney conceded in court on Thursday morning that he tried to enter hundreds of dodgy form-filed affidavits into evidence, even though their own investigation found that a subset of the sworn statements that they received were filled with lies and “spam.”

“This is concerning,” Judge Daniel Kiley, from Arizona’s Maricopa County, remarked with some understatement.

This wasn’t the only laughable assertion by Trump campaign attorney, Kory Langhofer. On the record and in front of a judge, Langhofer said the campaign was confident it had weeded out bot submissions because the site had a CAPTCHA.

Then he got even stupider by claiming the narratives the Trump campaign couldn’t immediately disprove must be truthful representations. Not being able to prove something is a lie isn’t the same thing as finding it to be true, the judge pointed out.

Judge Kiley replied that this did not show the remaining affidavits are trustworthy.

“That just shows you cannot disprove what’s asserted,” Kiley noted.

Then, despite entering the legal arena to dispute alleged fraud, the Trump attorney said it was unlikely anyone actually engaged in fraud.

“This is not a fraud case,” Langhofer said, casting the lawsuit instead as allegations of flaws within the voting system. “It is not a stealing-the-election case.”

It appears the Trump campaign’s lawyer isn’t getting the talking points memos. There have been wild, widespread accusations of voter fraud from both the outgoing president and many of his administration figureheads, which for some reason include his children and his children’s spouses.

The Trump campaign thinks a webform and a hotline that will coddle conspiracy theorists when not swamped by pranksters is going to help it win back an election. Good luck with that. But it will make for some great popcorn munching as the campaign and its attorneys continue to embarrass themselves in courtrooms around the nation until every last avenue for redress has been (in all senses of the word) exhausted.

Filed Under: donald trump, election, evidence, fraud hotline, trump campaign, voting, webform

Twitter Attempts To Add A Bit Of Friction In Run Up To The Election

from the interesting-experiment dept

Over the last few months, we’ve seen various internet sites (mainly Twitter and Facebook) experimenting, adjusting policies, and (well, to be honest) scrambling to put in place various policies to deal with the concerns many have about how their sites will be used for mis- and disinformation regarding the election. Most of this has been focused on questions about what content to remove, or what (and how) to “flag” certain content. Last week, Twitter announced some bigger plans to adjust some elements of how the site works at least through the election. It’s an interesting experiment, and it will be worth following to see how effective the changes are.

It’s ramping up its limitations on sharing content that Twitter deems to be “misleading.” This is the content that, as of a few months ago, Twitter is appending a bit more information to, and (sometimes) limiting the ability to reply or retweet. Twitter is now going even further on those tweets, but still short of removing them entirely.

In addition to these prompts, we will now add additional warnings and restrictions on Tweets with a misleading information label from US political figures (including candidates and campaign accounts), US-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers, or that obtain significant engagement. People must tap through a warning to see these Tweets, and then will only be able to Quote Tweet; likes, Retweets and replies will be turned off, and these Tweets won?t be algorithmically recommended by Twitter. We expect this will further reduce the visibility of misleading information, and will encourage people to reconsider if they want to amplify these Tweets.

Twitter recently started popping up a message to some users if you try to retweet a link to a news article without clicking through — in effect urging you to click and read the article before you actually retweet it. I’ve seen this idea discussed in the past, and while it adds a bit of friction on retweeting, I doubt it will be particularly effective. Often when I’ve seen it, it’s been on articles I’ve already read, so the warning is more of a nuisance than anything else, and I’m guessing most people will just click through without hesitating. However, with the new change the company is going even further, encouraging people to add their own commentary:

First, we will encourage people to add their own commentary prior to amplifying content by prompting them to Quote Tweet instead of Retweet. People who go to Retweet will be brought to the Quote Tweet composer where they?ll be encouraged to comment before sending their Tweet. Though this adds some extra friction for those who simply want to Retweet, we hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a Tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts, reactions and perspectives to the conversation. If people don?t add anything on the Quote Tweet composer, it will still appear as a Retweet.

That is going to be very interesting. I have a personal mental model on which things I just retweet and which I add commentary too, and I wonder for me, personally, whether these prompts will change my behavior. I do think that there is some value in encouraging people to add their thoughts, though who the hell knows how it will work in practice. Still, at the very least it strikes me as (again) a free speech supportive change — encouraging more commentary, rather than focusing on taking down content.

Second, we will prevent ?liked by? and ?followed by? recommendations from people you don?t follow from showing up in your timeline and won?t send notifications for these Tweets. These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see relevant conversations from outside of their network, but we are removing them because we don?t believe the ?Like? button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amplifying Tweets to people who don?t follow the author of the Tweet, or the relevant topic that the Tweet is about. This will likely slow down how quickly Tweets from accounts and topics you don?t follow can reach you, which we believe is a worthwhile sacrifice to encourage more thoughtful and explicit amplification.

Again the focus here is on friction — though this “feature” (showing tweets liked by people loosely connected to you) has always been somewhat controversial — especially given that people use “like” to mean very different things. I was among those who thought that Twitter never should have been showing this content in the first place, but having seen a fair amount of it in my feed, will admit that it has been more relevant and interesting than I had expected. I don’t know how much friction this will actually add, nor how significant it will be, but it’s noteworthy that Twitter decided to at least temporarily kill this particular feature after people had been complaining about it for a while.

Finally, we will only surface Trends in the ?For You? tab in the United States that include additional context. That means there will be a description Tweet or article that represents or summarizes why that term is trending. We?ve been adding more context to Trends during the last few months, but this change will ensure that only Trends with added context show up in the ?For You? tab in the United States, which is where the vast majority of people discover what?s trending. This will help people more quickly gain an informed understanding of the high volume public conversation in the US and also help reduce the potential for misleading information to spread.

This is also a good move — and I’ve definitely been seeing more of this over the last few weeks on Twitter. Many have argued that Twitter should do away with the trends feature altogether, as it’s usually hot garbage, and frequently gamed. However, a version that has more context could potentially work better. I’m skeptical, but will be watching it.

Twitter also says that it will not allow anyone to claim victory in an election unless a major news organization has called the election. I’m not sure how they will be able to make this work in practice:

People on Twitter, including candidates for office, may not claim an election win before it is authoritatively called. To determine the results of an election in the US, we require either an announcement from state election officials, or a public projection from at least two authoritative, national news outlets that make independent election calls. Tweets which include premature claims will be labeled and direct people to our official US election page

Unless they pre-review tweets from candidates, I don’t see how that will work. Indeed, Wired suggested that Twitter should have gone one step further and put Trump’s tweets on a time delay to review them before letting them go through:

Why not put Donald Trump?s tweets and his Facebook posts, as well as those of other political elites, on a time delay? (See here for a smart and similar earlier proposal focused on how a delay might strengthen national security.) Twitter and Facebook have extensive and well-documented content rules that prohibit everything from electoral to health disinformation. The platforms have singled out these categories of content in particular because they have significant likelihood of causing real world harm, from voter suppression to undermining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?s public health guidelines. The FBI found that the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was, in part, organized in a Facebook group.

To date, the enforcement of these policies has been spotty at best. Twitter has labeled some of the president?s tweets as ?potentially misleading? to readers about mail-in ballots. The platform hid a Trump tweet stating ?when the looting starts, the shooting starts? for ?glorifying violence,? and it recently hid another tweet equating Covid-19 to the flu, claiming that the president was ?spreading misleading and potentially harmful information? when he wrote that ?we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” Facebook has taken similar actions, providing links to reliable voter and health information and removing posts that it deems violate its policies.

But these actions often take hours to put in place while this content racks up thousands of engagements and shares. In those hours, as recent research from Harvard shows, Trump is a one-man source of disinformation that travels quickly and broadly across Twitter and Facebook. And we know that the mainstream media often picks up on and amplifies Trump?s posts before platforms moderate them. Journalists report on platforms? treatments of Trump?s tweets, making that and them the story, and giving life to false claims.

I shudder to think about the ways in which some would argue this removes Section 230 for such content (even though there are cases ruling that pre-reviewing content doesn’t take away 230). However, it does seem like a potentially interesting move as well.

All in all, Twitter did seem to focus not on holding back speech, but on putting in a little friction, in an attempt to at least slow down the possibility for misinformation and disinformation to spread. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s at least a more thoughtful approach than the way that many just call for more aggressive pulling down of information. Still, I find the Trump campaign’s response to these changes quite telling:

Yet according to Samantha Zager, deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, Twitter?s changes are ?extremely dangerous for our democracy? by ?attempting to influence this election in favor of their preferred ticket by silencing the President and his supporters.?

Except that the changes do no such thing. The only thing it does is seek to slow down the pace at which you could spread mis- and disinformation. So, unless the Trump campaign is flat out admitting that it needs mis- and disinformation to win its campaign, then that statement is bizarre. But, of course, that does seem to be the stance of Trumpworld these days. It needs misinformation to win. That it’s so quick to admit that, though, should still be somewhat shocking.

Filed Under: content moderation, disinformation, election, friction
Companies: twitter