Pornhub has begun blocking visitors from Texas, where the authorities are attempting to enforce a new law requiring web porn platforms to check viewer ages. The company called the law "ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous."
Since Pornhub pulled out, Texans have greatly increased Google searches for tools to mask the geographic location of their devices.
We've been here before—with age-check laws, attempts to get around them, and porn platforms cutting off access. In fact, Texas is the seventh state that adult content platforms run by the Canadian company Aylo (formerly MindGeek) have left over age verification requirements. As a result, residents of Texas and six other states are blocked from visiting such popular sites as Pornhub, Redtube, and YouPorn.
There may be a better way forward when it comes to thwarting minors' access to porn while still protecting adult privacy and free expression. But it's also more complicated—and less likely to indiscriminately punish porn platforms, producers, and performers. Unsurprisingly, politicians don't seem interested.
Pornhub went dark in Texas last Thursday, following a late-February lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Ken Paxton against Aylo. Paxton has accused the company of failing to follow the state's age verification law, which requires adult-content websites to make sure viewers are at least 18 years old. A federal court has called the new Texas law unconstitutional. But the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals then gave the state a green light to start enforcing it—hence Paxton's lawsuit.
"As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website," reads a message on Pornhub that now greets visitors from Texas. "Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.
"While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk," the statement continues. "Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible. As we've seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply."
Pornhub makes a good point, and one that prohibitionists of all sorts are wont to ignore. Banning (or putting up major barriers to) products that people want doesn't stop people from wanting and accessing those products. It simply bars people from accessing them in the safest and most transparent way possible. And this is especially true where the internet is concerned, since the internet is a global and not easily constrained phenomenon.
There will always be websites willing to provide porn without carding viewers. These platforms are also less likely to take other steps to stay within regulatory or creator-protective limits. By driving viewers away from platforms like Pornhub—sites that engage in at least some content moderation, are relatively receptive and responsive to authorities, and are willing to forge mutually beneficial partnerships with porn creators—age verification laws could actually increase viewership of exploitative or otherwise undesirable content.
"The Texas law for age verification [won't] actually protect children," suggested Pornhub. "But it will…reduce content creators' ability to post and distribute legal adult content and directly impact their ability to share the artistic messages they want to convey with it."
"Searches by Texas users for the term 'VPN' jumped more than fourfold" after Pornhub blocked access to Texans, Variety reports.
VPN stands for virtual private network, a tool used to mask the geographic location of internet users. Using a VPN, a resident of Texas could access Pornhub content by appearing to be located in some state where Pornhub is not blocked.
We've seen similar spikes in interest in VPNs in other states where Pornhub has blocked users.
States where Pornhub (and sister sites, such as Redtube and YouPorn) are now blocked include Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Each of these states recently enacted an age verification requirement for adult content websites. Last March, Utah became the second state to enact such a law, and the first to find residents blocked by Pornhub. The Arkansas, Virginia, and Mississippi laws—and Pornhub blocks—started last summer. The North Carolina and Montana laws took effect this past January, with Pornhub blocking access shortly before that.
Louisiana was the first state to enact a law requiring web porn platforms to verify visitor ages. Yet Pornhub has not blocked visitors from Louisiana. Why?
The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
Using this service does not require people to turn over their real identities to porn sites. "Through LA Wallet's [Anonymous Remote Age Verification] capabilities, adult content sites can anonymously verify the age of users," its website states.
This system isn't perfect, but it is less invasive than the alternative—closer to a convenience store clerk glancing at someone's ID than to creating a gigantic porn viewer database linked to real identities. This makes it more attractive to people visiting porn platforms and to the platforms themselves.
Louisiana's law may still pose privacy risks and infringe on free speech. But at least Louisiana attempted to mitigate these issues, unlike the other states that have passed age verification laws. It took the time to develop a system that allows adult content sites to anonymously verify users, instead of just telling tech and content companies to work it out themselves, user privacy be damned.
It's pretty clear that the days of open-access digital platforms are receding. Online age verification proposals—not just for porn but for social media—are sweeping the country. Last year, age-check laws aimed at adult content were introduced in at least 11 states. And so far this year, at least seven states (Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma) have seen proposals put forth to card visitors to online porn platforms.
The Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group, has challenged some of these laws in court, as have some porn platforms.
But Aylo—which was acquired by Ethical Capital Partners last year—has another idea as well. It wants to see age restrictions implemented at the device level.
"We believe that the real solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users' ages at the point of access—the users' devices—and to deny or permit access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification," Alex Kekesi, Aylo's vice president of brand and community, explained in an emailed statement. (He also said "this is not the end" of the Pornhub battle in Texas and that the company is "reviewing options and consulting with our legal team.")
Device-based verification could work in different ways, but the basic advantage is that it can keep internet porn away from kids without implicating adult user privacy.
In a device-based system, parents could make sure their minor kids' devices were specially equipped with a mechanism to alert websites that person using it is under 18. This device-based trigger—which could work equally well on porn, social media, or other platforms where people might want to proactively restrict access for kids—could accomplish the goal of restricting access to some group of users without requiring every user to forgo anonymity.
There's also a more expansive way of doing device-based verification, which would require anyone using a smartphone or computer device to verify their age with the device provider (as opposed to making it an opt-in thing). This option would obviously be more of a burden on adult user privacy, and therefore is more objectionable. Jonah Aragon lays out an array of potential problems with this approach here.
Either way—kids-only or more expansive—"such an approach requires the cooperation of manufacturers and operating-system providers," noted Pornhub in the statement now visible to Texas visitors.
I think this helps explain why we see less of a push for device-level verification. Computer and smartphone companies have more political clout than porn companies; it's much easier for politicians to make special demands of the latter than the former.
Add the facts that 1) politicians are lazy and 2) at least some of them want to reduce porn viewership more broadly and not just for minors, and it's not hard to imagine why politicians have been focused on making porn companies card users rather than pushing for device-based solutions.
For what it's worth, a voluntary, device-based technical solution isn't just better from a civil liberties standpoint; it may also be better at restricting access for kids.
The initial ruling against Texas' age verification law, "noted that Texas' own studies tended to show that content filtering and parental controls would be more effective, and better tailored, than age verification," First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn pointed out last year. And while some people suggest that these voluntary parental control measures don't cut it because parents are too dumb or careless to use them, "that does not allow the government to sidestep them as a less restrictive means," Cohn noted.
The post Pornhub Pulls Out of Seventh State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Once again, we're debating about "platforming Nazis," following the publication of an article in The Atlantic titled "Substack Has a Nazi Problem" and a campaign by some Substack writers to see some offensive accounts given the boot. And once again, the side calling for more content suppression is short-sighted and wrong.
This is far from the first time we've been here. It seems every big social media platform has been pressured to ban bigoted or otherwise offensive accounts. And Substack—everyone's favorite platform for pretending like it's 2005 and we're all bloggers again—has already come under fire multiple times for its moderation policies (or lack thereof).
Substack differs from blogging systems of yore in some key ways: It's set up primarily for emailed content (largely newsletters but also podcasts and videos), it has paid some writers directly at times, and it provides an easy way for any creator to monetize content by soliciting fees directly from their audience rather than running ads. But it's similar to predecessors like WordPress and Blogger in some key ways, also—and more similar to such platforms than to social media sites such as Instagram or X (formerly Twitter). For instance, unlike on algorithm-driven social media platforms, Substack readers opt into receiving posts from specific creators, are guaranteed to get emailed those posts, and will not receive random content to which they didn't subscribe.
Substack is also similar to old-school blogging platforms in that it's less heavy-handed with moderation. On the likes of Facebook, X, and other social media platforms, there are tons of rules about what kinds of things you are and aren't allowed to post and elaborate systems for reporting and moderating possibly verboten content.
Substack has some rules, but they're pretty broad—nothing illegal, no inciting violence, no plagiarism, no spam, and no porn (nonpornographic nudity is OK, however).
Substack's somewhat more laissez faire attitude toward moderation irks people who think every tech company should be in the business of deciding which viewpoints are worth hearing, which businesses should exist, and which groups should be allowed to speak online. To this censorial crew, tech companies shouldn't be neutral providers of services like web hosting, newsletter management, or payment processing. Rather, they must evaluate the moral worth of every single customer or user and deny services to those found lacking.
Uh, pretty easy just not to do business with Nazis, some might say. Which is actually… not true. At least not in 2023. Because while the term "Nazi" might have a fixed historical meaning, it's bandied about pretty broadly these days. It gets used to describe people who (thankfully) aren't actually antisemitic or advocating for any sort of ethnic cleansing. Donald Trump and his supporters get called Nazis. The folks at Planned Parenthood get called Nazis. People who don't support Israel get called Nazis. All sorts of people get called Nazis for all sorts of reasons. Are tech companies supposed to bar all these people? And how much time should they put into investigating whether people are actual Nazis or just, like, Nazis by hyperbole? In the end, "not doing business with Nazis" would require a significant time investment and a lot of subjective judgment calls.
Uh, pretty easy just not to do business with people who might be mistaken for Nazis, some might counter. Perhaps. In theory. But in practice, we again run into the fact that the term is ridiculously overused. In practice, it would be more like "not doing business with anyone who anyone describes as a Nazi"—a much wider group—or devoting a lot of the business to content moderation.
OK, but you can have toxic views even if you're not literally a Nazi. Of course. But you have to admit that what we're talking about now is no longer "doing business with Nazis." It's about doing business with anyone who holds bigoted views, offensive views, views that aren't progressive, etc. That's a much, much wider pool of people, requiring many more borderline judgment calls.
This doesn't stop at Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent, and those with genuinely horrific ideas. Again, we're going to run into the fact that sometimes people stating relatively commonplace viewpoints—that we need to deport more immigrants, for example, or that Israel shouldn't exist, or that sex-selective abortions should be allowed, or whatever—are going to get looped in. Even if you abhor these viewpoints, they hardly seem like the kind of thing that shouldn't be allowed to exist on popular platforms.
Maybe you disagree with me here. Maybe you think anyone with even remotely bad opinions (as judged by you) should be banned. That's an all too common position, frankly.
In Substack's case, some of the "Nazis" in question really may be—or at least revere—actual Nazis. "At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics," Jonathan M. Katz wrote in The Atlantic last month.
But you needn't have sympathy for Nazis and other bigots to find restricting speech bad policy.
Here's the thing: Once you start saying tech companies must make judgment calls based not just on countering illegal content but also on countering Bad Content, it opens the door to wanna-be censors of all sorts. Just look at how every time a social media platform expands its content moderation purview, a lot of the same folks who pushed for it—or at least those on the same side as those who pushed for it—wind up caught in its dragnet. Anything related to sex work will be one of the first targets, followed quickly by LGBT issues. Probably also anyone with not-so-nice opinions of cops. Those advocating ways around abortion bans. And so on. It's been all too easy for the enemies of equality, social justice, and criminal justice reform to frame all of these things as harmful or dangerous. And once a tech company has caved to being the safety and morality arbiter generally, it's a lot easier for them to get involved again and again for lighter and lighter reasons.
Here's the other thing: Nazis don't magically become not-Nazis just because their content gets restricted or they get kicked off a particular platform. They simply congregate in private messaging groups or more remote corners of the internet instead. This makes it more difficult to keep tabs on them and to counter them. Getting kicked off platform after platform can also embolden those espousing these ideologies and their supporters, lending credence to their mythologies about being brave and persecuted truth-tellers and perhaps strengthening affinity among those otherwise loosely engaged.
There's also the "Streisand effect" (so named after Barbra Streisand's attempt to suppress a picture of the cliffside outside her house only drew enormous attention to a picture that would otherwise have been little seen). The fact that Nazi accounts may exist on Substack doesn't mean many people are reading them, nor does it mean that non-Nazis are being exposed to them. You know what is exposing us—and, alas, perhaps some sympathetic types, too—to these newsletters? The Atlantic article and the Substackers Against Nazis group continuing to draw attention to these accounts.
In their open letter, Substackers Against Nazis don't explicitly call for any particular accounts to be banned. They're just "asking a very simple question…:Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis?" But the implication of the letter is that Substack should change its policy or the writers in question will walk. "This issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers," the letter reads. "Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be."
Substack executives haven't publicly responded to critics this time. But they have laid out their moderation vision before, and it's commendable.
"In most cases, we don't think that censoring content is helpful, and in fact it often backfires," Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi wrote in 2020, in response to calls for them to exclude relatively mainstream but nonprogressive voices. "Heavy-handed censorship can draw more attention to content than it otherwise would have enjoyed, and at the same time it can give the content creators a martyr complex that they can trade off for future gain." They go on to reject those who would have Substack moderators serve as "moral police" and suggest that those who want "Substack but with more controls on speech" migrate to such a platform.
"There will always be many writers on Substack with whom we strongly disagree, and we will err on the side of respecting their right to express themselves, and readers' right to decide for themselves what to read," they wrote.
If the accounts Katz identified are making "credible threats of physical harm," then they are in violation of Substack's terms of service. If they're merely spouting racist nonsense, then folks are free to ignore them, condemn them, or counter their words with their own. And they're certainly free to stop writing on or reading Substack.
But if Substack's past comments are any indication, the company won't ban people for racist nonsense alone.
Plenty of (non-Nazi) Substack writers support this stance. "Substack shouldn't decide what we read," asserts Elle Griffin. "We should." Griffin opposes the coalition aiming to make Substack "act more like other social media platforms." Her post was co-signed by dozens of Substackers (and a whole lot more signed on after publication), including Edward Snowden, Richard Dawkins, Bari Weiss, Greg Lukianoff, Bridget Phetasy, Freddie deBoer, Meghan Daum, and Michael Moynihan.
"I, and the writers who have signed this post, are among those who hope Substack will not change its stance on freedom of expression, even against pressure to do so," writes Griffin.
Their letter brings up another reason to oppose this pressure: It doesn't work to accomplish its ostensible goal. It just ends up an endless game of Whac-A-Mole that simultaneously doesn't rid a platform of noxious voices while leading to the deplatforming of other content based on private and political agendas.
They also note that it's extremely difficult to encounter extremist content on Substack if you don't go looking for it:
The author of the recent Atlantic piece gave one way: actively go searching for it. He admits to finding "white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters" by conducting a "search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels." But this only proves my point: If you want to find hate content on Substack, you have to go hunting for it on extremist third-party chat channels, because unlike other social media platforms, on Substack it won't just show up in your feed.
And they point out that (as on blogs of yore) individual creators can moderate content as they see fit on their own accounts. So a newsletter writer can choose to allow or not to allow comments, can set their own commenting policies, and can delete comments at their own discretion. Some can opt to be safe spaces, some can opt to be free-for-alls, and some for a stance in between.
I'm with Griffin and company here. Substack has nothing to gain from going the way of Facebook, X, et al.—and the colossal drama those platforms have spawned and the mess they've become proves it. Substack is right to keep ignoring both the Nazis and those calling to kick them out.
The post Substackers Battle Over Banning Nazis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's been ample cheering over the internet intermediary company Cloudflare canceling services to the controversial 8chan heir Kiwi Farms. If history is any indication, however, Cloudflare's decision will do little to stop online hate and harassment. Meanwhile, it moves us yet another step further from the sort of neutrality that's typically guided internet infrastructure companies (that is, things like web hosting, cybersecurity, and newsletter services). And the further we stray from this neutrality, the worse the consequences for all sorts of online speech and organizing.
Cloudflare is a private business, and perfectly free to drop services to any entity it likes. But whether it should—and whether it made the right call with Kiwi Farms—is up for debate.
The Backstory
Until recently, Cloudflare—a popular provider of all sorts of back-end services that keep websites running smoothly—provided security services for Kiwi Farms, an internet forum that The Guardian calls "the worst place on the web." In effect, Cloudflare helped Kiwi Farms avoid the kind of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that could take the platform down.
Kiwi Farms was founded by a former 8chan administrator and known as a space for people to plot organized harassment campaigns against disfavored groups or individuals. Recently, "farmers" targeted Canadian activist and Twitch streamer Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti. They coordinated takedown requests for her Twitch account, doxxed her, and conspired to get a SWAT team sent to her house, among other dastardly things.
In response, Sorrenti—who was arrested after someone called police pretending to be her and threatening violence—led a campaign to get Cloudflare to stop servicing Kiwi Farms.
Initially, Cloudflare resisted. Its founder and CEO Matthew Prince—who has described himself as "almost a free-speech absolutist"—and Head of Public Policy Alissa Starzak wrote an August 31 blog post explaining Cloudflare's content moderation policies and why they believe "that voluntarily terminating access to services that protect against cyberattack is not the correct approach."
"Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline," noted Prince and Starzak. "That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities."
Playing Whack-a-Mole
Cloudflare hasn't always acted in accordance with its professed principle against terminating services. In 2017, it canceled the account of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. And in 2019, it canceled services for the fringe-right forum 8chan.
The Daily Stormer popped back up elsewhere. So did 8chan. Which brings us to an uncomfortable truth about the global internet era.
"If the new 8chan met the fate of the old 8chan, what's to stop a new Kiwi Farms from cropping up in short order?" as Freddie deBoer put it. "It turns out that extremism isn't so easily stamped out in a digitally connected world; you can kill a site, maybe, but until you kill the human attitudes that such a site reveals, you have never actually solved the problem."
In other words, the problem isn't the expression of extremist views, it's the extremist views. Cutting out one digital avenue for offensive speech or organized harassment does nothing about the underlying sentiments, and may only harden people in their extremist viewpoints. Feeling marginalized and attacked is powerful at building community and solidarity. (See, e.g., former President Donald Trump.)
To their credit, Cloudflare executives seem to recognize this, as well as the danger in starting to choose customers based on those customers' viewpoints.
Is Cloudflare Like a Phone Company?
After terminating services for 8chan and the Daily Stormer, "we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us," write Prince and Starzak in their August 31 blog post.
These past experiences led Cloudflare executives to conclude "that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold," write Prince and Starzak. "Not because the content of those sites wasn't abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities."
"Just as the telephone company doesn't terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy," they added.
This seems like a prudent policy and the one most protective of speech broadly—including, yes, neo-Nazi and troll speech but also all the speech that most people would recognize as desirable and even vital.
(Notably, Prince and Starzak write that they will "terminate security services for content which is illegal in the United States," including "content subject to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). But, otherwise, we believe that cyberattacks are something that everyone should be free of." FOSTA said Section 230 doesn't apply where prostitution is involved. What a crazy world we live in where platforms promoting consensual adult sex work are essentially barred by law from being protected from cyberattacks…)
Kiwi Farms: An 'Immediate Threat to Human Life"?
But does Kiwi Farms present an exceptional case? Cloudflare's CEO seems to think so.
On September 3, Cloudflare decided to terminate service to Kiwi Farm. "We have blocked Kiwifarms. Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post," wrote Prince in another blog post.
It does not seem to be a decision that the company took lightly. "This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with," Prince wrote. "However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before."
Prince insisted that it wasn't merely "revolting content" that had prompted the company to act and that the decision did not come in response to the pressure campaign led by Sorrenti.
"While we believe that in every other situation we have faced — including the Daily Stormer and 8chan — it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process, in this case the imminent and emergency threat to human life which continues to escalate causes us to take this action," wrote Prince.
"Hard cases make bad law," he added. "This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent."
Setting a Precedent?
It's reassuring to see Cloudflare take seriously the larger implications of cutting off service to Kiwi Farms and to see its CEO say this is not some new norm for the company. But even if Prince doesn't want or intend for it to be precedent-setting, that may not be something in his control.
Each time an internet infrastructure company does this, the easier it is for that company and others like it to justify doing likewise in the future. (Already, the Internet Archive has disappeared Kiwi Farms from its archives.) And the easier it is for people angry at any platform's existence to demand these companies do so.
Cloudflare and other private actors are well within their rights to terminate services to web platforms they find offensive. It isn't illegal "censorship," a First Amendment violation, or an antitrust violation (all claims that tend to get made whenever a tech company gives a controversial figure or entity the boot). Nor is it a situation in which Cloudflare is running afoul of Section 230.
When Cloudflare canceled services to 8chan, my colleague Scott Shackford wrote that "refusing to associate itself with a site that hosts messages it finds offensive isn't much different from a baker or T-shirt maker refusing customers that ask them to make cakes or shirts that contain messages that they dislike." Offensive sites may find others to host and service them, just as people may go elsewhere for cakes and T-shirts. But "the point here," writes Shackford, "is that every company whose business model operates on the transmission of messages has the ability to decide what its limits are—if any."
That's not wrong. One one level, Cloudflare's decision is a sign that free markets and free association are thriving. But it also brings up more fundamental questions about how a company like Cloudflare should operate.
Is it more like a cake shop, or is it more like a phone company?
Mandating that it act like a phone company would be deeply problematic. But an internet in which infrastructure companies choose to operate more like the phone company is certainly a less risky one for free speech and political organizing broadly. Once we start holding companies like Cloudflare responsible for the content of every single site it services, that path seems unlikely to end at the worst sites on the internet.
The post Cloudflare Can Cancel Service to Terrible Websites Like Kiwi Farms. But Should It? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Scott Alexander is the pseudonymous proprietor of Slate Star Codex, a science and history blog well-liked by many libertarians and neoliberals. On Monday, he took the drastic step of deleting the blog after a New York Times reporter threatened to reveal his name in a forthcoming article.
"I'm not sure what happens next," wrote Alexander in his last and currently only blog post. "In my ideal world, the New York Times realizes they screwed up, promises not to use my real name in the article, and promises to rethink their strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks."
In an interview with Reason, Alexander explained he had recently learned that a New York Times tech reporter was working on a story about Slate Star Codex. The reporter had contacted several of Alexander's friends, as well as a former girlfriend. Eventually, the Times reached out to Alexander, who agreed to speak about his blog off the record. He also asked the reporter not to divulge his real name in the article, but this request was rejected.
"We had a discussion about why I wanted my real name out of the story, where I said most of the same things I said in the public post," Alexander tells Reason. "He seemed understanding but said his editor absolutely prohibited him from writing it without my name, and he thought the story was important enough that he didn't want to drop it."
The Times declined to comment to Reason, though a spokesperson stressed that "when we report on newsworthy or influential figures, our goal is always to give readers all the accurate and relevant information we can."
This is an unfortunate series of events. Alexander has penned a lot of really great pieces on a wide range of subjects: on Marxism's failings as a science, on the English settlement of the Americas, and on bureaucratic barriers to scientific research, to name just a few. (I would link to them here, but they've all disappeared for the moment.) Indeed, according to several of the people the Times had interviewed, the story was probably going to be a fairly positive one that celebrated Alexander's prescience on some COVID-19 related topics. We don't know for sure since the article isn't available yet. Alexander is hoping that his deletion of the blog will cause the Times reporter to decline to publish, or to publish without revealing Alexander's real name to the world—a practice that has come to be called "doxxing," at least when done by internet trolls.
Of course, if publishing information about a person without their permission is always "doxxing," then the craft of journalism is one nonstop doxxing party. News stories at The New York Times, Reason, and virtually every other publication of some importance frequently contain details that the subjects themselves would have preferred to be omitted. It can hardly be called "doxxing" to reveal that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is a millionaire who owns three homes, for example.
Doxxing, then, should probably be defined in a more limited way—perhaps as the act of revealing private or personal information about a private or semi-private subject, in a situation where it isn't warranted. But under this definition, it's still hard to see what was about to happen to Alexander as anything other than doxxing.
To underscore how important his anonymity is to him, Alexander titled his farewell post, "NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog." Alexander's reasons for wanting to remain anonymous are twofold: For one, as a person who has staked out well-founded but occasionally controversial positions on hot-button issues—race and IQ science for instance—and courted a passionate base of fans and critics, he has previously received death threats. He does not wish to make it any easier for people to find him.
While I'm largely sympathetic to Alexander's plight, I think it's a bit of an over-dramatization for him to assert that his safety would be seriously undermined by his unmasking. People who are prominent on the internet receive occasional death threats: It's upsetting when it happens, and no one deserves it, but the threats are almost never carried out. By making the matter primarily one of safety, Alexander is essentially mimicking progressive activists who treat discomfort and disagreement as a kind of physical harm. Since I routinely criticize them for this, I would be remiss if I didn't ding Alexander on similar grounds.
But Alexander's other objection to having his name published is quite reasonable: He's a psychiatrist, and in order for him to do his work it's important for his patients not to know all that much about him personally, or about his opinions. And given the cultural moment we are currently living through—involving widespread cancellations or even firings of anyone deemed guilty of problematic or offensive behavior, no matter how trivial, long ago, or ridiculous—Alexander's concern that his employer might decide someone with a national commentary presence is more trouble than they are worth is understandable.
These objections might not be strong enough to derail a critical news story that hinged on Alexander's identity, or one in which the burden of leaving him unnamed was outweighed by some other factor. If Alexander did something that was notable or significant—other than just being a guy with a good blog—a reporter would have to consider naming him. But, by all accounts, the Times story was a puff piece about how great Slate Star Codex was. If that's true, it seems fairly inadvisable to move forward with it despite the subject's vehement objection.
In fact, the Times has made such accommodations in the past. A recent Times profile of the socialist podcasters Chapo Trap House identified one of the members using only his pseudonym, Virgil Texas. (The piece gave one of the podcaster's girlfriends a pseudonym as well.) Neither Texas nor Alexander are truly anonymous: Amateur internet sleuths can uncover their identities fairly quickly. Alexander concedes this point but thinks there's a difference between being relatively (though not completely) anonymous and being named in a New York Times piece. In any case, the fact that the real name was already out there on the internet apparently did not deter the Times from protecting Texas.
Some will no doubt describe this double standard as an example of political bias, but it's probably better described as garden-variety sloppiness. It seems more likely that the Times does not have consistent standards here, and editors alternate between fostering over-reliance on anonymous sources and forbidding the practice.
A 2017 Times piece from the standards editor notes that many stories "present tough decisions—reporting about children, for instance, or people worried about their safety, or others who may be naive about the impact publicity could have on them" and "since no set of guidelines can cover every situation, the best we can do is to try to balance those questions of fairness and privacy with our chief goal: to tell readers what we know." If that's the policy—and if the piece doesn't contain a bombshell that necessitates the use of his name—it's hard to understand why Virgil Texas's request for anonymity is granted but Scott Alexander's is refused.
The post <em>The New York Times</em>'s Inconsistent Standards Drove Slate Star Codex To Self-Cancel appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We were once told that nothing could replace sitting down with a teacher, the camaraderie of an office, a face-to-face business deal, or seeing a movie in the theater.
But when the grim COVID-19 pandemic is finally defeated, the question we'll be asking ourselves isn't Why would you want to do that online? but Why would you want to do that in real life?
For decades, the shimmering potential of what used to be called cyberspace gathered dust in the corner of our living rooms, like a fancy, expensive piece of exercise equipment used for draping laundry.
In 1990's Life After Television, George Gilder gazed upon networked machines he called "telecomputers" and dreamed of a world in which political and corporate hierarchies were smashed by user-generated "hetarchies." The founders of Wired promised a peaceful "Digital Revolution" that would whip "through our lives like a Bengali typhoon."
The new coronavirus has done what 30 years of internet manifestoes never accomplished: a mass migration into our screens. We aren't being quarantined in our homes so much as being frog-marched into a virtual fallout shelter. The silver lining is that we may finally realize that life is mostly better in the cloud, where it's possible to learn faster, work better, and generally get what you really want, delivered directly to your door and for less money.
Ironically, living online gives us more free time in our actual flesh-and-blood lives. The typical round-trip commute is about an hour. Yet just 3.6 percent of America's labor force "currently work[s] at home half-time or more." More than 50 percent of all employees have a job that could at least partly be done remotely and 80 percent say they want to work from home at least part of the time. Now is their chance.
Doctors' appointments that last just a few minutes can take weeks to schedule and blow apart entire days. Telemedicine accounted for less than 1 percent of insurance claims before the pandemic. Now, Medicare is covering video and phone appointments. And hospitals are monitoring COVID-19 patients remotely at homes, providing more comfort and reducing the risk of contagion.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer than 6 percent of public K-12 schools offered a majority of their courses online and just 13 percent of undergraduates got their bachelor's degrees through the internet. Now the whole country is experiencing the flexibility and offerings available through distance learning, and it seems likely that the future of higher education will more seriously blend online and in-class instruction.
Many people will head out to multiplexes and sports arenas once they reopen, but fewer than ever before. Even before this time of self-isolation, studios had already been stepping up the simultaneous release in meatspace and on-demand video. Netflix now allows users to watch the same show remotely with friends, creating a communal experience instead of a solitary one.
Amazon is hiring an additional 100,000 workers to meet demand for deliveries of its standard fare and for groceries too, as online retailing explodes. Many will come to see their weekly shopping as the definition of 21st century drudge work, the equivalent of beating carpets or hand washing clothes.
For all the talk about Americans moving back to traditional, densely populated cities, suburbs were already making a "comeback," according Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey. Suburban and small-town living will become even more attractive as goods and cultural offerings become increasingly dispersed via the internet.
This new, accelerated digital revolution won't be lonely or isolating.When it comes to school, work, and socializing, we will all get to set our own hours and preferences more than ever before, and we'll have more time left over to hang out with friends and family.
Virtual and augmented reality gear, faster connection speeds, and the ability to interact with more and different people will give us more points of contact than ever before.
Cyberspace, the "new home of Mind," declared independence from the industrial world decades ago, and had been slowly filling up with new arrivals like the New World did after the first contact with Old Europe. The great migration has finally begun, not out of choice but out of necessity. That irony aside, the future awaits us all in whatever terms we choose.
Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie. Motion graphics by Lex Villena.
Photo credits: ID 54732254 © Fernando Gregory | Dreamstime.com, ID 140948893 © Viktor Gladkov | Dreamstime.com, ID 172245631 © thanakorn hormniam | Dreamstime.com, ID 8336313 © Matt Antonino | Dreamstime.com, Cortland 256k Model by MJGOODWINART, ID 54989358 © Tsung-lin Wu | Dreamstime.com, ID 141480540 © Ovydyborets | Dreamstime.com, ID 132925232 © Syda Productions | Dreamstime.com, Tim Evanson "Doctor's Office", ID 13537936 © Andreus | Dreamstime.com, ID 295711 © Daniela Spyropoulou | Dreamstime.com, Jonathan Lang "People Walking", Marcin Wichary by Tatung Einstein computer, ID 172097620 © Muhammad Annurmal | Dreamstime.com
The post How Coronavirus Is Kickstarting the 21st Century appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Baude and Chilton have different methodological and ideological perspectives, so it's very interesting to see their differing takes on various issues, such as Restatements (Baude, Chilton), law school rankings (Chilton, Baude), and the Federalist Society (Baude, Chilton, Baude).
Check it out.
The post Summary, Judgment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The open secret of Supreme Court advocacy in a digital era is that there is a new way to argue to the Justices. Today's Supreme Court arguments are developed online: They are dissected and explored in blog posts, fleshed out in popular podcasts, and analyzed and re-analyzed by experts who do not represent parties or have even filed a brief in the case at all. This "virtual briefing" (as we call it) is intended to influence the Justices and their law clerks but exists completely outside of traditional briefing rules. This article describes virtual briefing and makes a case that the key players inside the Court are listening. In particular, we show that the Twitter patterns of law clerks indicate they are paying close attention to producers of virtual briefing, and threads of these arguments (proposed and developed online) are starting to appear in the Court's decisions.
We argue that this "crowdsourcing" dynamic to Supreme Court decision-making is at least worth a serious pause. There is surely merit to enlarging the dialogue around the issues the Supreme Court decides—maybe the best ideas will come from new voices in the crowd. But the confines of the adversarial process have been around for centuries, and there are significant risks that come with operating outside of it particularly given the unique nature and speed of online discussions. We analyze those risks in this article and suggest it is time to think hard about embracing virtual briefing—truly assessing what can be gained and what will be lost along the way.
The article will be important reading for anybody who is interested in Supreme Court decisionmaking, and I learned quite a bit from it. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, my general attitude is somewhat more favorable to the practice of "virtual briefing," and I thought I'd offer a few of my own observations. (Full disclosure, I have of course blogged, tweeted, and podcasted about Supreme Court cases, and my Twitter feed is mentioned in the article, though I find it extremely unlikely that any Supreme Court case has ever been influenced by my Twitter feed. The Court isn't even influenced by my occasional amicus briefs!)
1. Regardless of whether one shares the article's normative cautions, the article documents an important phenomenon. A minor but important point for Supreme Court law clerks: even if your account is private, thorough investigation may be able to figure which lawyers, professors, or news sources you follow.
I'm also quite sure there are examples of blog posts or other online media having an effect on Supreme Court arguments or opinions, though I'm not sure that all of the examples documented in the article—Walter Dellinger's comments on NPR, the federalism argument in U.S. v. Windsor, or a Heritage Foundation report about Masterpiece Cakeshop—are the best examples. In each case, I strongly suspect that these points had made it to the Justices through other fora, though I suppose we don't know. But I'm sure there are other examples, even if we aren't sure which they are. (See point #4, below.)
Indeed, one thing that the article acknowledges, but I want to emphasize, is that many arguments that are made on the internet are also made in other more traditional fora—they make their way to amicus briefs, to newspaper columns, etc. Blogs and twitter provide much faster, and more accessible, ways to make, respond to, and curate these arguments, and maybe a different kind of emphasis or focus, but they really are just part of the ecosystem, and it may be hard to prove exactly what part.
Even this blog, which is sometimes alleged to have an influence on the the justices, usually contains arguments that can also be found in the authors' other writing, such as Sam's article on the national injunction, Orin's many articles on the digital Fourth Amendment, Randy's and Jonathan's articles and briefs on health care, and so on.
2. In any event, I think it is entirely understandable that the same people who occasionally care about amicus briefs, and who occasionally show some indication of having read the newspaper or listened to the radio, would also want to know if they are missing some part of the conversation that is happening online, where many serious lawyers now spend their time. Sometimes the Justices need information, and I do not think we should fault them for seeking it as widely as possible.
It's true that having more and more sources of information or argument about a case means that the parties have less and less control over what the Court can hear, or what it might be convinced to focus on. The authors make the point that this can be bad for the parties, who might well have made strategic choices to focus on one argument rather than another. But I am not convinced it is bad for the country. For better or worse, Supreme Court opinions are taken to resolve major legal issues for the whole country, not just the parties. So it seems perverse to let the strategic interests of a few parties keep the rest of us out of the conversation. When we rethink the stare decisis effect of Supreme Court opinions, I will reconsider outside briefing, virtual or otherwise.
I'd also add that I think it's a mistake to ask whether any of this writing persuades the Court. Even when the Court has already decided on a basic outcome and line of reasoning, it may run into collateral issues in collateral areas of law where its opinion could have unintended consequences. Having a lot of available information and commentary about possible landmines or implications helps the Court avoid accidentally doing harm to other areas of law.
3. Ultimately, part of the reason I am relatively unconcerned about "virtual briefing" and similar writing about the Court is that it takes place out in the open, where anybody can see it and anybody can respond. The latter point makes virtual briefing potentially more reliable than amicus briefs, where the briefing schedule and page limits makes it difficult or impossible for parties to respond to all of the briefing, or for the amici to respond to each other. And let's not even get into the "amicus machine" or the favor economy that allow some parties to take much better advantage of harnessing amicus support than others. (This does feed into the authors' discussion of whether the parties can or should engage in "virtual briefing," which is important. See #4 below.)
Similarly, I think "virtual briefing" fares much better than some of the older methods of influencing the Court outside of the briefs, such as the President's having private chats with the Justices, or fancy law professors' indoctrinating their students and then trying to slip the most loyal ones into clerkships. And I think it fares far far better than having the Justices simply fall back on what they remember learning in law school, or on their own imaginations.
The point of the regular briefing process is to give the parties a guaranteed opportunity to communicate with the court. The point of page limits is to make sure the court isn't overly burdened by such communications. Ditto oral argument and time limits. Were there world enough and time and attention, we'd want infinite arguments and infinite amici. But the briefing and argument rules are not like the rules of evidence at trial, which are supposed to stop the Court from considering facts outside of them. We don't have rules of evidence with respect to legal conclusions, for good reasons.
By taking place in public, and with tons and tons of adversaries on all sides, "virtual briefing" is harder to abuse and more legitimate than many of the alternatives. If it is unhelpful, I am confident the Court can ignore it, but if it is helpful, we ought to regard it as a public service.
4. In my view, the only real problem with "virtual briefing" is that we worry about it too much. We don't know how well "virtual briefing" works, or which arguments have really been found to be helpful or effective, because the Justices are unlikely to cite or acknowledge any of it. At least they discuss amicus briefs and legal scholarship occasionally.
Moreover, parties and Supreme Court advocates don't know whether it is appropriate to join the fray, even though they might often have useful responses to some points raised online. Should the parties keep quiet? Find friendly law professors to parrot their talking points online? Or start up a blog and post anything helpful that got cut from the briefs?
But it seems to me that these problems are exacerbated by suggestions that these blogs/tweets/podcasts are somehow shady, or less deserving of consideration than amicus briefs, news reports, law review articles, and all the rest. So I hope that the article does not have the effect of making it seem—in 2019—like the internet is anything other than a totally natural place for people to be trying to advance the best arguments they can about the things they care about.
To their great credit, Fisher and Larsen ultimately conclude that "perhaps the most sensible and realistic way forward" is for the Supreme Court to simply promote transparency by asking for supplemental briefing when a Justice sees a new and relevant argument online. But even this norm, it seems to me, is more likely to have a chilling effect than to be helpful to the Court or the country. Better to stick with the status quo: The Justices have the discretion to ask for supplemental briefing when they think they need it, and they don't have to tell us what sources inspired them to ask for it. The rest of the time, they don't usually tell us what they're thinking about while the case is still pending, and if they did have to tell us, that would probably chill free deliberation more than it promoted knowledge.
Maybe we should have more supplemental briefing orders than we do. But we don't need and shouldn't have any special rules for online sources compared to anything else.
The post In Defense of "Virtual Briefing" (i.e. Blogging, Tweeting, Podcasting About Supreme Court Cases). appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the beginning, there was Instapundit, one of the web's first great aggregator and commentary sites. Launched in August 2001, the site became massively popular after the 9/11 attacks, when it acted as a clearinghouse for information and commentary from all over the world about what the hell was going on.
The founder of Instapundit is Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who came to be known as the "blogfather" to many of us then toiling on the border between print and pixels. Always a future-oriented writer and scholar, he called himself a libertarian transhumanist and his optimistic view on cyberculture is summed up by the title of his 2006 best-selling book, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths.
That was then. Reynolds' new book is called The Social Media Upheaval. In it, he makes the case that the federal government should use antitrust law to curtail the cultural, market, and political power amassed by Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other tech companies. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Reynolds talks about why he quit Twitter last year, how his thinking has changed regarding the internet, and what he hopes will come next online and elsewhere. He also recounts the earlier, Wild West days of online communities in the 1980s, how a photoshopped joke image kept showing up on his Wikipedia page, and why libertarians seem to gravitate to unconventional diets.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
The post Why Instapundit Glenn Reynolds Thinks Twitter, Facebook, and Google Should Be Busted Up appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Social media selectively blamed for threats and violence. On Saturday, a man opened fire at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, killing 11 people while shouting slurs about Jews. According to the online trail he left behind, the shooter—46-year-old Robert Bowers—disliked Donald Trump because he thought the president was "a globalist, not a nationalist" and beholden to Jewish interests. Bowers sometimes posted this and other deranged, anti-Semitic comments to the social-media platform Gab—which says it has been "work[ing] tirelessly with the FBI and DOJ on this case over the past two days to ensure justice is served."
Meanwhile, information about the online life of the "MAGA bomber" has also been trickling out. Cesar Sayoc Jr., the 56-year-old man behind last week's wave of psuedo-pipebomb mailings, was apparently quite active on Twitter and Facebook, where he posted increasingly out-of-touch and anti-Democrat screeds and memes for years before sending at least 14 potentially explosive packages to prominent liberals such as the Clintons, Barack Obama, George Soros, and Robert de Niro.
The New York Times found numerous instances of Sayoc sending Twitter threats. And at least one person reported these threats to the company but was ignored. In contrast, Bowers—despite many distasteful posts on Gab—does not seem to have directly threatened anyone before going on his murderous rampage.
Guess which social-media platform is taking more heat…
Despite the fact that Twitter and Facebook are just as "complicit" in enabling Sayoc as Gab is in giving voice to Bowers, payment processing companies have not been pulling their services from these social giants and supposedly enlightened liberal voices haven't been calling for their demise—yet Gab is getting both.
Web hosting company GoDaddy dropped Gab, giving it just 24 hours to find a new host or be disappeared from the web. As a result, Gab has temporarily gone down. The company posted the following statement yesterday:
— Gab.com (@getongab) October 29, 2018
Since Saturday, cloud company Joyent, payment processors PayPal and Stripe, and blogging platform Medium have all ceased doing business with Gab. "When a site is allowing the perpetuation of hate, violence or discriminatory intolerance, we take immediate and decisive action," said PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs in a statement.
Gab's temporary demise has spawned gleefully idiotic gloating from certain "progressive" and "anti-fascist" circles, which seem unconcerned that Gab is getting different treatment than its more entrenched and establishment competitors.
Gab has a reputation as a Trump-friendly platform and has long attracted anger, revulsion, and mockery for embracing the alt-right and anyone shunted from other social sites. Gab's treatment this weekend compared to the treatment of bigger and just-as-hate-filled platforms makes it abundantly clear that this isn't actually about stopping "hate speech" or holding social platforms "accountable" so much as shutting down a disfavored platform.
Those cheering now won't be doing so for long. The more that web platforms and tools are treated as synonymous with the speakers of the content they broker, the more that radicals right and left, social justice causes, and marginalized communities of all sorts will be shut out of the conversation.
Yup. This. I wrote about this a few months ago, suggesting we should be thinking about this before it got to the level where we *needed* to think about it. https://t.co/jHsmHJpiJn Perhaps time to restart that conversation… https://t.co/zLnDt3ePgK
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) October 28, 2018
Trump is considering Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "The judges of the D.C. Circuit can have an extraordinary impact over the direction of the country," notes Axios' Jonathan Swan. "Because of this, people often refer to the D.C. Circuit as the second-most powerful court in the United States, behind only the Supreme Court."
Americans are staying put. U.S. homeowners are staying in their houses for the longest stretches on record, according to MarketWatch. More:
Across the country, homes that sold in the third quarter of this year had been owned an average of 8.23 years, according to an analysis from Attom Data Solutions. That's almost double the length of time a home sold in 2000, when Attom's data begin, had been owned.
It's partly the long tail of the housing crisis that's created stagnant conditions and a less dynamic housing market, Attom spokesman Daren Blomquist told MarketWatch.
As of the second quarter, 2.2 million homeowners were still underwater on their mortgages, meaning they owe more to their lending institution than the home is worth, according to data from CoreLogic. Another 550,000 have 5% equity or less, meaning that if that property were to be sold the transaction costs, such as a real-estate agent's commission, would likely leave the homeowner with nothing.
Jesus, Brazil's new president is horrifying. https://t.co/tWxBxHo5YW pic.twitter.com/xSF64hY5Xu
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) October 28, 2018
New #PolComm Forum article: The Case for @FoxNews Studies, by @mattyglesias @voxdotcom https://t.co/XOPzoanRiy pic.twitter.com/JC5wjddyXk
— APSA & ICA Political Communication Divisions (@poli_com) October 27, 2018
— Jon Wurster (@jonwurster) October 27, 2018
CORRECTION: This post initially identified Bowers as a supporter of the group QAnon though he appears to have been somewhat critical of the group.
The post Gab Dumped by Tech Companies Over Synagogue Shooter Posts but Twitter, Facebook, and Other Social-Media Giants Get a Pass: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To the extent that I know who MSNBC host Joy Reid is, it's generally due to some really dumb tweets like this one:
"Classical liberal" is an accurate term for a person who supports New Deal economics and social modernity but does not identify as socialist https://t.co/2a6tGqkljh
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 5, 2017
To be honest, it wasn't until I started getting pulled into libertarianism many years ago that I even heard the term "classical liberal" myself. But I also wouldn't presume to confidently define terms that I'm unfamiliar with. It's not clear if she even knows how wrong she was, despite the reams of responses from people correcting her, and the tweet remains online.
But she has deleted some decade-old blog writing from when she was a radio host in Florida, and now it's coming back to haunt her.
Mediaite has taken note of some homophobic posts from Reid's blog back around 2005 through 2007. Rather than taking responsibility for the posts and apologizing, Reid, via a cybersecurity consultant, is claiming that the now-defunct site was hacked or somehow manipulated to make it appear that she had written commentary that indicated discomfort with gay affection and gay marriage.
Reid has an admitted history of gay-baiting from the left as a way to attack politicians on the right. She apologized back in December when old blog posts were unearthed in which she frequently speculated that Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor from Florida, was gay. She's far from the only person to make such speculations, but she did it in a nasty, sarcastic way to attack those she saw as ideological opposition.
Back when those Crist posts were unearthed and exposed, she responded, "It was insensitive, tone deaf and dumb. There is no excusing it—not based on the taste-skewing mores of talk radio or the then-blogosphere, and not based on my intentions."
This time, though, she's insisting the newly unearthed homophobic posts were not written by her and that somebody went through the effort to manipulate the history of the site's content—even interfering somehow with the pages archived on the Wayback Machine—in order to "taint [her] character with false information."
Here is Mediaite's summary of some of the uncovered blog posts (and there's a Twitter thread by the person who unearthed the content here):
A 2006 Reid Report post included a compilation of the top five "totally not gay celebrities of the year," which was a satirical attempt—albeit, a lazy one—at suggesting everyone on the list was secretly gay. Singer Clay Aiken and CNN pundit Anderson Cooper both made the list, which—if the publishing date is correct—was posted years before they had come-out publicly.
In another post dated to 2005, the author said Cooper is the "gayest thing on TV" and noted that they have it "on good authority that Cooper is totally gay." He didn't come out publicly until 2012.
Other mentions on the list included the stars of Brokeback Mountain, the previously noted film that the author didn't see because "two male characters having sex" was "too out there."
I have no way of definitively determining whether these posts are real or fake. I certainly wasn't reading her blog at the time.
But if some shadowy force was going through the effort to destroy Reid's reputation, it apparently put in the time to make sure the posts were relevant to the discussions of the time. Who remembers NBA basketball star Tim Hardaway's anti-gay comments from 2007 anymore?
At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald points out that the baiting, attacking language in the posts Reid insists are fabricated resembles the kind of language she had admitted and apologized for.
Greenwald also rapped the left for ignoring the story, but that seems to be shifting. Mainstream media outlets are picking it up, particularly because the organization that handles the Wayback Machine put out a statement yesterday that it can find no evidence of tampering with their versions of the posts. Furthermore, the well-known national LGBT advocacy and support organization PFLAG has announced that it's withdrawing an award it had planned to give Reid for her support of LGBT issues in the media.
There are two cultural trends the Reid story puts on display. The first is the overwhelming desire in the current culture war to claim the scalps of your ideological foes. We saw it most recently with Kevin Williamson, when those who disagree with Williamson's conservatism managed to get him fired from The Atlantic almost immediately after he was hired. Reid and Reid supporters are in fact using this cultural trend as a defense, stating outright that this is all part of an attempt to get her fired.
The second cultural trend is a weird attempt to purge from history that a good number of liberals have only recently come around on certain gay issues. The scandal isn't really what Reid said 10 years ago. The scandal is that there was an audience for it among Democratic partisans as little as 10 years ago. That history makes some people squirm. It's a reminder that, for all the attacks on conservatives for being anti-LGBT, the Democratic Party didn't fully embraced same-sex marriage until one whole president ago.
Reid's defensiveness is strange, because it's not like gay people—even gay progressives—have forgotten. It took a lot of hard work by gay activists (and gay people just willing to live their lives openly) to change straight people's attitudes and make them less uncomfortable at the prospect of gay couples and families. Now that those attitudes have shifted, some leaders (both political and cultural) want to act as though they were "evolved" all along.
In the event that anybody cares (they do not), I'm not interested in claiming Reid's scalp here, even if it turns out she's lying about her old blog being hacked or manipulated. An NBC spokesperson said this afternoon that they are not planning to take her off the air.
The post Joy Reid Blames Mystery Hackers for the Anti-Gay Stuff on Her Old Blog appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rhode Island has joined a host of other states in considering an irrational measure to regulate online porn by charging consumers a $20 access fee. But the Rhode Island bill actually beats others like it in terrible and unconstitutional requirements, such as requiring the blockage of not just nude imagery or porn sites but any content that "affront(s) current standards of decency"… whatever that means.
The bill, sponsored by state Sens. Frank Ciccone (D-Providence) and Hannah Gallo (D-Cranston), is packed with ill-defined terms and extreme mandates.
To start, it would require all internet-enabled devices sold in the state to come with "a digital blocking capability that renders inaccessible sexual content and/or patently offensive material." But as many previous schemes to block sexual content have shown, it's nearly impossible for automated censors to distinguish pornographic sexual content from sexual wellness websites, reproductive health organizations, ancient art, educational information, and all sorts of other non-obscene or pornographic stuff.
And the Rhode Island bill wouldn't just block overtly sexual content but anything deemed "patently offensive," too–even though there's no clear definition of this term. The state currently defines "patently offensive" as material "so offensive on its face as to affront current standards of decency."
Makers of computers, smartphones, and other internet-enabled products would be left to determine for themselves what exactly "current standards of decency" means and how to put that in algorithmic terms.
The proposal doesn't stop there in terms of confusing and unconstitutional dictates, though. It would also require devices to automatically block "any hub that facilitates prostitution"—again, not a legal or well-defined category of content.
And device makers would also have to "ensure that all child pornography and revenge pornography is inaccessible" on their products—something that sounds great but is completely technically infeasible. If it were that easy to stop the spread of child porn, companies would be doing it already.
What makes all of this especially ridiculous is that under Ciccone and Gallo's proposal, anyone over 18-years-old could have the filter removed by making a request in writing and paying a $20 fee. The money would go to the state's general treasury "to help fund the operations of the council on human trafficking." (But… if people are paying the state $20 to access prostitution sites, doesn't that make the state a trafficker?)
The fact that lawmakers think blocked "patently offensive" material should be able to be accessed for a low price just shows how toothless their proclamations that the legislation is necessary to protect public health or morals. But what lawmakers would get out of the measure is a nice new source of steady income and a registry of people who want the filter removed.
Plus, the fees imposed on individual consumers would be pocket change compared to the money the state could make shaking down tech companies. Under Ciccone and Gallo's proposal, failure to implement the technically impossible filtering requirements could mean being sued by the state or any Rhode Island resident, being held liable for civil damages, and being charged up to $500 "for each piece of content that was reported but not subsequently blocked."
The post $20 Fee for Porn Access Proposed in Rhode Island appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In December, the cast of characters known collectively as The Volokh Conspiracy left The Washington Post—where they have made their home since 2014—and moved to reason.com. Shortly before the eclectic crew of legal bloggers began their migration, the conspiracy's namesake and unofficial ringleader, University of California, Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh, talked with Reason's Nick Gillespie about life, liberty, and the law.
Q: The contributors to The Volokh Conspiracy are mostly libertarianish, but not exclusively so. Is that accurate?
A: That's right. We're basically moderates, libertarians, and conservatives. Some of us are more on one side than another, but I like "libertarianish." That's how I think of myself. For the purposes of our blog, we never feel we need to toe the party line. Sometimes I talk about court cases, and I point out that the legally correct result under the precedents, it's not the libertarian result. We might like to have a Constitution that's more libertarian than ours, but in many ways our Constitution is majoritarian rather than libertarian.
Q: Why "conspiracy"?
A: I was trying to come up with a name, and I thought, "How about The Volokh Gang?" Then I realized there was a show on television, a public affairs show, called The Capital Gang, and people would think that we are trying to rip them off, or at the very least that we're derivative.
Q: And who wants that? Especially in law, where everything is based on what came before.
A: There's a line that law is the only discipline in which the phrase "That's an original idea" is a pejorative. But in the academy, we're always supposed to be original, and what's more, it's more fun to be original. "OK," I thought, "so it can't be gang."
This was in 2002, not long after all this talk about the "vast right-wing conspiracy." So I thought, "How about The Volokh Conspiracy?" The absurd thing is that a conspiracy would call itself "The Conspiracy" on a webpage. I will say that since then I've heard people say, "Look, I'm reluctant to pass along your stories to my friends, because they're going to think that this is a conspiracy theory website." On the other hand, at times I remember looking in our referrer logs, and people were looking for conspiracy theories. They found our blog. They may have been disappointed, but maybe they got enlightened.
Q: You have a pretty fascinating American story. How does that experience affect your views?
A: I was born in Kiev, which was then in the Soviet Union. My parents, as a result of their experience in Russia, ended up being Republicans. They saw Reagan as telling it like it is on communism, and the Democrats of the late '70s and early '80s as basically missing the evils of communism. I was 7 when I came [to the United States]. Their support made me open to the values of free markets. I like to think I've independently reached that result, but I think it helped that free markets and laissez-faire were not dirty words in our household.
Q: How has Trump has done on the federal judiciary so far?
A: There are many things to quarrel with the administration on, but in my view the one area in which they have done a really good job is picking top-notch judges. I'm sure you can find some exceptions, but the judges that I happen to know who were picked by the administration are really all superb.
Q: When you say a judge is good, is it because they come to results you agree with?
A: Human beings being who we are, we do tend to see more virtues in those we agree with and more vices in those we disagree with. But here I'm speaking about intelligence and, to the extent that we have this information, judicial craft.
In any event, if what you're looking for is liberals, you're not going to get them from President Trump. If you're looking for libertarians, you're really not going to get any from either party. On the other hand, if you're looking for smart, thoughtful conservatives who will, at least some of them, have something of a libertarian streak—and more broadly, will recognize the importance of protecting established constitutional rights, and at times push back against the administration when they think the administration is going too far—I have found Trump's picks to be surprisingly strong along all these metrics.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a longer version, subscribe to Reason's podcast.
The post <em>The Volokh Conspiracy</em> Comes to <em>Reason</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Looking forward to a future when federal agents monitor Tinder? We won't be far off if some folks in Congress get their way.
Under a proposal from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.), anyone posting or hosting digital content that leads to an act of prostitution could face serious federal prison time as well as civil penalties. This is obviously bad news for sex workers, but it would also leave digital platforms—including dating apps, social media, and classifieds sites such as Craigslist—open to serious legal liability for the things users post.
In effect, it would give government agents more incentive and authority to monitor sex-related apps, ads, forums, and sites of all sorts. And it would give digital platforms a huge incentive to track and regulate user speech more closely.
Goodlatte's measure was offered as an amendment to another House bill—the "Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act" (FOSTA)—this one from Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner. The House Judiciary Committee will consider both bills on Tuesday.
Wagner's legislation (H.R. 1865) would open digital platforms to criminal and civil liability not just for future sex crimes that result from user posts or interactions but also for past harms brokered by the platforms in some way. So platforms that followed previous federal rules (which encouraged less content moderation in order to avoid liability) would now be especially vulnerable to charges and lawsuits.
The bill currently has 171 co-sponsors, including ample numbers of both Republicans and Democrats.
Specifically, Wagner's bill would amend Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which says that websites and other online platforms should not be treated as the creators of user-posted content. What this means in effect is that these third-party platforms can't be sued or prosecuted for users' and commenters' illegal speech (or illegal actions resulting from speech)—with some major exceptions. Digital platforms do not get a pass for content they actually create "in whole or part," for instance.
As it stands, states cannot generally prosecute web services and citizens cannot sue them when user-generated content conflicts with state criminal law. Rep. Wagner's bill—like the similar and more-hyped "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act" (SESTA) in the Senate—would end this state and civil immunity for digital platforms in cases of "sex trafficking" or "sexual exploitation of children." But while that may sound like a small concession, it actually opens up a huge range of activity for liability. At the federal level, the above offenses encompass everything from the truly horrific and unconscionable (like sex trafficking by force) to things like sexting between teenagers. And at the state level, definitions can be even more varied and blurry.
Wagner's bill doesn't just stop at carving out a new Section 230 exception. It also creates a new crime, "benefiting from participation in a venture engaged in sex trafficking," and makes it easy to hold all sorts of web platforms and publishers in violation.
Any "provider of an interactive computer service" who hosts user-posted information "with reckless disregard that the information provided…is in furtherance of [sex trafficking] or an attempt to commit such an offense" could face a fine and up to 20 years in prison, the bill states. And nothing "shall be construed to require the Federal Government in a prosecution, or a plaintiff in a civil action, to prove any intent on the part of the information content provider."
So in cases like, say, Hope Zeferjohn, the teen girl convicted of sex trafficking for talking to a younger teen on Facebook about prostitution, Facebook could be facing a federal charge for participating in a sex trafficking venture.
Goodlatte's proposal, meanwhile, would work by amending the Mann Act, a century-old prohibition on transporting someone across state lines for prostitution. The new section would declare that "whoever uses or operates a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce or attempts to do so with the intent to promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person shall be fined under this title, imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both." Anyone that "promotes or facilitates the prostitution of 5 or more persons" or "acts in reckless disregard of the fact that such conduct contributed to sex trafficking" could face a fine and up to 25 years of imprisonment.
Note that no actual prostitution needs to take place. An attempt—i.e., an online ad or solicitation, or what some official sees as one—is enough.
Like SESTA in the Senate—which passed out of committee but has since stalled—this new package of proposals is presented as a way to combat sexual exploitation and human trafficking. But all it would really do is drive sex ads further underground, making it both harder to rescue victims of sexual abuse and harder for willing adult sex workers to conduct business safely, while simultaneously enabling unscrupulous attacks on web platforms, putting an insane chill on all internet speech, and opening the way for even more government prying into everyone's digital lives.
* SESTA's companion bill in the House is H.R. 1865. This post has been updated to reflect that.
The post Posting or Hosting Sex Ads Could Mean 25 Years in Federal Prison Under New Republican Proposal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Our goal was to undress Pinterest, not dress up Pornhub," the press kit for Bellesa, a Montreal-based web startup, proclaims with lofty feminist ambitions. A recent writeup on Bustle hails the (NSFW) site as "good both for women and for men who want something outside what our patriarchal, heteronormative society dictates they should like."
Little of Bellesa's video content, however, distinguishes it from other porn sites; it's Pornhub in a Pinterest wrapper. Nothing wrong with that per se—in fact, a porn platform with serves up a variety of videos (not just the softcore, romantic stuff that's often assumed to appeal more to women) with a less aggressively masculine interface would probably do well.
But for a site to live up to its idealistic, feminist branding, it needs to account for the labor and intellectual property of those producing the content—the performers, directors, and others who actually make the adult videos—whether that means making content distribution deals with independent sex workers or ethical-porn production companies; producing content in house; or working out some sort of profit-sharing platform for user-created content.
Bellesa—Catalan for beauty—does none of these things. Canadian magazine The Link describes founder Michelle Schnaidman's role as curating or facilitating porn—"she makes it available for those who seek it." It solves what Bustle writer Joanna Weiss described as the "pesky paywall" problem by featuring porn clips cribbed from all around the web, without paying or promoting the people who made them.
Bellesa also asks women to upload their own "erotic stories, sexy photos and GIFs, and feminist blog posts" for free, for the fun of it. Apparently all it takes to find feminist pornography is being willing to band together with other feminists and become unpaid porn stars, erotica writers, and digital content producers for the cause!
Shnaidman assures women she created this porn clearinghouse for only the best and most feminist reasons.
"We need to put an end to slut-shaming and to the antiquated idea that sex is something men do to women," she told Bustle. "Or something women do for men. Because it's not. Once society finally accepts the notion that women like sex (like, really like sex), we can begin shattering the stigma surrounding female sexuality—and of course porn."
The Bellesa website decries the "male-dominated paradigms that have defined sex on the internet" so far, and porn that is "derogatory and exclusionary towards women."
"The market for services meeting women's sexual needs is often neglected due to the myth that women are less sexual than men," explains Bustle. But on Bellesa, there will be "relatable" bodies, performers expressing "authentic" pleasure, and as many shots of nude men as women.
Refinery29 even recommends women against signing up for a non "female-friendly" porn subscription service and instead find "free porn" on Bellessa.
Both the women's media and Shnaidman here showcase problems (long) prevalent among mainstream feminists: a willingness to throw certain sorts of women under the bus when it's convenient; an apparent inability to consider how creating some preferable condition for some normative class of women will affect those not in this class; and a tendency to embrace personal liberation on the backs of more marginalized groups.
Several adult-film producers have already asked Bellesa to take down their content.
Hi, @BellesaCo you have content created by us and the lines we distribute on your site. Please remove it. Thanks. cc: @bustle @suzannahweiss https://t.co/xgDG4KIsQz
— Wicked (@WickedPictures) September 21, 2017
Hi, @BellesaCo you call yourself "ethical" and stole my content & never credited me as the writer/director. cc: @bustle @suzannahweiss https://t.co/vMdVAccJTW
— Jacky St. James (@jackystjames) September 20, 2017
And sex workers on social media have been protesting the feminist-friendly narrative around the pirated-video platform.
It's not free content. It's stolen content. You are no better than PornHub, Imgur, or Reddit. https://t.co/7srK6EtQ4N
— Kim Cums (@KimCummms) September 19, 2017
When you contribute (pirate) vids to @BellesaCo, you're asked to affirm consent & age of performers. How can you if it's not your content?!
— Ellie Boulder (@ellie_boulder) September 20, 2017
Stealing porn empowers no one. And to pirate specifically from female producers in the branding of 'porn for women'… Shame on @BellesaCo. https://t.co/Zka1RGiwtD
— Jiz Lee (@jizlee) September 19, 2017
Just because you're stealing *for women* doesn't make make it ethical. This is repulsive. https://t.co/a6xDj0o6jv
— Casey Calvert (@caseycalvertxxx) September 19, 2017
Bellesa may have recognized a market opportunity and leapt on it, but company rhetoric about serving up adult-entertainment in an ethical or feminist manner is just branding drivel. The most feminist-friendly way to consume porn is to make sure the performers are getting paid.
Update: On Thursday afternoon, Bellesa released a statement announcing that it was taking down its entire video section for now and "making a firm commitment … to transition the entirety of the video section of Bellesa to feature exclusively videos that are in direct partnership with studios, and that compensate fairly for their contribution."
"For those that are open to working with us, we would love nothing more. To those that do not because it's too little, too late, I understand and I'm sorry," wrote Michelle Shnaidman.
"The goal with which I created this platform has regrettably become in direct conflict with supporting and respecting the women of the sex-space," wrote Shnaidman. "We've displayed a massive amount of ignorance with regards to the adult entertainment space and have unintentionally hurt women who work in the sex space. We are unendingly sorry for this."
The post Feminist Porn Isn't Free appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Has a bullying Louisiana sheriff learned his lesson about abusing power? The targets of an illegitimate and unconstitutional 2016 raid he ordered think he has. Yet Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry Larpenter has received no formal discipline for his conduct.
Larpenter has reached a settlement in the civil suit filed against him by Jennifer and Wayne Anderson, whose home was raided by Larpenter's deputies in 2016 after Jennifer blogged critically about the sheriff.
"I think the sheriff's finally learned that he can't bully people and violate people's constitutional rights," Wayne, a Houma police officer, told local station WWLTV. "In our case, he stepped on the wrong people's constitutional rights because we knew our rights. Hopefully, he thinks twice the next time he gets his feelings hurt."
The trouble stems from Jennifer's pseudonymous blog, ExposeDAT, which billed itself as the area's "Underground Watchdog" and was critical of Terrebonne Parish leadership, including Larpenter. Among other things, the blog questioned the business relationship between Larpenter, Parish President Gordon Dove, and Tony Alford, an insurance agent and a commissioner on the Terrebonne Parish Levee and Conservation District Board. Alford filed a defamation complaint.
Under Louisiana's defamation statute, the crime is defined as "the malicious publication or expression in any manner, to anyone other than the party defamed, of anything which tends to expose any person to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or to deprive him of the benefit of public confidence or social intercourse; or to expose the memory of one deceased to hatred, contempt or ridicule; or to injure any person, corporation, or association of persons in his or their business or occupation." But the Louisiana Supreme Court has declared this statute unconstitutionally broad when applied to public figures—like Larpenter, Dove, or Alford.
Nonetheless, after warrants issued to Facebook and AT&T linked ExposeDAT to the Anderson household, the sheriff obtained search warrants for the couple's home and computer and for the ExposeDAT Facebook account. Terrebonne Parish deputies raided their home, seizing two computers and five cellphones (including one computer and some phones that belonged to the Anderson children).
State District Judge Randall Bethancourt, who issued the search warrants, told WWLTV he had no problem letting law-enforcement "take a look-see at these computers that might have defamatory statements on them."
The Andersons quickly filed a suit in federal court, asking it to stop police from searching the family's computers and to declare the raid and seizure unconstitutional. This week, the Andersons settled with Larpenter out of court in an undisclosed agreement.
Per the terms of the settlement, the Andersons can't say much about what went down. But in a statement, their attorney declared the agreement "a victory for citizens' right to be critical of their elected officials without fear of retribution" and said it's "reassuring to see that the Sheriff has decided to take responsibility for what he did to the Anderson's, and compensate them for the harm they suffered due to his actions."
U.S. District Court Judge Lance Africk officially dismissed the case on Thursday, but he said he retains the right to open it again if the settlement's terms aren't met in a reasonable time period.
In an earlier ruling, Africk opined that "Jennifer Anderson's speech [on ExposeDAT] falls squarely within the four corners of the First Amendment." Larventer's actions, Africk wrote, send a message that "if you speak ill of the sheriff of your parish, then the sheriff will direct his law enforcement resources toward forcibly entering your home and taking your belongings under the guise of a criminal investigation." This "would certainly chill anyone…from engaging in similar constitutionally protected speech in the future."
Meanwhile, Louisiana's 5th Circuit Court of Appeal declared there was insufficient probable cause for the warrants and declared the subsequent searches unconstitutional.
Larpenter remains head of law enforcement in Terrebonne Parish.
The post Sheriff Forced to Pay After Ordering Raid on Blogger Who Criticized Him appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Can California ban people from publishing the ages of Hollywood stars? A federal court is currently considering whether the state can stop the practice without running afoul of the First Amendment.
At issue is a 2016 law (Assembly Bill 1687) ostensibly designed "to ensure that information obtained on an Internet Web site regarding an individual's age will not be used in furtherance of employment or age discrimination."
But rather than address age discrimination per se, the law simply bans certain types of websites from publishing accurate age information about certain classes of entertainment workers. As such, it "sets a dangerous and unconstitutional precendent," claim lawyers for the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), "and should be deeply troubling to all who care about free speech."
The law's supporters singled out IMDb as a primary target. In addition to its massively popular free website, IMDB also offers a professional subscription service to actors, casting directors, makeup artists, and other entertainment professionals.
The way the new law was written, random websites that publish the ages of entertainment professionals are still in the clear. But any "online entertainment employment service provider" that accepts payment for its services falls under the measure's purview. For such individuals or entities, paid-user requests to remove age information must be honored within five days or else the site risks civil and criminal penalties. These providers are also barred from sharing age info with or publishing it on other sites.
"Rather than passing laws designed to address the root problem of age discrimination, the State of California has chosen to chill free speech and undermine public access to factual information," IMDb states in a suit challenging the constitutionality of the measure. "AB 1687 does not prohibit the discriminatory use of information, but instead forces the removal of factual information from the public domain."
The state said in a recent motion that the law was simply a "contract based nondisclosure rule."
But "while the law may encompass some information exchanged within the subscriber relationship, it sweeps much more broadly, preventing IMDb or third parties from posting age and date of birth information, regardless of its source," IMDb stated in an August 10 motion.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria has already blocked California from enforcing the law while the case is ongoing.
At best it would seem the law is unneccessary, at least in terms of getting IMDb to delist ages. In order to gain the right to request such a thing, someone would have to be a paid subscriber to IMDbPro. And paid IMDbPro subscribers can already have their ages removed from their profiles. Meanwhile, a non-subscriber who wants their age removed is (still) legally out of luck.
Considering this—plus the fact that any non-subscription site can publish ages with impunity—and the idea that this new law will somehow hinder age-discrimination in the entertainment industry becomes laughable.
Still, that's the story California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which has joined in the state's opposition to IMDb, are sticking with.
Becerra argued to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that "if [the bill] is to be considered a speech regulation, it is a valid commercial speech regulation," because the legislature found "the problem of age discrimination in the entertainment industry to be real, adopted the provision to aid in solving that problem, and matched the restriction to the problem to be addressed."
In its own motion, SAG-AFTRA complained that IMDB "contends it has an absolute First Amendment right to disseminate the ages of everyone in Hollywood, consequences be damned, and no matter how much or little value such expression has in the marketplace of ideas." But "so long as the communication of the age of persons in the entertainment industry writ large facilitates illegal age discrimination, such expression may be regulated consistent with the First Amendment even though specific communications might not be discriminatory."
Note that the Actors Guild doesn't claim that IMDb publishes age information that's false, nor that it publishes true information obtained in an illegal manner. Rather SAG-AFTRA asserts that IMDb somehow has a legal responsibility to help actors obtain work by concealing their ages; that the state has the ability to judge what kinds of content have "value" in the "marketplace of ideas"; and that information of "little value" can be banned.
The district court will have to decide whether the state's solution represents a narrowly tailored solution to a legitimate public policy problem or an unconstitutionally broad restriction on speech.
IMDb has provided a host of arguments for why it's the latter:
The next hearing on the case is scheduled for October 26. Per the judge's preliminary injunction on the law's enforcement, IMDB is expected to prevail.
The post Actors Guild Fights to Make Outing Entertainers' Ages a Crime appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you've visited disruptj20.org, a website that organized folks for the purpose of disrupting President Donald Trump's inauguration events in D.C., the Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to know about it.
Whether you were even in D.C. on Inauguration Day is apparently not relevant. In an effort to track down anybody who rioted or engaged in violence on that day, the Justice Department has gotten a search warrant demanding that the site's host company, DreamHost, provide records related to their investigations.
It's not unusual for law enforcement agencies try to get records about particular users of sites if they believe these users are engaged in criminal activities. And it's constitutional for them to use warrants to try to track down specific information from or about users suspected of a crime.
But according to DreamHost, the warrant the Justice Department is asking for the IP addresses of anyone who has even just visited the site. So the company announced in a blog post yesterday that it's fighting the warrant:
The request from the DOJ demands that DreamHost hand over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses—in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people—in an effort to determine who simply visited the website. (Our customer has also been notified of the pending warrant on the account.)
That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution's First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone's mind.
DreamHost also argues that the overbroad demand violates the Fourth Amendment's requirement that search warrants identify specifically what the government wants to seize. The government appears to be essentially demanding all of DreamHost's data about disruptj20.org, including everything that connects to the site or originates from the site. It's a fishing expedition to see if the feds can connect anybody to the site with any of the actual violence that took place Inauguration Day.
Ken "Popehat" White, a former federal prosecutor, warns that this type of search indicates an overt hostility toward anti-government protests:
The government has made no effort whatsoever to limit the warrant to actual evidence of any particular crime. If you visited the site, if you left a message, they want to know who and where you are—whether or not you did anything but watch TV on inauguration day. This is chilling, particularly when it comes from an administration that has expressed so much overt hostility to protesters, so relentlessly conflated all protesters with those who break the law, and so deliberately framed America as being at war with the administration's domestic enemies.
There will be a hearing on the Justice Department's motion to compel DreamHost to comply with the warrant on Friday.
The post The Justice Department Wants to Know if You've Visited an Anti-Trump Resistance Site appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Libertarians, rejoice—a U.S. regulator took the bold step of deciding that his office simply doesn't have the jurisdiction to control major parts of the internet. Last Wednesday, the free market-friendly Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai unveiled his plan to roll back the FCC's controversial 2015 Open internet Order (OIO), which granted the telecommunication regulator expansive discretionary authority over how internet Service Providers (ISPs) can operate and compete.
Pai's plan is a real win for those who believe businesses should not need government permission before innovating. But don't expect the so-called "net neutrality" hardliners to accept this proposal without a major fight. Their reactions last week were predictably apoplectic.
Sen. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) set the tone on Wednesday, promising a "tsunami of resistance" against Pai's deregulatory move. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) clutched his pearls and warned that rescinding the OIO would "destroy the internet as we know it." A writer at Gizmodo scoffed that Pai's position was one "only the strongest free-market libertarians" could support (is that supposed to be an insult?). The political group Free Press, a dogged OIO supporter, bemoaned that if Pai succeeds, "the internet as we know it will be gone for good."
But hysterical critics have a hard time answering exactly how the internet was able to become the engine of innovation that it is today without the expansive FCC controls only granted through the OIO in 2015.
Radical Regulation
The 2015 Open Interent Order broke from years of established federal policy by reclassifying ISPs as "common carriers" for FCC purposes. In legal terms, the OIO applied Title II of the 1934 Communication Act to ISPs. This meant that web-service providers such as RCN and Time Warner were to be treated less like part of a competitive and cutting-edge industry and more like an arm of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly of Norman Rockwell's America. Specifically, the change would prohibit certain kinds of content-delivery differentiation, placing the FCC in the position of picking winners and losers by being able to determine which service innovations are allowed and which are not.
For providers, the imposition of Title II regulations meant uncertainty, new fees and compliance costs, and a major new power center just waiting to be captured by commercial interests. For consumers, it meant less choice, higher prices, and a worrying channel for new government censorship of speech. For libertarians, it was merely more of the same: Yet another government regulator deciding that it should have more power to tell businesses and consumers what they can and cannot do.
It is hard to overstate just how radical of a departure the OIO was from the preceding years of light touch regulatory authority over internet activities. For years, U.S. internet policy was guided by a remarkably laissez faire approach encapsulated by the Clinton administration's Framework for Global Electronic Commerce. This extraordinary document instructs the federal government to "encourage industry self-regulation wherever appropriate" and "refrain from imposing new and unnecessary regulations" on commercial internet activities. And if that's not clear enough, Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act states that any "service or system that provides access to the internet" should be "unfettered from Federal or State regulation" like the OIO.
Accordingly, America today is home to the world's most successful and competitive technology companies, and consumers have access to a dazzling array of telecommunication services at affordable, competitive prices. (And thanks to Pai's new plan, we can continue to be.) But can you imagine what the internet would now look like if ISPs had been forced to ask the FCC for permission every time one wanted to roll out a new service over the years? We might not have much of an internet at all.
No Free internet
For a great example of how the OIO harms consumers and innovation, we can look to the absurd fits that so-called "net neutrality" partisans pitch over zero-rated services.
Zero-rated services allow users to access certain features of the internet for free or at steep discount; some high profile examples include Mobile Wikipedia and internet.org. For people living in conditions of extreme poverty, this kind of access can literally mean the difference between being able to connect with the broader world and being stuck in digital isolation. But zero-rating is also good for binge watching. Consider T-Mobile's popular "Binge On" service, which allows customers to stream content without counting against data usage caps. Consumers might see this as a welcome facilitator for their next Netflix fix, but OIO advocates see it as a "slippery slope" that undermines "net neutrality principles."
Because zero-rating may technically violate the prohibition against differentiating access, the FCC actually launched an investigation into zero-rated services in 2016 for potentially running afoul of the OIO. (Thankfully, one of Pai's first actions was to call off this insane witch hunt.) That's right: The FCC wanted to prevent companies from giving away free stuff because it "violated net neutrality." This is the ridiculous world of the OIO.
It is unfortunate that the FCC's heavy-handed and political power grab through the OIO has been conflated with the nebulous and universally positive-sounding abstraction of "net neutrality." Industry supporters of the OIO often deploy high-sounding (but largely incomprehensible) rhetoric about "treating all data equally" and "protecting our open internet" without delving much into the specifics of how they want to get there—namely, by super-charging the FCC with an expansive and arbitrary permission-based regime for internet services. Instead, net-neutrality ideologues prefer to focus on the doomsday scenarios that they imply would occur without the radical new OIO rules, conjuring images of a tiered internet and bundled-access packages reminiscent of the cable television industry.
Yet two decades without the OIO has wrought nothing like these imagined apocalypses. The best actual "scandal" that OIO advocates can dredge up is MetroPCS's 2010 decision to offer budget 4G LTE service using unconventional network construction. For most people, this is hardly a reasonable pretext to hand major new powers to a regulator. Especially a regulator like the FCC.
FCC's Empire Expansion
America's telecom regulator is notorious for developing clever rationalizations for new authorities each time that it finds its influence waning. In the case of the OIO, the contours are especially sharp: as the influence of radio, telephones, and cable continued to slump, the FCC was eager to find some new rationalization for why it should regulate the internet.
Perhaps this is why—as my colleague and FCC-watcher Brent Skorup points out—the FCC included a major loophole in the OIO that allows ISPs to still prioritize their own services. According to Skorup, it appears that the FCC wanted to broadly control these services rather than being limited to merely adjudicate competitive concerns.
It is also odd that "net neutrality" advocates rarely, if ever, discuss alternatives to the OIO that could achieve their intended goals. Denmark, for example, is frequently singled out for praise of its stellar telecommunication coverage and service. Yet, as Roslyn Layton and Joseph Kane recently pointed out in a report for the Mercatus Center, Denmark achieved this not by rolling out new top-down net neutrality rules, but rather by eliminating their telecom regulator all together.
In the U.S., perhaps a more general purpose regulator, like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), would be a more appropriate body to investigate and deal with violations of net neutrality principles, rather than endowing the famously labyrinthine FCC with a broad grant of power to manipulate the market as it sees fit.
It is exceedingly rare to find a regulator with enough honesty and humility to admit when his or her office is simply not needed. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai should be applauded for his move to deregulate by small government advocates, competition-minded businesses, and consumers alike—but it's just a first step. Expect a lot of wailing and grinding of teeth from the OIO hardliners before the FCC moves to vote on Pai's proposal. The stakes are high, but the benefits from rolling back these asinine regulations are even higher.
The post Plan to Roll Back Internet Regulations a Boon for Business and Innovation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Here's another good example of the limits of liberal "tolerance": in the name of equality and diversity, tech leaders have turned against a long-respected member of their community over his private and consensual sex practices. Sure, the scandal has revealed that Drupal developer and spokesman Larry Garfield has a penchant for BDSM broadly and also for a specific sub-genre of the kink centered on the fictional land of Gor, in which a subset of women serve as men's sex slaves. But more importantly, the situation has exposed strange taboos in the liberal-leaning Drupal community and how hypocritical their talk of tolerance can be.
Taking the brunt of the hypocrisy criticism is Drupal trademark owner Dries Buytaert. Buytaert's main gig now is chief technology officer for Acquia, a company he co-founded in 2007. But he's better known as the the creator and original project lead for the open-source content management software Drupal, which has attracted a huge and devoted community since its 2001 launch. Drupal is "supported and maintained" by the nonprofit Drupal Association, which also organizes Drupal conferences.
According to Executive Director Megan Sanicki, the association began looking into Garfield last October at the behest of another member of the Drupal community. That person had discovered Garfield's profiles on membership kink and dating websites and shared some screenshots with Drupal leadership.
But a Drupal Community Working Group investigation into Garfield found that he had not violated anything in the Drupal community's Code of Conduct, which probably should have been the end of things. No one has offered any evidence that Garfield discriminated against women in his professional life—in fact, many women whom Garfield has worked or associated with have rushed to his defense—let alone committed any more severe offenses or violence against them. Garfield himself says he believes women are every bit as intelligent as men and that his desire for female submission extends only to his own personal romantic/sexual partnerships. "The [dominant/submissive, or] D/s and Gorean community in general places a heavy emphasis on explicit, active, informed consent and constant communication," he notes, adding that he personally has "never, ever advocated for treating women, as a class, with anything other than dignity and respect."
But even if Garfield did hold sincerely sexist views in private, it hardly seems grounds for community expulsion in the absence of publcly articulated views or actions. The idea that women should be submissive to their husbands is a prominent feature of many religious faiths, and a value that plenty of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others still hold dear—typically with way less add-on feminism than you'll find in BDSM relationships. Would the Drupal Association feel as comfortable ousting a devout supporter of Islam or evangelical Christianity if it came out that their wives practiced voluntary submission?
If—as Buytaert says—the association is commited to treating people equally regardless of "their heritage or culture, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, and more," they seem to doing a pretty terrible job. People's preferences toward certain types of sex or particular fantasies can be no less innate than a sexual orientation toward same- or opposite-sex partners (and no more reason for alarm). And it's hard to imagine a woman receiving the same treatment and derision if it came out that she once worked as a dominatrix or wrote 50 Shades of Grey fanfic.
Meanwhile, Garfield was disinvited from the upcoming DrupalCon Baltimore, had his status as a conference track coordinator revoked, and (in a February phone call that both agree on at least the basics of) was asked by Buytaert to stop contributing to the Drupal community. (The request might not seem like a big deal to those outside the tech world, but "open-source communities/projects are crucially important to many people's careers and professional lives," explains John Evans at TechCrunch, "so who they allow and deny membership to, and how their codes of conduct are constructed and followed, is highly consequential.")
At this point, Garfield went on the offensive, telling his side of the story in a blog post that professed "no choice but to clarify some private details" of his life that were the subject of "a whisper campaign going around the Drupal world," one which was hurting him greatly professionally. Garfield explained his involvement in "hierarchical relationship" communities based on dominance/submission practiced with "informed, active consent," admitting that he is "involved in two such communities, specifically the BDSM community and the Gorean (Gor) community." From Garfield's post:
The former is by far the larger of the two and more varied, although I spend more of my time and activity in the Gorean community. It's a small community, and sadly much of what is found online about it is utter crap, just as most in the BDSM community find the '50 Shades' representation of BDSM to be harmfully misleading. The Gorean subculture is inspired by a science-fiction book series written [by John Norman] from the 1960s onward to today, and predicated on a strong sense of personal honor, integrity, and community. It also practices consensual Master/slave relationships, and has a strong gender bias toward male-Dom/female-sub relationships, but that is not the cornerstone of Gorean culture. […] The idea of consenting to give your significant other outsized control over your life may seem strange or uncomfortable to some. That's fine; it's not for everyone, nor does anyone claim it is, nor should anyone ever be forced into such a relationship. […] Yes, I have been involved in several consensual Master/slave relationships with women. I will continue to do so, but only with those who are also interested in such relationships. I discuss the social and personal dynamics of such relationships on private forums set up for people with similar interests. I know many people who are happily coupled in such relationships
After Garfield's post was up, Dries Buytaert responded with a post of his own, explaining that he was trying to break off the relationship because "Garfield holds views that are in opposition to the values of the Drupal project." Buytaert stressed that "the Drupal community is committed" to not discriminating against anyone based on "their heritage or culture, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, and more" and works hard "to foster a culture of open-mindedness toward difference." But Garfield "actively promotes a philosophy that is contrary" to these values and the basic belief that "all people are created equally," Buytaert wrote.
In a sentence now deleted, he stated that "when a highly-visible community member's private views become public, controversial, and disruptive for the project, I must consider the impact," and ultimately was not able to "get past the fundamental misalignment of values." Buytaert's explanation was updated several times in the face of public response, with him later apologizing for "causing grief and uncertainty…to those in the BDSM and kink communities" and stating that the situation was "never about sexual practices or kinks." It wasn't "Larry's alternative lifestyle" that was the problem, Buytaert suggested, but "confidential information" that he cannot share, as well the the underlying "beliefs conveyed in Larry's blog post."
What beliefs would those be? In Garfield's decade-plus association with the Drupal community, no one has publicly accused him of treating women as inferior, trying to coerce people he knew professionally into sex, or even talking about his sex life at all in professional settings. Many men and women who know him from these settings have spoken out in his support, including 120 Drupal "developers, supporters, and funders," who told Buytaert that they are concerned with his actions and, if Garfield did not violate the law or Drupal's Code of Conduct, he should be welcomed back and offered an apology. The Drupal community should not "discriminate against people for who they are on the outside, for what they believe, for what they value, or for how they lawfully, consensually, and peacefully live their personal lives," it said.
It's equally unclear what sort of other behavior of which Garfield is being accused. Garfield says he does not know, and has publicly asked Buytaert and the Drupal Association to enlighten him; they have stayed mum, not even revealing the basic nature of the alleged info. As John Evans writes at TechCrunch, "Dries & co. could surely have told the community substantially more (indeed, anything) about Garfield's problematic behavior, if any, without revealing sensitive information. For instance, they could have said they'd received reports of threats, harassment, or coercion by Garfield, if any such reports existed. They have said nothing of the sort."
But "just trust us is not enough," Evans continues. "Especially since it also seems possible that the CTO and co-founder of a heavily funded pre-IPO company has participated in expelling a man from what has been his professional community for the last twelve years, ignoring that community's own Code of Conduct and Conflict Resolution Policy, because it was decided he was guilty of, essentially, thoughtcrime; that no real accusations have been made, and no allegations of problematic behavior have been cited, because none such exist."
The few Drupal threads floating around as evidence that Garfield's chauvinistic views crossed over into his tech life are laughably non-offensive (see some examples below) or only suspect if read in the least likely and charitable light possible. And the writing being used as "proof" that Garfield truly believes in male supremacy come from the kink forums he posted to—i.e., places where one's persona, comments, etc., tend to serve as an extension of sexual fantasies or fetishes, not credible indicators of full-time values. Some have claimed that by not hiding his identity better in these forums, Garfield deserves what he is getting, but keep in mind that these were registration-required sites in which he had been participating for over a decade that only came to light after another Drupal devotee found them last year and then (against the site's terms of service) screenshotted them to share more widely.
Throughout all this, Buytaert and others opposing Garfield insist that it isn't about "sexual practices and kinks" and what Garfield does in his own time is fine—it's the fact that he "flaunted" it online which made a difference, or it's the "underlying" belief system behind his sexual kinks. Their statements sound a lot like some of my older relatives talking about gays and lesbians a decade or so back—if a man wants to have sex with another man in his own bedroom, that's fine, just don't go holding hands in public, or calling another man your boyfriend in front of the children! Buytaert et al. seem to suggest that sexual practices and kinks are relegated to things that happen in the flesh, in the bedroom, and entirely on the physical level. But for many BDSM practitioners, part of the fun lies in rituals and rules that extend beyond the bedroom, and role playing often (or exclusively) happens in online forums. Saying you're cool with someone's sexuality unless they ever talk about it or allude to it in public doesn't really hold water.
"In the past, Dries might've kicked Larry out because 'BDSM is a threat to family values'," notes Nadia Eghba at Medium. "Today, leaders like Dries kick Larry out because 'BDSM is a threat to gender equality;. Unfortunately, the end result is the same….If diversity is our dogma, call me 'spiritual, not religious'. I still pray for the same things as you, but I won't be at the witch trials."
John De Goes, organizer of the programming conference LamdaConf, expressed similar sentiments in an Inc interview. "In this new world order, it's not sufficient to conduct yourself with the highest standards of professionalism, as Larry Garfield has reportedly done," said De Goes. "Instead, you must have the right private beliefs and values, and you must restrict your private consensual sexual behavior to the list of approved behaviors. Everything you say and do must be examined with a microscope to judge whether you are morally worthy of inclusion into the community."
Inc points out that "the deeper question about how much tolerance should be afforded to controversial views is one that has popped up multiple times in open-source communities" in recent years, from Brendan Eich's removal as CEO of Mozilla over his opinion on same-sex marriage to the drama surrounding LambdaConf's inclusion of programmer Curtis Yarvin (who runs a neoreactionary blog in his non-professional life).
Buytaert was at first quite explicit on his answer to this question. In a section of his blog post that's now been deleted, the Drupal head opined that "someone's belief system inherently influences their actions, in both explicit and subtle ways," and wrote that he is "unwilling to take this risk going forward" with regard to Garfield's potential beliefs about sex and gender potentially spilling over into his professional life. And here's the real rub of it:
Larry's continued representation of the Drupal project could harm the reputation of the project and cause harm to the Drupal ecosystem. Any further participation in a leadership role implies our community is complicit with and/or endorses these views, which we do not.
Whether Buytaert himself believes that Garfield is a sexist pervert is irrelevant—he's clearly worried that other people will perceive Garfield as a sexist pervert, and afraid that this will create bad public-relations for Drupal. Rather than practice what he preaches about tolerance, respect, and creating "a culture of open-mindedness toward difference," Buytaert offered up Garfield for social-justice sacrifice in order to appease prudes and busybodies. Here's hoping the tech community continues to reject this sort of phony promise of diversity and attempts at inclusiveness through exclusion.
Below are a series of allegedly problematic posts that Larry Garfield (username: Crell) made in Drupal community forums related to gender, sex, and a "master/slave" naming convention within Drupal:
The post Drupal Developer Larry Garfield Ostracized Over Involvement in Sci-Fi Based Kink Community appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to order an Oregon man to take down blog posts he made that contain information about informants the feds had in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge when part of it was occupied by a group led by Ammon Bundy. They say Gary Hunt is illegally in possession of sensitive documents that could threaten investigations.
The post Brickbat: State Secrets appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last April, Utah passed a resolution declaring pornography a "public health hazard." The bizarre antic offered no remedy for this imagined scourge, nor any binding legislative action, but simply an assertion that porn leads "to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms."
Now the proverbial other shoe has dropped. Sen. Todd Weiler (R-Woods Cross), who sponsored last year's porn resolution, said he will soon introduce new legislation that would allow Utah residents who imagine themselves addicted to porn to sue the websites where they watch it.
"I'm trying to kind of track the same path that was taken against tobacco 70 years ago," Weiler told Utah's KSL.com. "I'm looking at where we can push the envelope as a state of Utah. To pretend that this is not having any impact on our youth, on children's' minds as they're developing, as their attitudes towards sex and the opposite sex are being formed, I think is foolish."
Weiler fancies his solution a libertarian one.
"It's not government coming in and saying what you can and can't watch," he said. "It's just basically a message to the pornography industry that if someone in Utah can prove damages from the product, that they may be held liable financially."
It's easy to laugh at melodramatic musings like Weiler's and at such tone-deaf dealings as the Utah porn resolution. But this silly "porn as public health crisis" meme seems to now be spreading to other states, egged on by folks at the group formerly known as Morality in Media.
Last week, Virginia State Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William) proposed legislation declaring porn a "public health crisis" that has reached "epidemic" proportions, the evidence of which can be seen by the fact that teenagers are—gasp—texting each other sexy pictures. (Because everyone knows that before ubiquitous internet porn, puberty-racked adolescents walked uphill both ways to and from school and never saw themselves as sexual beings…)
Despite the feverish paranoia of conservative lawmakers like Weiler and Marshall, many in the Republican rank-and-file think their party's obsession with issues like pornography is out of touch and misguided. Check out what delegates at the 2016 Republican National Convention had to say about porn's alleged public-health-hazard status in the video below.
The post Treat Porn 'Epidemic' Like We Did Tobacco, Utah Republican Proposes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At least twelve more men face felony charges in Washington for posting comments to the now-defunct web forum known as The Review Board (TRB). The dozen defendants, most of whom who will be arraigned in King County District Court on December 14, face one count each of promoting prostitution in the second degree—a charge historically used to target people who profit off of the prostitution of others but more recently favored by King County prosecutors to go after people who write positively online about area prostitution.
Prior to this new wave of charges, the King County Sheriff's Office has already prosecuted more than a dozen men in 2016 for what amounts to little more than online speech related to prostitution. Many of those men accepted plea deals after the county threatened to add additional charges and a sexual-motivation enhancement (i.e., more prison time and sex-offender status if convicted) for anyone who attempted to fight back but give those who plead guilty lenient sentencing. After initially portraying these men as a despicable ring of international sex-slave circulators, King County wound up letting most of them off with a bit of community service or electronic-home monitoring and an admission to posting on TheReviewBoard.net while knowing that it might "advance" prostitution.
The individuals whose prostitution was advanced on TRB included mostly independent, adult sex workers who also advertised their own services on the site, and some adult (mostly Asian) women who were in town temporarily working at escort agencies and had ads posted by bookers—often other sex workers or former clients—for a fee. Anyone who advertised on TRB had to be approved by site owner "Tahoe Ted," whose personal touch irked some sex workers in the area (he was sometimes accused of discriminating against women who weren't white or conventionally attractive) but also seemed to avoid the problem that plagues purely user-generated content sites like Craigslist and Backpage: underage women. In general, the point of TRB seems to have been one part digital "locker room," one part semi-curated advertising platform for sex workers, and one part system wherein both sex workers and clients (or "hobbyists," as many on the board referred to themsevles) could serve as checks and balances against bad actors on both sides.
In the latest batch of TRB-related arrests, defendants are accused of basically the same activity as the first group: reviewing Seattle-area escorts on TRB, messaging other members about local sex workers, and emailing with sex workers themselves about appointments. One of them is also accused of helping a Japanese woman who had been supporting herself as a sex worker in Guam for a few years, then Hawaii, to set up advertisements on TRB and find an apartment when she moved to Seattle, after he had struck up a casual but ongoing relationship with her in Guam years earlier. Granted, TRB posts do tend to describe semi-graphic sexual activity (although not necessarily sex; some review providers of "full body sensual massages" who don't do "full service" appointments). And emails exchanged between sex workers and defendants do hint at prostitution. But people write all sorts of things online that aren't based in reality, and without having talked to sex workers seen by defendants, or witnessed any part of any of the sessions themselves, the cops have no way of knowing whether any illegal activity—or any IRL meetings at all—took place.
This is, of course, part of the evil genius of how King County is going after people who pay for sex. With the "promoting prostitution" charge, law enforcement needn't show that defendants actually engaged in pay-to-play sexual activity themselves. All they must show is that the men "advanced" the prostitution careers of others by saying positive things about them online.
Of course, at many points throughout the overall investigation, King County deputies and cops from the Bellevue Police Department also posted graphic sexual reviews to TRB of real local sex-workers, messaged with other TRB members about them, and arranged appointments with them. According to these agencies, whose officers met undercover for many prostitution appointments, undercover cops always ducked out of "dates" before any sexual activity could go down. But that still means that the exact same activity undercover cops routinely engaged in is, too, the only activity police allege of most defendants in charging documents. If these defendants harmed the people prosecutors describe as "exploited" and "prostituted" women through such activity, it would seem King County cops are guilty of doing the same, for years.
But in certifications for determination of probable cause against new defendants, authorities present no evidence that the women these men "promoted" were being exploited, other than the mere fact that the women were engaging in sex work at all. At least a couple of the "prostituted women" mentioned in charging documents are prominent sex-worker rights activists. In the Certification for the Determination of Probable Cause against one defendant, emails from nonprofit advocacy groups such as the Sex Worker's Outreach Project (SWOP) and Center for Sex Positive Culture are even presented among evidence.
In other charging documents, defendants are found suspect for emailing with Donald Mueller, whom charging documents describe as a "convicted human trafficker" and "the primary pimp and trafficker for Korean nationals" as part of a "criminal organization named 'Seventh Heaven of Asia.'" But Mueller was not convicted of human trafficking, merely of promoting prostitution (the same charges leveled against defendants now) and the"criminal organization" was him and sometimes one other person. King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Val Richey—who signed a statement swearing to the truth of these same charging documents—described Mueller to me last June as someone who was "providing a place" for and "promoting" the prostitution of Korean sex workers, but with no "evidence that [he was] really like physically restraining or assaulting these women," or doing anything else that would allow human trafficking charges to stick.
Clients of Sex Workers Allied for Change (CoSWAC) issued a Tuesday statement "condemn[ing] this continuing crusade" and expressing solidarity "for those being arraigned tomorrow. We call on the King County prosecutor's office to put an end to this fiasco, and work to find real solutions for public safety, including the safety of sex workers in the Seattle area," it said. "We call on the people of Seattle to examine all facts before rushing to judgment, and to join us and the sex worker community in advocating for more humane and effective alternatives."
For a more in-depth look at the origins and consequences of this case, see my September Reason article, "The Truth About the Biggest U.S. Sex-Trafficking Story of the Year."
The post 'The Review Board' Bust: 12 More Men Face Felony Charges for Posting to Seattle Web Forum appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Morgan County, Alabama, Sheriff Ana Franklin says a raid on a local drywall business has nothing to do with the fact the the firm's owner has posted on a website critical of Franklin and the sheriff's office. But she won't say why the firm was raided other than it was part of a criminal investigation. The raid seized 19 electronic devices containing tax information, contracts and payroll data.
The post Brickbat: Purely Coincidence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Network TV continued to take a beating in 2015, but audiences were up for cable news programs, online content, and podcasts, according to a new report on media trends from the Pew Research Center. Some of last year's biggest media winners included CNN, which saw a 38 percent increase in prime-time viewers last year, and The Nation magazine, which saw a 68 percent increase in newstand sales. And some of last year's biggest losers? The Today Show, National Review and Wired magazines, news magazine programs such as 60 Minutes and Dateline, and the newspaper industry as a whole.
Last year was "the worst year for newspapers" since 2009-2010, according to Pew, with daily circulation falling an average of 7 percent, employment down 10 percent, and advertising revenue down 8 percent. And while digital advertising is up overall, newspaper websites haven't been big beneficiaries. Rather, almost two-thirds of digital advertising spending last year went to just five companies: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Twitter. For publicly traded newspaper companies, digital ad revenue fell 2 percent in 2015.
Network news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) also fared badly last year. While viewership for ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts was up one percent, overall "viewership data collected by Nielsen Media Research shows that in 2015 network affiliate news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) lost viewership in every key timeslot–morning, early evening and late night," Pew reports. Morning and evening audiences were down 2 percent, with late-night and mid-day audiences each down 5 percent.
But cable news is kicking ass, with viewership up eight percent in 2015 over 2014. "Cable-hosted presidential candidate debates helped drive some of the surge in viewership," notes Pew. Yet daytime cable-news programs also saw bigger audiences.
Of the major cable news networks, CNN saw the biggest audience gains, with viewership up 17 percent during the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. hours and 38 percent for prime-time programming. Fox News audiences increased by 7 percent during the day and 3 percent during primetime.
Smaller cable-news networks had a good 2015, too. Fox Business Network revenues were projected to grow by 15 percent in 2015, with CNBC revenues expected to grow 4 percent and Bloomberg TV revenues by 3 percent.
Another media bright spot comes from podcasts and streaming radio. Around one-fifth of U.S. residents ages 12 or older said they had listened to at least one podcast in the past month, up from 12 percent in 2010, and 36 percent had ever heard a podcast, up from 23 percent six years ago. Meanwhile, the number of people who had listened to streaming radio in the past month jumped from 27 percent in 2010 to 57 percent last year. And "this growth hasn't necessarily cannibalized the audience for traditional radio," notes Pew. NPR's major news programs attract around 12 million listeners, and 91 percent of Pew survey respondents aged 12 and up said they had listened to traditional radio in the past month.
Digital content is doing okay, too, despite the lackluster status of ad revenues. It's a major source for U.S. political news, with 65 percent of respondents in the Pew study saying they had learned about the 2016 presidential election from a digital source in the preceding week (48 percent from news sites or apps, 44 percent from social media). This is up substantially from 2012, when a mere 17 percent of U.S. adults said that they regularly turned to social media for election news and just 36 percent turned to any digital news source for campaign coverage. From Pew:
Indeed, for each of the four sectors studied in this analysis–newspapers, news magazines, national television news outlets and digital-native publishers–a majority of outlets (77 out of 110) grew their average monthly total digital audience in the fourth quarter of 2015, compared to the same period in 2014. For the 50 newspapers studied, 33 grew their average monthly unique visitors, and for the 12 news magazines, nine did. Looking at the eight national television news outlets, including the major networks, cable channels and Hispanic broadcasters, six increased their traffic. Finally, 29 out of the 40 digital-native news sites studied here experienced growth.
It's a mixed bag for print news magazines. Of the 14 magazines Pew studied, print sales figures ranged from a rise of 65 percent (for The Nation) to a loss of 37 percent (for National Review). Other losers included The Week (down 35 percent) and Wired (down 25 percent). Sales of New York magazine, meanwhile, were up 44 percent. The Atlantic experienced the biggest overall circulation increase: 2 percent.
On average, single copy (i.e. newsstand) sales for news magazines were down 3 percent in 2015 and subscriptions were down two percent. "All but four of the 14 news magazines studied experienced overall circulation decline," Pew notes. And while web traffic for these magazines was up in 2015, the average time spent on the sites was down.
A few more interesting tidbits from the Pew report:
The Brits are coming for our web traffic: American web traffic to dailymail.co.uk and theguardian.com would put these U.K. papers in the top five U.S.-based papers by web traffic.
Mobile trumps desktop: Desktop digital traffic fell for 39 of the 50 newspaper websites studied, but mobile traffic rose for 43 of the 50 papers.
Business booming for cable news stations: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were all projected to grow their profits in 2015, with Fox News profits up by about a fifth (to $1.5 billion), CNN up 17 percent (to $381 million), and MSNBC up 10 percent (to $227 million).
Mixed news for morning news programs: The Today Show viewership has declined 17 percent since 2008, but audiences for ABC's Good Morning America and CBS's This Morning are up 15 and 17 percent, respectively.
Face the Nation reigns on Sundays: Audiences are up for the Sunday political shows on non-cable stations, including CBS' Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, and NBC's Meet the Press. Of these, Face the Nation is the highest rated, followed by Meet the Press, which had a 13 percent viewership increase in 2015. Fox News Sunday viewership was up 10 last year over the previous year.
"News magazine programs" falling out of favor: Combined viewership for six network news-magazine programs (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, 20/20, Nightline, Dateline Friday, and Dateline Sunday) were down 5 percent last year over 2014 and 16 percent since 2008.
Alt-weeklies also floundering: Circulation is down 11 percent from 2014 to 2015 at the top 20 newsweeklies across America. "While much of this year's change was driven by substantial drops at large publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly, circulation did decline across the board," notes Pew. Just two alt-weeklies saw an increase in circulation of more than 1 percent, and neither increase was more than 4 percent.
The post Presidential Politics Pays Off for Cable News, But Networks and Newspapers Continue to Flounder appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Recent revelations that Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel has been quietly underwriting lawsuits against digital muckraking platform Gawker have doused new fuel on a simmering conflict between technologists and journalists. But this current dustup is about a lot more than the bad blood between these two behemoths. It's about creative destruction in news media and the friction of dealing with a world in which many of the remaining information-gatekeepers are being disrupted.
On the surface, this incident appears personal, so the resulting discussion has tended to be largely tribal. Thiel, who was incensed when the defunct Gawker tech-news site Valleywag outed him as a homosexual, views Gawker and its founder Nick Denton as unethical rumormongers who profit from slander and "bullying people even when there [is] no connection with the public interest." Journalists at Gawker and many other publications see things a bit differently. And from their position, a powerful tech billionaire acting as an angel-investor in lawsuits against controversial media companies appears immediately threatening to their means of earning a living and to the freedom of the press more broadly.
Of course, funding a legal case on another's behalf does not in itself affect a court's decision—particularly when the underwriter remains anonymous, as Thiel did. As Eugene Kontorovich of the Volokh Conspiracy pointed out at the The Washington Post, a violation of privacy is a violation of privacy, and it doesn't matter whether the case was self-funded, aided by public interest groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), or even paid for by a lone technologist. Yet this plain fact is ill comfort for those digital journalists harboring existential anxieties about their place in society and their relationship to powerful groups that they fear can make or break their livelihoods.
As Goes Gawker…
Most of this is overblown. Gawker versus Thiel isn't really about Gawker or Thiel. Rather, this incident can be better understood as a dramatic escalation of a difficult technological trend in news media that has been perceived but ignored for some time. Silicon Valley has built technologies that are disrupting both traditional and new channels of information distribution alike. The Gawker/Thiel spectacle is at its core a story about the pains of creative destruction.
The Internet has had an accelerating effect on media. Online platforms like Gawker became successful in the brutal market of News 2.0 by delivering the salacious content that their readers demanded—and fast. The buzz and ad dollars generated by "junk food" clickbait were then channeled to such platforms' more serious news operations. Gawker vehicles published tabloid gossip and commentary, but also broke a genuine scoop or two. Indeed, only a few weeks ago, Gizmodo broke the major story that Facebook might be politically censoring conservative stories on the platform. Legacy news organizations, meanwhile, were left to ape these proven clickbait techniques while trying to maintain some level of journalistic integrity and content.
The legacy establishments were not safe from techno-colonization, either. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes caused a veritable exodus from The New Republic after he unveiled his plans to reshape the recently-purchased magazine as a "vertically integrated digital media company" last year. The Washington Post, too, was poached by Amazon's Jeff Bezos in 2014, who proceeded to oversee experiments with PostEverything, Storyline, and Morning Mix. ESPN had Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight, the New York Times had the Upshot, the Atlantic had Quartz. By 2015, the Atlantic was gushing over how the Buzzfeed-age was "[changing] the way the news industry works." NBCUniversal put major money into Vox and Buzzfeed a few months later.
Considered in context, Gawker cannot be pigeonholed as merely a lone muckraker spewing irrelevant garbage. It did do that, but it also piloted and perfected a new form of news media that eventually came to dominate the industry.
As goes Gawker, so could go the world of the chattering classes. News media companies and outside investors have poured millions of dollars into such platforms since the last recession. Native digital platforms promised decent news gigs for new journalists trying to launch a career. Much of the news industry has been reoriented around the new digital structure. And before we know it, the whole thing could come crashing down.
From Disrupters to the Disrupted
The Code Conference describes itself as "an invitation-only event where top industry influencers gather for in-depth conversations about the current and future impact of digital technology on our lives." The event is hosted by Recode of the Vox media family and draws some of the biggest names in technology and media. Nick Denton was there last week, firing off against "thin-skinned Silicon Valley billionaires." The next day, Silicon Valley billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos shared his vision to build factories on the moon. Fellow billionaire Elon Musk later opined that humans may already be cyborgs.
The color commentary from these figures largely overshadowed one of the most important speeches of the day: Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet trends report. Meeker is a partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of the most established venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Each year, her data-heavy slides on the pulse and trends of the technology world is considered essential reading for everyone involved in this space. She foresaw robust penetration in foreign markets in the early 2000's and the fast rise of mobile by the end. This year, her outlook is rather bleak.
Internet growth is slowing down and may portend a global economic downturn. Profits gained from the low-hanging fruit of targeting developing countries for new devices and Internet services are dwindling at a worrying rate. What's worse, many online ads are now known to be ineffective or even counterproductive. China is slowing down. India probably cannot save us. "Easy growth is behind us," Meeker conceded.
If Meeker's inclinations are correct, then much of the drama surrounding the Gawker/Thiel dispute becomes more understandable. New-media companies boldly entered into a Faustian bargain with technology. They leveraged the scale and speed that the internet affords to bypass old gatekeepers and remake the media in their image. But the catch was significant: Keep up, or get left behind. Clicks became a currency which was steadily debased. Good reporting and analysis became an unfortunate casualty. When enough market players realize that these companies are massively overvalued, it's going to get ugly.
We can already observe the beginning of the downturn right now. Top traffic generators such as Gawker, FiveThirtyEight, and Mediaite have suffered sharp declines in visits over the past months. A week after it raised $15 million with Turner Broadcasting, Mashable cut its whole political reporting unit, much of its global news team, and a handful of its editorial video producers. The International Business Times and VICE are having trouble as well and Buzzfeed has had to slash over-optimistic forecasts premised on constant growth. Even Gawker had started to trim down and button up before this latest brouhaha cropped up to crystallize the angst of this cohort's impending economic doom.
There is a kind of irony in the new media's rallying salvo against the Silicon Valley technologists that now seem to have the upper hand. Nate Silver provides a good example of this position: "Silicon Valley has unprecedented, monopolistic power over the future of journalism. So much power that its moral philosophy matters."
Now that the technological wave that recently compelled new media companies to power threatens to crash on their own heads, they start to sound more like the legacy media companies that they once upended. As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen shot back: "Journalism was, of course, far more centralized, homogenous, and monopolistic before the Internet." The disrupters have become the disrupted in only a few short years, and it's probably only going to accelerate.
Information Markets Want to Be Free
So what comes next?
Some new-media platforms may reorganize and survive, but not without major bloodletting and a good amount of grumbling. Many of them could close completely or be rolled into another outlet. Legacy news organizations that have maintained a reputation for deep analysis and factual reporting may find themselves in a better position as consumers seek out more trusted sources of information. But it's unlikely that the "fast food" internet reporting that has dominated the industry will continue in its current form.
This is not to say that people will not crave digital junk. They will, but they will be able to get it using a much cheaper apparatus.
Several groups of developers have been working on launching decentralized "information markets" that empower people to deliver news and data directly to those who value it the most. This can be as simple as posting a bounty for information that will be paid upon verification of facts, or as complex as a conditional futures market that interprets market prices as a "prediction" of future events. As Robin Hanson, one of the leading information-market theoreticians, explains, "the fact that a trader must 'put his money where his mouth is' means that the things people do say in information markets can be more easily believed."
You're probably already familiar with one kind of information market: the prediction market. InTrade was a popular prediction market that allowed people to buy and sell "contracts" about the likelihood of some future event. It became well-known during political elections because its market prices provided insight into each candidate's odds throughout the campaign. Unfortunately, a fluke of U.S. commodities futures regulations brought scrutiny upon the platform in 2012, which led to InTrade's eventual demise.
Some developers are building information markets on top of distributed blockchain technologies so that there is no "operator" to target and shut down. The Darkleaks project, for instance, allowed whistleblowers and criminals alike to verify and sell sensitive information anonymously on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Augur market is built on the Ethereum platform and seeks to harness the profit mechanism to optimize forecasting. BitBet is similar, but built on Bitcoin. In each of these cases, there is theoretically no "Intrade, Inc." that a body like the CFTC can target to take down. This will not, of course, save project developers from an overzealous regulatory body that simply makes up new authority. But in many cases, technology does have a way of getting around regulations—if only because it moves so fast.
Information technology is accelerating so rapidly that it can undermine the leaders who thought themselves to be ahead of the curve before they really even realize it. The techniques that are championed by today's titan of media technology can tomorrow just as easily undermine the large-scale news operations they built. The future of news media has never been more uncertain, but one thing is for sure: Modern journalists are living in interesting times indeed.
The post New Media Versus Silicon Valley appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Good news for folks who care about Internet freedom and the First Amendment: a federal appeals court just affirmed that classified-advertising sites aren't generally liable for content posted by users. The case stems from a civil lawsuit filed against Backpage.com by three women who said they were forced into prostitution and that perpetrators had advertised their services on Backpage. The plaintiffs said this makes Backpage complicit in their abuse and sought damages from the company.
They had no luck with this argument in a district court, which ruled against them. "The existence of an escorts section in a classified ad service, whatever its social merits, is not illegal," wrote Judge Rihard Sterns in his decision. By merely providing a platform for these ads, Backpage's actions "amount to neither affirmative participation in an illegal venture nor active web content creation," and therefore fail to forfeit the benefits provided by the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996.
Under Section 230 of the CDA, "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." In effect, this means that "online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (For more on why section 230 is so valuable, see here.)
"Congress did not sound an uncertain trumpet when it enacted the CDA and chose to enact broad protections to internet publishers," held the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in its recent decision. If "the evils that the appellants have identified are deemed to outweigh the First Amendment values that drive the CDA, the remedy is through legislation, not through litigation."
Rob Rogers, senior counsel with the law firm Holland and Knight, said the First Circuit's opinion in the civil case "signals that at least one Circuit Court will not accept plaintiffs' invitations to chill the commercial use of websites by eroding the CDA."
This is important, because there's been a "rising frequency of lawsuits attempting to chip away at CDA immunity," according to Rogers, "particularly as website operators await the Ninth Circuit's decision following its rehearing in Jane Doe No. 14 v. Internet Brands, in which the Ninth Circuit initially ruled in 2014 that the CDA does not bar actions against website operators for failure to warn."
The plaintiffs in the Backpage case had tried to argue that CDA immunity did not apply in their case because Backpage was actively participating in a sex trafficking venture—in violation of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000—by offering an escort-ad section and employing certain (site-wide) rules that allow for user anonymity. Yet any "claims that a website facilitates illegal conduct through its posting rules necessarily treat the website as a publisher or speaker of content provided by third parties and, thus, are precluded by Section 230(c)(1)" of the CDA, the First Cicuit held.
The federal Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA), passed in 2015, states explicitly that that advertising a victim of sex trafficking is a crime of the same calibur as sex trafficking, in a move that many legislators hoped would help shut down Backpage. But it remains to be seen how courts will interpret the role of advertiser here. Is it the person who drafts and posts an ad, or the venue where the ad runs?
Backpage is currently suing the federal government over this provision, which it claims is unconstitutionally vague. The law "does not define 'advertises' or 'advertising,'" Backpage complains. "The ambiguity of the terms .. is compounded by legislator's statements that the Act was intended to impose criminal liability on Backpage.com (or other websites) for 'facilitating' or 'profiting' from sex trafficking when individuals misuse the site."
This isn't Backpage's only ongoing battle with the U.S. government. In October, the CEO refused to show up in Congress to testify on a panel about human trafficing. Last week, the Senate passed a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress.
The post Another Win for Internet Freedom, First Amendment in First Circuit's Backpage Ruling appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For a minute, it felt like we were on the world's most mundane secret mission: at 6 p.m., you will be emailed a secret location in Dupont Circle. Talk to no one about it. Enter through the bar and proceed down into the basement area—if anyone asks, say you're looking for Luke. There, awaiting you, will be… a conference table full of bloggers and a raging narcissist pissed at the media. Woo-hoo, Saturday night!
The reason for all this intrigue was a press conference hosted by 36-year-old writer Daryush Valizadeh, better known as "Roosh V." Though he started out in the mid-aughts preaching the gospel of "pickup artistry," that particular phenomenon has fallen out of vogue. Now Roosh heads up what he calls the "neomasculinity" movement, using his blog and the men's website Return of Kings as headquarters, along with selling self-published books about how to bang women in other countries. Until last week, he was mostly unknown outside avid followers and avid opponents. But that changed when Roosh arranged social meetups for fans in cities around the world, and a lot of activists, journalists, and politicians lost their collective minds about it.
Make no mistake: I am no fan of Roosh's writing or worldview, though I find his schtick more sleazy than terrifying, more Milo Yiannopoulos than "KKK of misogyny." On the way to Saturday's press conference, a journalist friend with me had much better humor about the whole spectacle. The self-important security scheme, the aggrieved victimhood dripping from Roosh's tweets—he was clearly loving this, and a part of me hated feeding into it. But I was going, out of a combination of curiosity, the potential newsworthiness, and it falling into the category of "too weird not to."
But perhaps Roosh was only responding in kind to the sort of paranoia with which he'd been greeted around the globe all week.
In Australia, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said he would consider denying a Roosh a visa. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that "Australia doesn't welcome people to our country who disrespect women." In general, Australian media reported on a Roosh tweet saying "The border is weak. I will get in" and "I have the funds to get in by boat through one of multiple weak points. Money is no barrier to the operation" as if they were deadly serious.
The U.K. House of Commons debated Roosh on February 4, during which Kate Green MP asked for Return of Kings fans to be deemed a "hate group"—a designation that that would make membership illegal. Home Office minister Karen Bradley MP noted that "the home secretary has powers to exclude an individual who is not a British citizen" if their presence isn't "conducive to the public good"—though she "cannot comment on individual cases"—and said she would consult with internet service providers and sites such as Facebook about possibly banning Return of Kings content. More than 40,000 people signed an online petition calling on authorities to ban Roosh from entering the U.K. and to "take all available action in this case to prevent [fan] meetings taking place," citing their "terror against women" as justification.
A similar online petition, this one signed by more than 45,000 people, warned that "there is strong evidence indicating that 'RooshV' has entered Canada and is in Montreal. We ask Mayor Bonnie Crombie of Mississauga, Mayor John Tory of Toronto, and Mayor Denis Corderre of Montreal to denounce 'RooshV' and to urge local businesses and organizations to deny him accommodation while in Canada." The petition claimed that Roosh would be coming to Canada in violation of section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which bans meeting for the purpose "of inciting hatred of an identifiable group."
In America, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott put out an official statement that "this pathetic group and their disgusting viewpoints are not welcome in Texas."
District of Columbia police indicated that they had an eye on a scheduled meetup in the nation's capital. Des Moines, Iowa, police put out a Facebook message warning that the meetups "may be a ruse to commit rape. We have no information that this will actually take place but we recommend that no one, men or women go to any of the sites."
At Chicago's Loyola University, sexual assault survivors were warned to avoid the area where one local meetup was scheduled, a meetup local police said they were "well aware" of and would be "monitoring." At the University of Rochester in New York, campus admins called in extra school security officers and city police for a meetup there, sending out an all-campus alert that Roosh "offers extreme writings based on his philosophy of Neomasculinity."
The school "does not believe the event will actually happen, but is still taking precautionary measure to ensure student safety," the local Democrat and Chronicle reported. These measures included consulting with the New York State Intelligence Center, which decided that there was "no evidence to suggest a gang, group, or organization is involved."
'The Most Hated Man in America'
At Saturday's press event, five women and maybe a dozen men fill the room, folks I would soon learn work for places such as The Washington Post, DCist, Wonkette, Washingtonian magazine, Vice, The Daily Beast, and a German television station. At a few minutes after 7 p.m., Roosh comes charging through the door, sizing everyone up, barking orders about who could film where and complaining about the room's low energy. Within minutes, he says—not entirely chagrined—that he's been called the "most hated man in America."
Though their demeanors are very different and their views opposed, Roosh reminds me of another Internet-famous man who was called that, Hugo Schwyzer. A former Pasadena Community College professor and male-feminist writer for places like Jezebel and The Atlantic, Hugo's sex scandals (sleeping with students among them) and public mental-health breakdown—playing out in real time on Twitter—were very much a big thing from my vantage point in the women's blogosphere. Not only was everyone on feminist Twitter talking about it, but Schwyzer was also covered in a lot of mainstream American and U.K. outlets. A hashtag, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, sprung up around allegations that Schwyzer had fucked over feminists of color. The U.K. Telegraph suggested he might be "evil incarnate."
A few years later, in D.C., whenever I've mentioned Schwyzer to writer friends or colleagues, no one knows anything about him. That the whole dramatic Hugo saga had only really been relevant and salient to a small segment of the Internet, I was sure—but I hadn't realized how truly small that segment was. "Male feminist sex scandal" gets clicks, but it doesn't stick in people's minds. I bring it up because I think this Roosh situation is very similar. The story has been magnified out of all proportion because for a lot of traffic-thirsty web writers or editors, putting "pro-rape activists" in headlines or tweets is too good to pass up—even if it may not technically be true and props up a man and movement they claim to abhor. But while it's likely to have limited reach and flash-in-the-pan stickiness for most, the Roosh situation is still interesting as a case study of collective catharsis through call-out culture and moral panic as meme.
The root of the "pro-rape" accusation is a Roosh blog post ("How to Stop Rape") that proposes legalizing rape on private property. Roosh claims it was "a thought experiment" or satire—a disclaimer on the post now says as much—and says he doesn't think rape should be legal anywhere. Many protest that Roosh's P.S. isn't authentic. And even if it is, "the idea driving this 'satire' seems to be either that women are usually responsible for their own rapes, or that they routinely call something rape when it isn't," Emily Crockett writes at Vox.
But call it a "thought experiment" or call it trolling, I do think Roosh was being deliberately hyperbolic and provocative, as is his style, and does not believe in literally legalizing rape.
Regardless, though, does it matter if his original intent was earnest proposal if he since recanted? It shows the so-called "social justice warriors" won. Or, in less absurd terms: sane and individual-autonomy respecting views are such the social norm that even someone who states outright that his ideal society is "traditional" and "patriarchal" won't publicly condone sexual violence against women.
Literary Affect
At the press conference, Roosh tends to minimize his more outrageous statements. Perhaps it's all smoke and mirrors, but what emerges is a picture much less flattering to the international Lothario image Roosh projects but much more flattering to him as both a savvy self-brander and a human being.
"Macho sex writing—to convert that to 'rape' takes such a leap of faith that you have to be a liar," he says when about scenes in his series of "bang books" that have been described as pro-rape.
"You literally say they were 'too incapacitated' to consent," challenges Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey.
"Macho sex writing is not a court," Roosh fires back. "It's not a piece of evidence….Maybe some things [in the books], I wanted to come across as an aggressive guy. Maybe I do. But just because it's [in the books] doesn't mean that there is a victim out there and she suffered. Have I raped anyone? No."
So the stories were fiction? asks another reporter. No, said Roosh—but maybe they were his "interpretation" of his events.
The bottom line, though, is that "not a single woman has been hurt by me," says Roosh. "I've never been accused of rape, I've never been charged. No follower of mine has read something of [mine], and then gone on to rape, because I know if they did hurt a woman it'd be all over the news."
The whole thing calls to mind two more male writers: Matt Taibbi, probably best known for his work at Rolling Stone, and Mark Ames, who now writes for outlets such as Pando. The pair worked together at an English-language newspaper in Russia in the late '90s and subsequently published a book about the experience called The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia. Within this book, there are scenes of the mostly-male Exile editors sexually harassing their administrative staff—going so far as to tell secretaries they must sleep with them to keep their jobs—and Ames threatening to kill his pregnant Russian girlfriend if she doesn't get an abortion. The men never claimed at the time that it was satire or fiction. In explaining, Ames was prone to saying things like "Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them."
Despite this, Taibbi and Ames have continued to flourish as leftist writers, and as far as I know no feminist groups or Canadian mayors have tried to prevent either from visiting the country. Perhaps they're just lucky to have come of age in a different Internet era. Perhaps it helps that their politics and progressive credentials are otherwise right.
None of Roosh's views are right, from the left's perspective. From the perspective of most Americans, really. His work routinely stresses that women should be "submissive," that their highest value is as sex objects and mothers, and that America would be greater if only women were skinnier and had less sex outside marriage.
But while such views on gender roles are far from normative in 21st-century America, it's not as if they're relegated solely to Roosh and his crowd. There are still a good deal of evangelical Christians who preach female submission to their husbands, with a lot of blogs kept about the subject. There's a lot of popular music about how bitches ain't shit. There are immigrants from many cultures where egalitarian gender roles aren't standard. We don't—and shouldn't—prevent any of these groups from meeting or monitor them when they do.
What's more, people with sexually deviant turn-ons or loony, bigoted, and just plain unpopular ideas get together all the time. Unless there's evidence they're plotting something criminal, authorities should back the fuck off, really.
Freedom of the Manosphere
As much as we might hate to admit it, Roosh is a journalist. His main site, Return of Kings—one of the hubs of what's sometimes called the "Manosphere"—and its forums get nearly two million visits per month. As neither Roosh nor any writers or readers of Return of Kings were under suspicion of criminal behavior, it is at the very least bizarre that law-enforcement officials would feel the need to comment and keep an eye on their gathers. And it's probably the kind of thing we should condemn, those of us interested in freedom of speech, press, movement, and association.
People will object that these groups were "pro-rape" meetups. But outside media misinformation, there was nothing about the proposed happy hours to suggest they had anything to do with rape.
"Starting on [January 31], a lot of you have lied by saying I am a 'pro rape advocate,'" Roosh tells the press gathered with him Saturday. Outlets also said the fan meetups were about "learning how to rape. 'They're going to exchange tips.' Some of you have even called it a rape rally. A rape—what the hell is that, a rape rally?"
There was no public elements planned for the 163 gatherings. Roosh calls them "social happy hour[s]" where men could "meet in private to talk about anything—work, politics, girls." The plan for each was to meet in a public place and then migrate to a nearby bar.
Subjecting these men to police surveillance and intimidation based on the state's perception of a publication they like seems a bit totalitarian, no? Let the bitter, horny, heterosexual men have a safe space, too.
Do You Even Lift?
On February 3, a post on Return of Kings announced that the meetups would be canceled. "I can no longer guarantee the safety or privacy of the men who want to attend," Roosh wrote. "While I can't stop men who want to continue meeting in private groups, there will be no official Return Of Kings meetups."
At Saturday's press event, someone asks why Roosh's cadre of alleged alpha-men would cancel get-togethers over a little thing like feminist protests or a few police cars. "Because you have gotten governments involved by lying about their intention," he responds. "Now the world thinks they're going to meet to, uh, to rape people. So why are they going to meet now? Do you think it's smart now for them to go and meet after that?"
Roosh goes on to suggest this reporter himself certainly wouldn't have gone in those circumstances, adding, "I mean, do you lift?"
It is hard to tell if this is performance or not, creating a psychic uncanny valley not dissimilar to the effect of Donald Trump's—Roosh's favorite 2016 presidential candidate, by the way. Asked what he likes about Trump, Roosh replies that it's because "he hates you guys too. The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Someone suggests that hating the media isn't a political ideology. "But anti-establishment is," Roosh replies.
Anti-media as he may proclaim to be, it's not inconceivable that Roosh organized and then canceled the social meetups precisely in order to gain media attention. Being prevented from meeting only fuels his followers' narrative of hysterical, punitive feminists and a "cucked" media beholden to identity politics. All of it drives more web traffic.
Asked whether this controversy had been good for him, Roosh says it is "the best and the worst. I mean, what's going to happen now is I'm going to be known, in the media, as a 'pro-rape' advocate for the rest of my life. 'Oh, that's the guy that believes all women should be raped.' But at the same time, they're going to say, that's the guy, I know his name."
Roosh claims to live "somewhere in Europe," though he grew up in Maryland, where he says he's currently visiting family. He told Dewey he doesn't know why the house he claims is his mother's is registered under his name.
Media Malpractice
Roosh has no regrets about publishing the "How to Prevent Rape" essay, he says. "That article was making a point about personal responsibility, that a woman's safety is not only in the hands of men but it's in their own hands too. And I guess that point didn't get through, so on that account, I did fail. I failed to give the point. But that doesn't mean I did anything wrong."
Sexist pig or not—remember when people just called people sexist pigs or "chauvinists," instead of branding them dangerous on an international level?—Roosh is correct on some key points about modern media.
Asked if he could acknowledge that his writing was offensive, Roosh responds "So what if you're offended? So what if I make fun of you? Is that where we're at now, that we can't write things that hurt people's feelings? Good, get offended, feel something."
"Do I believe that a woman should submit to a man?" he says. "Yes. Does that mean that my family's address should be put online because of that, and the media staking out their home because of what I write? No."
After the hacker-collective Anonymous "doxxed" Roosh's family (i.e., revealed their home address online)—info since confirmed by The Daily Mail—Roosh says he has received "dozens" of threats of violence and arson. "Your work, and the work of your colleagues, has incited a mob, based on lies, that has put my family in danger," he chastises media Saturday. "If they get hurt right now, God forbid, it's because of you."
Roosh himself has been accused of inviting fans to dox journalists who cross him. But he insists he merely asked followers to gather publicly available information on journalists, such as their home cities and Twitter handles. "I never said I was going to share their address, that was another lie," he says Saturday. "It's like you guys can't stop lying." (Truly, the Taylor Swift of MRA bloggers, folks.) He complains that "it's like a game" for media, cutting-and-pasting from one another's stories when they see they're generating hits.
There was a hint of "holy shit" in many of Roosh's statements, an incredulity that anyone who works or spends a lot of time on the Internet many sympathize with. Sometimes the media—mainstream, ideological, fringe, local, global, whatever—is just astonishingly bad. From the Chinese man who sued his wife for bearing ugly children to eggs being "as bad for you as smoking," the influx of Super Bowl sex-slaves to the hordes of sexist "Bernie Bros," the press routinely, en masse, gets things totally wrong.
Sometimes this is rooted in bias, but just as often it's a more economic than ideological imperative, a mandate to produce fast copy that generates good traffic. This means many writers take the veracity of other publications' reporting for granted. When the original account is incorrect, inaccuracies and distortions can spread like a game of Telephone from The Huffington Post to Jezebel to The Guardian, and so on.
Asked whether he considers himself a victim, Roosh says "You know what, no. I take full responsibility for everything that I have done. But that doesn't mean that I can't state what you did wrong."
Vanity Virtue
At The Washington Post, Caitlyn Dewey argues that "the number of people who actually follow Daryish Valizadeh is smaller than it looks."
"While his flagship website, Return of Kings, is well-trafficked—averaging slightly less than 2 million views per month, according to Similar Web—that number is not necessarily indicative of the size of Valizadeh's following," writes Dewey. "On both Twitter and Facebook, Return of Kings has fewer than 13,000 followers. The site's accompanying forums have registered 19,600 accounts, but half have never posted."
Dewey calls the whole Roosh situation "manufactured publicity on a scale that few fringe Internet movements have ever dreamed of." On Twitter, Roosh is milking it for all he can.
But on his blog, Roosh condemns the very sort of manufactured controversy he's complicit in. "Instead of focusing your anger on real problems in your neighborhood, city, and country, the media has made you emotional against a man who poses absolutely no threat to anyone," he chastises his opponents. "I'm being used as a target so that you can expend your rage on me instead of other entities that are genuinely hurting your standard of living."
It's obnoxiously self-aggrandizing but…also not untrue. Roosh's assessment of what's hurting people's standard of living is probably vastly different than mine, as both are also vastly different from media-criticizing leftists like Freddie de Boer. But one thing we all agree on is a similar diagnosis: online media prioritizes sensationalism and righteous signaling over accuracy and nuance. This is far from ahistorical, of course, but it also makes modern media much less "progressive" than many in it would like to think.
At the end of Roosh's press conference, I come away feeling more charitable about him than I did going in, which could mean he's a good showman, a sociopath, someone conflicted (both Crockett and Emmett Rensin at Vox offer profiles to this effect), or simply that he's neither a terribly sympathetic person nor cartoonishly evil. In any event, the clickbaity portrayal of him as some outlandish misogynist villain, ready to storm Australia via private yacht and host how-to-rape seminars globally, overshadows more interesting and perhaps revelatory components of the manosphere phenomenon.
If reporters had tried to talk to the men attending Return of Kings meetups, instead of insta-demonizing them, what might they have found? Rage-filled rape advocates? "Beta males" who "don't even lift?" How many of them? What way do they lean politically? What draws them to Roosh's writing? Are these guys with power, or guys trying to cope with not having power?
These would be informative things to know. Instead we have overblown fears and parody villains, predictable liberal responses, wasted opportunities. Rape is bad and good people should be against it—everybody got that? Because as common sense as that might be, it's also the only major takeaway an international press corps has established here.
The Return of Kings meetups gave the popular media and its acolytes the latest opportunity to assert their goodness, to feel the catharsis of raging in solidarity. But was even one person's opinion changed, or anyone's ability to understand one another increased?
The post How Maryland 'Neomasculinity' Blogger Roosh V Became an International 'Pro-Rape' Villain appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today in everything is problematic: Comedian Kate Quigley hosted the AVN Adult Entertainment Awards, at which rapper Waka Flocka Flame performed. When a video of her twerking on him backstage was uploaded to YouTube, it quickly went viral as an example of cultural appropriation from a "wasted embarrassing white girl."
The title of the YouTube video, "Woman confronts Waka Flocka Flame"—which has more than a 1.3 million views—is "also pretty problematic," opined April Siese at Death and Taxes magazine. A post at the popular men's blog Barstool Sports was (jokingly?) titled "This White Girl Trying To Twerk On Waka Flocka Flame Is Not Helping Race Relations."
Quigley responded in an Instagram post, since taken down: "I've been pretty quiet about this whole twerk video thing. BUT 'RACE RELATIONS??!!' Give me a break!! SMH. Waka & me are cool. I saw him yesterday. Was obviously a joke & he thought it was hilarious. Good lord…"
When bombarded by TMZ at the airport this week, Waka explained that "actually, we set that up."
"We staged that just to see how many people would just go… 'look at her being a ho! That's hella racist' and stuff," he told TMZ. "You just see how people just run with shit. And it just goes to show how people just, they don't look into nothing."
"We didn't think it was going to go viral," he added. "I only did it just for comedy. I'm a comical person. I like having fun."
The post 'Problematic' and 'Wasted Embarrassing White Girl' Twerking on Waka Flocka Flame Is a Comedian, You Guys appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>American writer and "pickup artist" Roosh V is causing a bit of hysteria abroad in countries where citizens are even more likely than they are here to say that offensive speech is "dangerous." The trouble started when Roosh V—real name Daryush Valizadeh—announced the organization of 165 simultaneous meetups on February 6 for followers of his "neomasculinity" movement, including gatherings across American and in countries such as Australia, Canada, Chile, England, Israel, and Scotland. Soon thereafter, activists in the U.K. and Canada began protesting the meetups, which they have labeled as "pro rape" events.
(Update: The meetups have all been canceled by Valizadeh)
Granted, Valizadeh doesn't have the most progressive views on romantic relations. And in stories about his sexual exploits, he often crosses into consent grey areas. But being a brute or a cad isn't illegal, and neither is writing rapey tall-tales. Nor is meeting with like-minded people to express unpopular views.
Of course, this is exactly the problem for some, who are calling on their governments to ban Valizadeh from even entering the country, to ban his fans from meeting up, and to criminalize all anti-woman "hate speech"—an impossibly broad category that seems to include everything from common insults to political expression at odds with feminism.
As of February 3, more than 55,000 people had signed a petition calling for the Scottish government to prevent Valizadeh from entering the country. "Promoting rape is hate speech, and should be treated as such," the petition reads.
Sandy Brindley of Rape Crisis Scotland has been organizing with other women's groups to protest Roosh V meetups in Scotland and pressure authorities to close the "gap in the criminal law" by designating "incitement of hatred against women" as a hate crime. "If what [Valizadeh] is doing is promoting rape then an incitement to hatred offence would enable us to deal with that," she told The National. But as a Scottish government spokesperson pointed out, making "threats of sexual violence" is already against the law in Scotland, as is harassment that would "be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm."
Over in Canada, the mayors of cities where Roosh V meetups are planned took to the Internet to voice their displeasure. "Your pro-rape, misogynistic, homophobic garbage is not welcome in Ottawa," tweeted Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson. Toronto Mayor John Torry tweeted that Roosh V "doesn't reflect the values of Toronto and his statements about women are demeaning and unacceptable." And Vancouver police have assured residents that they will be monitoring the Roosh V meetup there.
All this for a dude with a blog and some self-published books? Or, rather, the fans of some dude with a blog and self-published books? I mean, look, I've been aware of Valizadeh since he blogged under "D.C. Bachelor" back in the mid-aughts, and I find his views as gross as his capacity for self-promotion is impressive, but … come on. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that either Valizadeh or his fans intend any sort of public spectacle during these meetups, let alone any violence or incitements to violence against women. The entirety of activists' "case" for keeping them out, or under the watchful eye of law enforcement, is that they simply do not like what these men believe.
And that's rather insane for anyone who claims to be sticking up for the rights of the vulnerable, marginalized, or oppressed. Because a government allowed to whimsically ban someone from entering the country or ban a group of people from associating based purely on dislike for the content of their beliefs is sure as shit not a government that's going to stop with pickup artists. Throughout history, limits on freedom of speech and association have come down hard on the left, because it's the left that most frequently challenges the status quo. Lip service to social justice goals notwithstanding, there's no reason to think that people in power are going to suddenly stop with this centuries-long tendency now.
What's more, this sort of illiberal behavior from the left only enables those with views like Roosh V fans. As Charlie Peters writes at Spiked, "when you censor extreme views, you force them underground where they escape criticism and become even more radical. If our politicians will not allow us to debate Valizadeh, then how do they ever expect his brand of nonsense to be repudiated?"
The post All Anti-Feminist Talk Would Be Criminal 'Hate Speech' If U.K. Activists Get Their Way appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, by Jamie Bartlett, Melville House, 308 pages, $27.95
The most paranoid fantasy about what happens in the darkest corners when humanity is unsupervised online might look something like the assassination markets described in Jamie Bartlett's The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld. The idea, hatched by the anarchist Jim Bell, is to allow anonymous digital cash donations toward the slaying of public figures. Correctly predicting the death date wins the bettor a payoff, based on the sly presumption that the reason you got it right was that you caused the death. The idea, Bartlett explains, was to exert "a populist pressure on elected representatives to be good." This grim technofantasy for angry dissidents has not, as far as we know, ever paid off.
Bartlett directs the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the British think tank Demos (not to be confused with the liberal American think tank of the same name). He began his breezy and humane book expecting to find more clear-cut cases of people and behaviors to condemn and proscribe. But what he ended up finding was just human beings: dedicated, troubled, incendiary, funny, craving to be heard and understood. Welcome to the Dark Net. Welcome to the human race.
Early in the book, Bartlett tackles the topic of "trolls," whose behavior ranges from flogging obscure running gags at sites where they are not welcome to outright harassment (comedically, they think, though they must know and not care that their targets might not find it funny). Especially when it consists of "doxing"—revealing the actual identities and addresses of the people behind the words on the Internet—trolling can and does sometimes lead to suicides, relationships destroyed, families split apart, careers ended.
Demonstrating the inevitability of the troll phenomenon, Bartlett traces it back to the earliest days of Arpanet, BBSes, and Usenet, long before there even was a World Wide Web. In 1987, when Usenet gatekeepers tried to scotch a "rec.drugs" board, the libertarian Sun Microsystems multimillionaire (and privacy advocate) John Gilmore invented the "alt" hierarchy to host it. The alt sector became an early home to a rich and awful ecosystem of trolling, some of it hilarious and some of it disturbing.
A fellow called Old Holborn, named Britain's "vilest troll" by the Daily Mail, serves as this chapter's linchpin, which Bartlett frames in libertarian terms. Holborn, as Bartlett sums it up, craves a stateless utopia and believes that a world where "everyone is easily offended will lead to self-censorship," so he "sees it as his role to prod and probe the boundaries of offensiveness to keep society alert." In general, Bartlett sees trolls as following "a libertarian ideology" that "part of living in a free society is accepting that no idea is beyond being challenged or ridiculed, and that nothing is more stifling to free expression than being afraid to upset or offend."
It can be difficult for the sober-minded to value people being funny assholes on the Internet. Even many who laugh along with some trolls' antics might admit the phenomenon is intellectually indefensible. But Bartlett is too open-minded and curious about trolling to merely condemn it. He accepts that what many trolls say is true: Something irrepressible in human nature requires pushing against any barrier, physical or social, just because it's there.
Bartlett then plunges into darkness more Stygian than comic, focusing on a nativist group called the English Defense League (EDL). The EDL folks say they support traditional British culture, which they feel is being damaged by Muslims and other immigrants. The EDL's foes say they're just racist. Facebook became a rich organizing tool for both the EDLers and their enemies, with each side frequently using fake accounts, so no one could be sure their apparent allies online weren't provocateurs or phonies. Put another way, both sides embraced trolling as a weapon.
By the end of this part of the book, the EDL character who forms the spine of Bartlett's narrative is weary of the online sturm und drang, admitting it hardened and coarsened his thinking. Still, he found it difficult to pull away from the world of Internet brawling, "because I ache to have a voice." One of the truths sewn through this book is that people feel that ache intensely, and that trying to take away that voice can feel violent, can feel like war.
One way to make sure your voice can't be crushed is to make sure your voice is hidden from those you don't want listening in. That leads Bartlett to one of the more obviously libertarian roots of modern Net culture: the cypherpunks and their children.
The cypherpunks were a gang of mostly libertarian technologists and activists who first cohered on obscure email listservs in the early 1990s. There they predicted and facilitated many of the techniques that now trouble those worried about the Dark Net, including cryptocurrencies (to allow uncensorable anonymous markets) and cryptography (to let people transmit words or images without the authorities being able to trace or punish the transmitters). The most prominent link between that '90s world of libertarian coders and the messy 21st century is "proff," an Australian cypherpunk known for poking at the more respectable digital freedom types, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for (as proff put it) "compromise, present-day politics, and a general lack of moral fiber."
proff's real name was Julian Assange, and he showed his own lack of compromise by launching WikiLeaks, an international collective dedicated to publishing information that powerful institutions would rather keep secret, ideally while keeping the leakers anonymous. Assange thus injected that obscure cypherpunk listserv drama into international geopolitics with a bang.
After the WikiLeaks-supported Edward Snowden made his very public revelations about National Security Agency spying, the use of Pretty Good Privacy-the easiest publicly availably personal crypto tool-tripled within a few months. The world these obscure libertarians were predicting and making became everyone else's very quickly.
Assange was not the only notable figure to emerge from libertarian crypto communities. In 2008, on a successor to the original cypherpunk listserv, the still-mysterious "Satoshi Nakamoto" introduced the world to Bitcoin, a digital currency whose use doesn't require either side of the transaction to know the other's real identity. Nakamoto had libertarian motives, or at least he understood his creation's appeal to libertarians: He wrote to Hal Finney, the second user of Bitcoin, that the currency was "very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly."
Bitcoin connects with Bartlett's narrative via Amir Taaki, a radical he visits in a communal Spanish squat, where we see Taaki and his programmers bridling at traditional commie attempts to settle everything with constant meetings. Taaki's team hole themselves away to work on such challenges as designing a more truly anonymous, rather than just pseudonymous, Bitcoin system. Taaki is enraged when ameliorists connected with the Bitcoin Foundation, such as the software developer Mike Hearn, say things like "people are going to be disappointed when it turns out that bankless money doesn't actually create anarchy." Taaki counters with, "Bitcoins aren't a fucking payment innovation. Bitcoins are a political project."
Bitcoin leads, naturally, to a chapter about the most famous part of the Dark Net, the illegal bitcoin-driven marketplace Silk Road, with the appropriate takeaway that "the real secret of dark net markets is good customer service."
Another dark world Bartlett surveys at chapter length is the one that contains the makers, distributors, and consumers of child pornography. Bartlett is suitably horrified but avoids moral panic, noting that real-world child sex abuse in the Internet age has, as far as the best available data can tell us, dropped by 62 percent in the U.S. and not increased in the United Kingdom.
The book ends with a step back to the big picture of whether techno-modernity will be a savior or destroyer. Bartlett illustrates the argument by pitting Zoltan Istvan against John Zerzan. Istvan is a popularizer of transhumanism, which wants to use technology to transcend all human limitations. Zerzan is a purveyor of primitivism, the idea of abandoning technological modernity for an allegedly more human, livable, and lovable way of life (for a far smaller number of people than currently live on this Earth).
The book's secret theme becomes clear when Bartlett notes that Zerzan uses the Web to spread his tech-hating ideology. Zerzan sighingly notes that "you need to use every tool at your disposal to spread those ideas, even if you dislike" the instruments in question. Any human need or attitude will fill every niche that human ability allows. If we have an Internet, we are going to do everything possible on the Internet. Everything.
Even after all the darkness he explores, Bartlett seems optimistic. And while he doesn't lay out the reasons for that optimism directly, you may find a reason for hope in his summation of the cypherpunk message. The Net, light or dark, allows us "to hold multiple personalities and identities," he writes. And that "extends the degrees of freedom individuals have, which in the long run will encourage people to live more productive and self-reliant lives, and leave more space for new ways of living."
The post Freedom in the Dark appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Following a First Amendment victory against meddling Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, the web-classifieds company Backpage.com is now taking on the federal government. On December 11, the company filed a civil action against U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, claiming that the Stop Avertising Victims of Exploitation (SAVE) Act—passed in May as part of a massive, federal human-trafficking bill—is unconstitutionally vague, overbroad, and infringes on First Amendment rights.
The SAVE Act added "advertising" a victim of sexual exploitation to the list of thing that can trigger a sex-trafficking charge, meaning that user-generated ad platforms such as Backpage and Craigslist could find themselves facing the same charges as someone who forces someone else into prostitution—regardless of whether the platform knew anything about the ad. It also stipulated a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence (up to life imprisonment) for anyone found in violation of the advertising statute.
A wide swath of free-speech and civil-liberties advocates opposed the SAVE Act, which they said was "overbroad, counterproductive, and would place unconstitutional burdens on the free speech and privacy rights of millions of Americans." The groups warned that the Act's reach wouldn't just extend to Backpage but also social media such as Facebook and Twitter, online dating websites, and apps such as Tinder and Grindr—and for no good reason. "Existing federal law criminalizes not only trafficking, but also intentionally aiding or abetting a trafficking venture," they pointed out. "But holding hosts of third-party content criminally responsible for content they did not create would be as counterproductive as it would be unjust."
Sex workers also opposed the bill, which they saw an attempt to shut down websites that make their work safer and allow them to operate independently. And people working on behalf of sex-trafficking victims also warn against shutting down the site, in part because Backpage reliably cooperates with law enforcement and proactively reports suspicious ads when sex trafficking is suspected.
While thinly-veiled prostitution ads abound on Backpage, it's also home to ads for strippers, dominatrices, and all sorts of legal sex work, as well as a wide range of non-adult advertising (washing machines for sale, call marketing jobs, etc.). "Contrary to statements of some of the SAVE Act's Congressional supporters," states the new Backpage lawsuit, "criminal liability cannot constitutionally be imposed on a website merely for providing a forum for speech that some individuals misuse for sex trafficking."
Previous state efforts to target Backpage and civil lawsuits against the site have all proved unsuccessful in federal courts. Backpage is now seeking a court declaration that the SAVE Act is unconstitutional and should not be enforced.
From the Backpage complaint:
First, the SAVE Act does not define "advertises" or "advertising." By any customary definition, "advertisers" are the third parties who place advertisements, not the operators of websites or newspapers where ads appear. Websites and newspapers are publishers entitled to First Amendment protection, which cannot be held criminally liable absent proof they had knowledge that a specific ad or other communication was illegal. Yet the SAVE Act leaves it unclear whether websites and the publishers and intermediaries themselves are regarded as "advertisers." The ambiguity of the terms of the SAVE Act is compounded by legislator's statements that the Act was intended to impose criminal liability on Backpage.com (or other websites) for "facilitating" or "profiting" from sex trafficking when individuals misuse the site.
Second, interpreting the terms "advertising" and "advertiser" according to common meanings, the SAVE Act potentially imposes nonsensical mens rea requirements that also contravene First Amendment principles. …. the Act prescribes a lower mens rea requirement for a website that may financially benefit from having published an ad than for a person directly involved in sex trafficking who placed the ad.
Originally, legislators included a higher mens rea requirement for websites and publishers, stating that they would only be liable if they knowingly allowed a specific criminal ad to be placed. Individuals who posted the ads, meanwhile, could be convicted under a less rigorous "reckless disregard" standard. But a last-minute amendment to the SAVE Act flipped the script, requiring proof that someone who posts an ad does so knowing it will cause someone to be trafficked, while merely requiring "reckless disregard" for advertisers.
"Given the enormous volume of third-party content [sites like Backpage] receive and disseminate every day," the Backpage suit continues, "websites cannot possibly review every post to guarantee nothing is unlawful." If criminal liability is on the table, it could create "a notice-and-takedown regime that would impermeably chill speech" and essentially permit a "heckler's veto" on all ads online.
"With all its vagaries, the Act could allow ad hoc and subjective interpretations by prosecutors with attendant dangers of arbitrary and discriminatory application," the suit concludes. "And, given the severe penalties under the Act—up to life imprisonment—the risks and likely speech-chilling effect of the law is also severe."
The case, Backpage.com LLC v. Loretta E. Lynch, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Read more about Backpage's recent win in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit (which included a shout-out to Reason from Judge Richard Posner) here; learn more about a lawsuit to decriminalize prostitution in California in Zach Weissmueller's Reason TV video below:
h/t @EscortingAdvice
The post Backpage.com Sues Federal Government Over SAVE Act appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer is refusing to participate in the U.S. government witch-hunt against his company, and for that he may face criminal charges. Ferrer failed to show up on Capitol Hill last Thursday, despite a subpoena to testify before a Senate committee about Backpage's alleged involvement in sex trafficking. Now a bipartisan group of senators is calling for his head.
Leading the charge are Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), heads of a new subcommittee within in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that's been tasked with investigating human trafficking. Ferrer was ordered in early October to appear before the subcommittee last week.
On Wednesday, Ferrer's attorneys told legislators that he would be out of the country and unable to make the hearing. Were he to attend, they added, he would likely invoke his fifth amendment right not to self-incriminate.
Sen. Portman called this "a clear act of contempt" that "may justify a referral" to the Justice Department for criminal contempt charges, according to The Hill. "Defiance of a congressional subpoena is rare, and it's serious," he said.
Backpage.com is a website that—like its more well-known counterpart, Craigslist—allows users to post ads offering or seeking goods, services, jobs, companionship, events, and other things. A portion of the ads posted to Backpage are marked "adult," and contain enticements for strippers, web-cam shows, dominatrix services, and other forms of legal adult-entertainment, in addition to ads somewhat-discretely offering (illegal) sexual pay-for-play. And a small portion of these ads wind up posted by people under age 18 or featuring those forced into prostitution.
To counter this latter category of advertisement, Backpage claims to employ more than 100 people who screen adult ads after they're posted, and the company immediately reports any ads suspected of advertising a minor to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). In 2012, the company's general counsel estimated that it flagged about 400 ads per month for NCMEC. Even if all of these ads did in fact feature minors, this amounted to about 1/25th of 1 percent of Backpage's monthly ad volume at the time.
The site and others like it have been a blessing for sex workers, who find it much easier to find and screen clients, work independently, and avoid street-based sex work by using the site—all things that help reduce violence against them. And the fact that such a centralized repository of adult ads exists has been a major aid to law enforcement, too. It's allowed them to identify and pursue sex-trafficking victims much more easily than they would if victims were forced back on the streets or being advertised on a disparate network of smaller sites (or the deep web).
"Without the credit card records that Backpage.com provides to law enforcement as a matter of course… investigators will be hamstrung in preventing sex trafficking," cautioned the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, and DKT Liberty Project in a recent brief in support of Backpage.
Yet after legislators convinced Craiglist to drop its "adult services" section in 2010 (a move that certainly didn't stop prostitution advertising on the site, just ushered it into the personals section), Backpage became the new bête noire for these misguided meddlers—a symbolic entity on which to project all their moral- and techno-panic concerning prostitution in the Internet era.
For the past several years, state and federal legislators have been attempting to shut Backpage down. The 2015 Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act targeted the site by setting a 10- to 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence from any entity that benefits financially from an ad featuring someone forced into prostitution or anyone under 18 involved in it. And Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart bullied credit card companies to stop accepting payments from the site, a move that Backpage is currently fighting back against in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (Backpage.com, LLC v. Thomas Dart).
The court last week granted a small victory to Backpage, ruling that Dart must immediately cease contact with the credit card companies while the case proceeds. A no-contact order stated that Dart is prohibited from "taking any actions to formally or informally request, direct, persuade, coerce, or threaten credit card companies" to get them to stop doing business with Backpage.
The demand for Backpage CEO Ferrer to appear before Congress isn't directly related to the Sherriff Dart case.
The post Backpage CEO Skipped Sex-Trafficking Hearing, May Face Criminal Contempt Charges appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>From 1962 to 1984, KRAB-FM was the strangest station in Seattle. Its "free forum" format featured poetry, comedy, odd interviews, obscure music, and a wide range of opinions. (At one point the John Birch Society and the Socialist Workers Party alternated in the same timeslot.) Once it even aired a live 20-hour group-therapy marathon.
The outlet was extremely influential in the small but vibrant world of community radio, where listener-sponsored stations can stake out an identity that is neither corporate nor NPR. And now it can be heard again: The KRAB Archive, online at krab.fm, is full of anecdotes, program guides, and—best of all—recordings of the shows themselves.
Whether it's an interview with a leader of Britain's Tory Party or an interview with a guy who lives in an old Kaiser automobile, a communique from a leftist band of bombers or a half-hour dedicated to Bulgarian brass ensembles, these audio files demonstrate just how much variety one radio station can contain. —Jesse Walker
The post Free Forum Radio appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The future of information suppression may be much harder to detect—and thus enormously more difficult to counteract. The digital censors of tomorrow will not require intimidation or force; instead, they can exploit the dark art of "shadow-censorship."
Shadow-censorship is a way to control information by secretly limiting or obscuring the ways that people can access it. Rather than outright banning or removing problematic communications, shadow-censors can instead wall off social-media posts or users in inaccessible obscurity without the target's knowledge. To an individual user, it just looks like no one is interested in his or her content. But behind the scenes, sharing algorithms are being covertly manipulated so that it's extremely difficult for other users to view the blacklisted information.
In theory, there are a variety of ways that shadow-censorship could be applied on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Users may be automatically unsubscribed from blacklisted feeds without notice. Social media analytics can be selectively edited after the fact to make some posts look more or less popular than they really were. Individual posts or users can be flagged so that they are shown in as few feeds as possible by default. Or provocative content that originally escaped selective filtering may be memory-holed after the fact, retrievable only by the eagle-eyed few who notice and care to draw attention to such curious antics.
In each situation, the result is to manipulate network dynamics so that individuals end up censoring themselves. No-knock raids and massive anti-sedition campaigns are unnecessary. To control sensitive information today, you can just make people believe that no one else cares. Eventually, they give up, cease their broadcasts, and move on to something else.
The concept of shadow-censorship tends to quickly invite skepticism. The scheme sounds more like a derivative plot to a lesser Phillip K. Dick story than a true threat facing today's keyboard kulturkampfers. After all, what seems more likely: a conspiracy to silence posts that speak truth to power or that our Internet friends simply find us boring? Sure, major technology companies like Facebook and Google and Twitter could engage in this malicious filtering. But why would they? They have reputations to uphold and users to keep happy. Should enough come to distrust these platforms, they will exit for fairer alternatives and doom these networks' futures.
But as the Edward Snowden revelations have made clear, technology companies are prime targets for government capture or coercion. Internet firms have taken major hits to reputation and future profitability for their collaboration with U.S. surveillance programs, whether they were willing henchmen for authorities or quiet resistors dragging their feet. The mere capacity to control data-access for major Internet traffic centers could prove irresistible for powerful forces seeking to massage perceived reality. We therefore cannot rule out the possibility that such shadow-censorship measures may be employed simply because they don't seem to be in a network's best interest.
What's more, we know that social-media platforms are able to shadow-censor because some of them already wield these techniques to neuter speech that's considered spam or abuse. Take Reddit. The content aggregator's Help page states that users who suddenly flood the website with a new submission may be "shadow banned," meaning that the user can continue to submit posts and links but they will not be visible to any other user. Reddit co-founder and current CEO Steve Huffman explained that he created the shadow-banning capability 10 years ago to abate the constant spambot attacks that plagued the website's early days. In an "Ask Me Anything" session with the community last summer, Huffman assured redditors that "real users should never be shadowbanned. Ever. If we ban them, or specific content, it will be obvious that it's happened and there will be a mechanism for appealing the decision."
But this tool could easily be abused by petty administrators seeking to stifle opposing opinions or entice advertiser dollars with a more wartless brand. This appeared to be the case during the "Reddit Revolt" earlier this year, a tumultuous internecine battle between Reddit users and certain administrators over heavy-handed censorship and shadow-banning. Some Reddit users claimed they had been shadow-banned merely for criticizing controversial former CEO Ellen Pao and Reddit's lack of transparent moderation. After Pao stepped down from her post, many users hoped that the new management would repair damaged community trust and retake the website's mantle as a "bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web," as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanion described the platform in 2012. However, perceived shadow-censorship continues to be a hotly debated topic on Reddit, with some leaving the platform altogether in favor of the (currently) more open Voat community.
Rightly or wrongly, some people downplay or even welcome underhanded censorship of controversial Internet movements like the #RedditRevolt or the more widely-reviled #Gamergate. If you consider these groups' speech and behaviors to be abuse on the level of physical violence, you will see no problem in shadow-banning their accounts or shadow-censoring their speech. But most of us would be deeply concerned to learn that the shadow-censorship tactics started to prevent spamming and harassment are being used instead to suppress evidence of government oppression or violence. And a recent incident on Twitter highlights just how salient this risk has become.
Last week, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard reported that Twitter appeared to have shadow-censored certain tweets about the "Drone Papers," a trove of leaked documents about the U.S. government's bloody drone campaign in Syria and Yemen that were released by The Intercept in mid-October.
An independent transparency activist named Paul Dietrich noticed that one of the documents released by the The Intercept contained some barely-readable text on the scanned page's back side that was not released with the first cache. He flipped the image, highlighted some of the obscured text so that it was easier to read, and shared it on Twitter. This nice bit of investigative work caught the eye of Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and hacker boasting a Twitter following of almost 100,000.
Appelbaum retweeted the image, but for some reason, Dietrich was not notified of the share, nor did the tweet appear on Appelbaum's feed. Noticing other strange notification behavior, Dietrich attempted to access Twitter over the anonymity network Tor. Lo and behold, the tweets appeared!
After a bit of poking around, a tweet alerting his followers to the shady behavior, and reports that others were experiencing similar problems, Dietrich concluded that some mechanism in Twitter itself was causing his tweets to be filtered out of many users' default feeds. Adding to the sketchiness, some tweets discussing this potential shadow-censorship subsequently appeared to be shadow-censored as well.
This unexplainable selective filtering caught the attention of the notoriously censorship-sensitive security community, who turned to Twitter staff for answers. Pearson contacted Twitter spokesperson Rachel Millner for comment, who provided this response: "Earlier this week, an issue caused some Tweets to be delivered inconsistently across browsers and geographies. We've since resolved the issue though affected Tweets may take additional time to correct."
Millner's unsatisfying statement provides little explanation for a quite serious concern. It does not explain the strangely inconsistent personal notifications that users have reported, nor the extent or duration of the "issue." Most importantly, it does not explain why these particular tweets were affected and how many others might have been as well. Twitter declined to provide these details to me when I reached out, and it looks like others haven't had much luck getting more information either.
Without clarification, theories about potential shadow-censorship on Twitter have taken off online. Dietrich himself speculates that Twitter's new "suspected abusive Tweets" policy may be to blame. In April, Twitter announced that this new feature can limit the reach of certain tweets that fall into a "wide range of signals and context that frequently correlates with abuse." Tweets that are flagged by this feature can be viewed by users that explicitly seek them out, but will be hidden by default to the broader Twitter base.
The similarities between this feature and the issue that appeared to shadow-censor the drone tweets this past week are evident. But without a more transparent explanation from Twitter's offices, most users simply cannot know whether their tweets are being filtered by such a tool or not. This is not just bad news for Twitter users who may be inappropriately shadow-censored because their innocent tweets happen to resemble the "signals and context" that Twitter programmers believe "correlates with abuse." It's also bad for Twitter itself. As the company attempts to eke into profitable territory with its new "Promoted Moments" feature, user trust and engagement will be more important than ever. But as the Reddit incident suggests, launching a broad "war on abuse" to coax advertiser investment can backfire if it undermines platform credibility.
The long-term risks that shadow-censorship presents, however, are much bigger than the potential decline of any one social-media platform. Should these tactics become widespread enough, or even if the mere perception that these tactics are being abused becomes widespread enough, much of the Internet will cease to function as an open and decentralized network where ideas and opinions can freely comingle, clash, and develop. Those with a radical streak in them may come to feel as though they are alone in their own walled garden, their rebel yells unreturned by their suspiciously quiet peers.
If shadow-censorship indeed becomes a major concern over the coming years, advocates of freedom will face challenges in counteracting it. Social-media platforms are obviously run by private businesses that are free to design their algorithms as they desire within the confines of current law. Introducing government regulations of such activity merely introduces a higher mechanism that can be abused by powerful parties to further their own interests.
Perhaps liberty-minded entrepreneurs will build alternative platforms that promise to protect and promote free speech, as was the case with Voat. For now, defenders of the open Internet must stay vigilant, monitoring platforms for possible abuses of shadow-censorship tools, and vocal. Raising awareness of the problem and sparking a public conversation about the unconditional value of free speech online is an imperative first step.
The post Shadow-Censorship on Social Media Sparks New Concerns for Open-Internet Advocates appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>French authorities say Google must apply Europe's nouveau "right to be forgotten" to global Internet-search results, not just results shown in the European Union. This means that should French officials decide online info about someone is "inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive, and not in the public interest," that article, blog post, message-board comment, or whatever will disappear from search results around the world.
The new E.U. "right" was established in May 2014, when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that Europeans could ask search engines such as Google and Yahoo to "delist" various results that show up when you search for their name. The offending content will still exist on the Intenet, but it becomes much harder for anyone to find.
Since the establishment of what the court called a "right to delist," Google alone has evaluated and processed more than 310,000 requests to delist links to more than a million individual web pages. Delisting was granted for about 42 percent of the URLs. "Whenever a request meets the criteria set by the Court for removal," Google explained in a blog post, "we delist it from search results for that individual's name from all European versions of Google Search."
But this summer, France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) sent Google an order to not merely delist links from European Google searches but search results around the world, too.
"This is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web," wrote Google.
While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally. Moreover, there are innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country, would be deemed legal in others: Thailand criminalizes some speech that is critical of its King, Turkey criminalizes some speech that is critical of Ataturk, and Russia outlaws some speech that is deemed to be "gay propaganda."
If the CNIL's proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world's least free place.
CNIL's president did not find this persuasive, rejecting Google's appeal of the order. In a statement released today, CNIL held that "once delisting is accepted by the search engine, it must be implemented on all extensions," because "if this right was limited to some extensions, it could be easily circumvented: in order to find the delisted result, it would be sufficient to search on another extension" and "this would equate stripping away the efficiency of this right." CNIL pointed out that delisted info "remains directly accessible on the source website or through a search using other terms" than an individual's name and "in addition, this right is not absolute: it has to be reconciled with the public's right to information, in particular when the data subject is a public person, under the double supervision of the CNIL and of the court."
Google "must now comply with the formal notice" or face CNIL's sanctions committee, it concluded.
"There's no further opportunity to appeal the decision at this stage under French law," notes Quartz. "But if Google refuses to comply, it could later appeal any sanctions levied by CNIL. Fines would likely start at around €300,000 ($336,000) but could increase to between 2-5% of Google's global operating costs. The search engine could then go to the Conseil d'Etat, the supreme court for administrative justice, to appeal the decision and fine."
The post French Win Right to Censor Internet All Over the World appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Quartz had an interesting and insightful overview of the world of online "dark web" drug sales in these post-Silk Road days, from economist Allison Schrager.
She starts with the basics, familiar to readers of Reason (see my feature from December 2014 on the rise and fall of Silk Road for a primer) then gets to some interesting observations and wrinkles.
Some data from darkweb drug sales researcher Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University:
most vendors are casual dealers, selling relatively small amounts, and spend only a few months on a site. About 70% of vendors sold less than $1,000 worth of product in the period they surveyed. Only about 2% sold more than $100,000, and just 35 kingpin vendors sold over $1 million. The top 1% accounted for 51.5% of all the transactions. Despite the variety of things on offer, cocaine, MDMA, and cannabis made up about 70% of sales; and while most listings were for cannabis-related products, an overwhelming majority of the revenue came from selling MDMA and cocaine.
Schrager details some of the expensive and time consuming ways people receiving drug packages take to hedge or minimize the risk of getting arrested for having drugs mailed to them. Then she notes the (unusual for a legal market) huge price disparities for illegal drugs across these black markets, which she credits to:
information asymmetry. You don't know how good an illegal drug is until you consume it, and you can't turn to the law to enforce agreements, return a substandard product, or complain to your dealer if he tries to rob you. That prevents price discovery and risk compensation, key features of a well-functioning market.
She sees the possibility of darkweb drug markets changing this:
Suppliers have detailed reviews on their product, the market is competitive, and people can shop around easily. Aspiring sellers struggle to get a foothold without a history of good reviews; sometimes they offer special deals and an easy exchange policy in return for good reviews. And the markets are global, so it's possible to see prices in other countries. All this produces a well-behaved price distribution like the one you'd find in any functional, legal market.
While admitting online markets ability to turn competitive advantage in illegal drug sales from muscle and territory to quality and service, she thinks there is a natural cap to these markets ability to transform the illegal drug trade entire, and she theorizes that it is drugs where the seller can for the most part also be the producer that will dominate these dark markets:
Drugs like heroin and cocaine already have established distribution and production channels that the web in its current form can't disrupt. Opium poppies and coca leaves are grown in only a few developing countries, and turning those commodities into consumable drugs, transporting them, and distributing them is the domain of large, well-organized, powerful and very profitable cartels who, so far, don't benefit from participating in dark web markets.
But according to the Theeconomist1, "Certain drugs are prime for bulk orders for distro [distribution]." He explains that RC (LSD), alp powder (Xanax) and MDMA thrive on the web because because vendors can participate in their production, and they are easy to ship in bulk. Theeconomist1 speculates that vendors for RC and possibly alp buy the chemicals overseas (often from China), press them into pills, and then sell the final (or intermediate product) on the web.
That all said, I'm not entirely sure that people seeking more risk-averse customers even in markets like heroin and cocaine can't benefit in the last dealer-customer step of getting the drug to market and find people prefer getting drugs in the mail to meeting dealers in person.
She also makes what seem to me absurdly prejudicial declarations that supposedly highly addictive drugs like heroin and meth will never prosper on online markets, since their users are allegedly too desperate and addled to either "have the mental energy to deal with bitcoin" or to wait for the mail. Markets are always going to know more than journalists or economists, so we'll have to wait and see.
I suspect Schrager is in the end underestimating the benefits to the end user of online drug sales (though one cannot forget the risks of package delivery); I think it likely safety and sanity that bitcoin-enabled online sales bring to drug markets will make them a game changer even vaster than Schrager theorizes. Still, she's written a smart and nuanced look at fine distinctions likely at play in these markets, still thriving post-Silk Road.
On the conviction of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, I wrote on the harm reduction glories of that site and its brethren.
The post Anonymous Online Drug Sales: Its Glories and Limitations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Jackie Calmes of The New York Times has written a much-discussed study for the Shorenstein Center on the state of the American right. It's a very long paper with little new to say; you can boil most of its thesis down to three points:
1. The "leaders of the Republican Party do not fully control its agenda."
2. The people jostling them out of the way are the conservative media.
3. As a result, Republicans are not able "to govern."
The first point is basically true. The "party elders," as Calmes calls them, have seen several policies they support either killed or wounded by the party's base. This does not strike me as a panic-worthy development. I agree with that base on some of those issues (such as Common Core) and disagree with it on others (such as immigration), but as a broad principle, it's hard to be upset about the fact that angry citizens can sometimes shoot down policies they dislike.
The second point is more debatable. Calmes' conception of conservative media includes not just the hierarchical Fox News but the more decentralized world of AM talk radio (not as diverse as it used to be, but still splintered) and the even more horizontal realm of the Internet. For all the manipulation and groupthink that go on in these spheres, they do not speak with a single voice. And as Jack Shafer points out in his response to Calmes, they haven't necessarily been much better at keeping the base under control than the old establishment is:
If conservative media is as powerful as Calmes posits, why can't it discipline the 17 squabbling presidential candidates and unify the party behind its candidate? (Which would be who? Ted Cruz? Rick Santorum? Ben Carson?) If conservative media is so powerful, why has Speaker of the House John Boehner, who is as much a "governance" Republican as walks the planet, been able to cream two recent challenges to his leadership by hard-line conservatives? How did the conservative media ever allow the nomination of such mushy Republicans as John McCain and Mitt Romney?
One significant story threading through the 2012 election, in case you've forgotten, was the Tea Party movement losing one battle after another.
A possible reply to Shafer is that the media don't all need to keep people in line—that they're out to disrupt a consensus, not to create one. That is, more or less, what Calmes is getting at in point number three: that the crowd is complaining rather than governing.
And yet she also writes this, after recounting the battle earlier this year over immigration and homeland-security funding:
By spring, Congress did pass a series of significant measures—addressing terrorism insurance, human trafficking and veterans' suicides, for instance, and fixing a longtime policy headache involving Medicare reimbursements to doctors. But Democrats' cooperation had helped, and no one interpreted those achievements as a sign that Republicans would be able to perform the bigger, essential governing tasks that loomed, of passing annual appropriations bills and raising the nation's debt limit, without the messy intraparty ruptures and brinkmanship of recent years.
Look: I fully recognize that the budget process has been especially dysfunctional lately. But consider what that passage basically says:
1. Rather than refusing "to govern," Congress did, in fact, pass several significant bills.
2. It often did so in a bipartisan manner.
3. But it will be harder to pass some other bills coming up without "messy" political fights.
When are political fights not messy? And given how much disagreement there is about how the government should be spending money (and about whether regularly raising the debt limit is an "essential governing task"), isn't it good that this stuff will kick up some fights? Politics without conflict is politics that excludes people. I have little love for the Republican milieu of 2015, but I have even less affection for the idea of a chummy group of pols keeping a lid on citizen discontent.
I mean, just listen to some of the people quoted in Calmes' paper:
"If you stray the slightest from the far right," said former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who continues to advise Republican congressional leaders, "you get hit by the conservative media."
Lott sounds like one of those center-left feminists driven to distraction by the fact that further-left feminists criticize them on Twitter. Sure, Trent: If people disagree with you, they can "hit" you by expressing that disagreement. Sometimes they will be jackasses spouting drivel. Sometimes they will have a point. Either way, it's not a crisis. I have a ton of problems with Congress, the Republican Party, and, yes, conservative media. The fact that people find it easier to complain and to mobilize is not one of them.
The post The Political Process Has Many Problems, But the Fact That Activists Have a Microphone Is Not One of Them appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Andrew Sullivan, a granddaddy of political blogging and a former editor at The New Republic, retired his blog in February. During his writing and blogging career, legal recognition of gay marriage was arguably his biggest cause. He was making conservative arguments for gay marriage recognition while much of the gay political establishment was focused in other areas like fighting workplace discrimination. He was writing about it all the way back in 1989.
So on the occasion of today's Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, he broke briefly from his retirement to react:
I think of the gay kids in the future who, when they figure out they are different, will never know the deep psychic wound my generation – and every one before mine – lived through: the pain of knowing they could never be fully part of their own family, never be fully a citizen of their own country. I think, more acutely, of the decades and centuries of human shame and darkness and waste and terror that defined gay people's lives for so long. And I think of all those who supported this movement who never lived to see this day, who died in the ashes from which this phoenix of a movement emerged. This momentous achievement is their victory too – for marriage, as Kennedy argued, endures past death.
I never believed this would happen in my lifetime when I wrote my first several TNR essays and then my book, Virtually Normal, and then the anthology and the hundreds and hundreds of talks and lectures and talk-shows and call-ins and blog-posts and articles in the 1990s and 2000s. I thought the book, at least, would be something I would have to leave behind me – secure in the knowledge that its arguments were, in fact, logically irrefutable, and would endure past my own death, at least somewhere. I never for a millisecond thought I would live to be married myself. Or that it would be possible for everyone, everyone in America.
But it has come to pass. All of it. In one fell, final swoop.
Read the whole thing here.
The post Andrew Sullivan: 'It Is Accomplished' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Dear Good People of the U.S. who want to stop The Bad Things from Happening: Great! I, too, want to stop The Bad Things from happening. Most people do. But we have got to talk about this impulse to accomplish good things by simply making all the bad things into federal crimes. It's an easy-to-stumble-upon—aka lazy—solution that ultimately fails us all, even when the actions in question are undoubtedly unsavory.
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is the latest to succumb to this regulatory red herring. In a lengthy segment yesterday, Oliver endorsed a new federal bill that aims to combat "revenge porn," the term du jour for any posting or sharing of sexually explicit images without the depicted's consent. (As University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks notes, the term "revenge porn" is imprecise because "while a number of cases do involve bitter exes whose express purpose is to harm or harass their former partners, many perpetrators don't know their victims at all. A more accurate term is non-consensual pornography, defined as the distribution of private, sexually explicit material without consent.") The not-yet-introduced legislation, called the "Intimate Privacy Protection Act," is a pet project of Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who says she'll bring the bill in the House within the next few weeks. It would make the posting or sharing of non-consensual pornography a federal crime.
Yet states can and have been introducing their own laws criminalizing "revenge porn," some of which even strike the right balance between protecting privacy and civil liberties. And private platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit, have also been taking steps to stem the flow non-consensual porn, with Google announcing last week that it would allow people to petition for such images' removal from search results. What is gained by bringing the heavy hand of federal prosecutors into this?
Victims can be just as well served by private or state efforts to thwart the spread of their images. And perpetrators can be rebuked just fine in state criminal or civil courts—without taking up space in our already woefully overcrowded federal prisons or wasting the resources of federal investigators. Let's leave the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to matters of actual homeland security and cross-state criminal enterprise, not chasing down 22-year-olds who text their girlfriends' photos to friends or the random Redditer who decided to download a porn pic that it turns out wasn't meant to be shared.
"The law would carve out exceptions for the 'bona fide public interest,'" Oliver assured us, joking that "if, say, a public figure like Anthony Weiner texted his penis around, we could all still enjoy that story."
But outside of "bona fide public interest" cases, publications and social-media platforms where users post non-consenual porn could be held criminally liable for those users posts—contra Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act.
Federal law currently grants Internet service providers and online platforms legal immunity for most content posted by third parties, with exceptions for child pornography, copyright infringements, and—as of last month—sex-trafficking ads. Though the specifics of Spier's bill are not yet available, it seems it would add yet another category of offense for which sites such as Twitter, Google, or Reason could be criminally charged should someone use the site for those ends.
"Frequently, almost inevitably, statutes that try to do this type of thing overreach," Matt Zimmerman, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told U.S. News about similar legislation Rep. Spier pushed last year. "The concern is that they're going to shrink the universe of speech that's available online," as Internet companies, fearing federal liability, become quick to remove any content about which someone complains.
Franks claims that a federal revenge porn law is needed "to signal society's acknowledgement and condemnation of this serious wrongdoing." But federal law has serious consequences, not just for criminals but for also in terms of economic costs, resource allocation, and civil liberties. It's far too significant to treat as some sort of political sermon or public service announcement.
The post John Oliver Wants to Make 'Revenge Porn' a Federal Crime. Why That's a Terrible Idea appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Andrew Sullivan, the pioneering blogger whose work set the tone for a generation of online political journalism, announced today that he's retiring from blogging after 15 years.
It's hard to overstate how influential Sullivan's blogging has been over the years. A former editor of The New Republic, he was among the first people with professional journalism credentials to take to the form, and in taking to it he helped define it.
His rapid-fire, idiosyncratic, highly personal, detail obsessed, link-heavy, readable and conversational style became the default for online political commentary. It relied on fast takes, highly charged reactions, detailed research, and an endless stream of arguments and opinions. It was webby and viral before anyone knew what that was.
Sullivan's blogging has always been delightfully, some might say frustratingly, impossible to pin down: He's a gay man who leans conservative and often takes libertarian positions. He's a fervent Obama supporter who spent much of the 2008 campaign writing positively about Ron Paul. He supported the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush, but eventually became a vocal opponent of the war and the torture program that came with it.
He wrote a lot about politics, often from the vantage of a knowledgeable lifelong political observer. But just as often he wrote about the rest of his life: about being a gay man and his years-long quest—finally fulfilled in 2007—to get married, about culture and religion, about how much he disliked New York and liked Washington, D.C.
Sullivan's deep embrace of personal obsession sometimes led him to chase odd ideas, most notably the notion that Sarah Palin was not actually the mother of her child Trig.
But that obsessive tendency, combined with Sullivan's prodigious output and unfiltered style, was also part of what made him so successful and so interesting to so many people. Sullivan's writing was bracingly, relentlessly open and honest with readers; it served as an extension of his personality. You not only knew what he thought, you knew how he felt.
Among other things, Sullivan's blogging career proved that a highly idiosyncratic individual could gain an audience on the web, and that, indeed, those idiosyncrasies and personal revelations were often part of the appeal. Sullivan amassed a massive readership as a blogger, but many readers seemed to treat him almost as a personal friend. A community formed around his blog, and Sullivan integrated that community into his posts, with features that spotlighted their lives and opinions and even the views they loved.
Sullivan was also among the first to prove that blogging could be more than a hobby; it could be a profession, and even a part of traditional, mainstream journalism. This was a big deal, especially during those years when skepticism about the Internet and self-starting bloggers was rampant in legacy media.
Sullivan proved the skeptics wrong. His blog, which started as a independent one-man web project, was eventually hosted and published by Time, The Atlantic, and then The Daily Beast. (Sullivan worked with my wife, Megan McArdle, at both The Atlantic and The Daily Beast.) A few years ago, he went independent once again, this time with reader support.
Over time, his one-man hobby operation turned into a fully staffed small business, with several other full time editors who shared the space under his name. Sullivan didn't just make a living blogging, he helped prove that it was actually possible to do so.
Along the way, Sullivan helped introduce his many, many readers to new voices and ideas, and, in particular, to young bloggers and journalists, many of whom went on to become successful, influential writers on their own. Some of those young voices included current and former Reason staffers: Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Julian Sanchez, Dave Weigel, and, yes, myself.
Sullivan linked frequently to Reason over the years, sometimes to argue, but often in support. He drove a lot of traffic to Reason's blog, especially early on, and helped introduce large numbers of readers to Reason's work. He wasn't exactly a libertarian himself, but he was heavily influenced by libertarian ideas, and he clearly believed those ideas deserved a prominent place in public debate.
I consider Sullivan a formative influence on the development of my own writing as a journalist; not only did he allow me to guest blog for him on multiple occasions, always with the freedom to say whatever I wanted, he linked to me regularly, argued with me on more than a few occasions, and has been generally supportive of my work. More than that, though Sullivan modeled for me what blogging could be—curious and informative and funny and personal and detailed and reader-friendly and important and enjoyably trivial, often all at the same time—while simultaneously introducing me to a vast array of ideas and voices that I might never have otherwise encountered. I remain incredibly grateful to Sullivan for all that he's done.
Sullivan says he's quitting to spend more time in the offline world—apart from the endless demands and distractions of daily online writing. It sounds like he has some health issues as well, which may be related to the stress generated by 15 years of obsessive daily blogging.
I'll admit I didn't read him nearly as much over the past couple years, but I still checked in occasionally, and I was always happy to see that he was still going. I'll miss knowing that he's writing and arguing and linking. He was enough of a fixture that it's almost hard to imagine the blogosphere, as it used to be called, without him around. I hope he returns every now and then to check in on the online world he helped create, and I wonder if he'll really be able to stay away. Either way, though, he's already done plenty for the Internet and for online journalism; whatever he does next, I wish him well.
The post A Fond Farewell to Andrew Sullivan, Who Is Retiring From Blogging appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>First Lady Michelle Obama('s ghost writer?) has joined Upworthy.com as a "guest curator."
If you're not familiar with Upworthy, it's the awareness-raising, heartstring-tugging, site with taunting headlines that usually include something like "You'll Never Believe What Happened Next." Here's an actual one with a different flair: "This Woman Explains Why She Used To Draw Abstract Vaginas All Day." It's a style so annoying, Facebook now actively removes such links from your newsfeed, and it's a platform so easy to parody, the makers of The Onion recently created ClickHole.com just to do that.
So, it's kind of surprising move for someone who has the gravitas and unique perspectives that come from living in the freaking White House.
Obama writes curates her first headline: "I Really Hope The Parents Of These People Get To See What They Said Here. They'd Probably Cry."
She goes on to explain the trials of her own experience as first-generation college student. "I'll admit I was a little overwhelmed. … I didn't even bring the right size sheets for my dorm room bed." She writes that without a "three-week, on-campus orientation program … I honestly don't know how I would have made it through college." Dude, you graduated cum laude from Princeton before heading to Harvard Law.
She eventually gets to the point by sharing a video about successful first-time collegians like herself, and concludes that "we're missing out on too much potential because too often young people don't believe that college can be a reality for them."
A White House blog post explains that Obama is doing this "as part of her Reach Higher initiative," which pushes kids to "take charge of their future by completing their education past high school, whether at a professional training program, a community college, or a four-year college or university."
Hopefully, for the sake of the kids, her future posts will focus on the professional training programs, because college isn't the only way to utilize one's potential, and certainly isn't the cheapest or even the one with the biggest payoff.
The post Michelle Obama Joins Upworthy. You'll Never–Oh Forget It. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"I really think the nation-state's not relevant anymore in a digital age," says Jeffrey Tucker, publisher of Laissez Faire Books and the creator and CEO of Liberty.me, a "social network and online publishing platform for the liberty minded."
For nine dollars a month, participants of the website can access a library of libertarian classics, privately message members without interference from the National Security Agency, learn from professors teaching classes on everything from Bitcoin to firearm safety, and more.
"We are so fortunate in this generation to have access to tools our forebearers didn't have. We have the digital cloud. That's a place where we can migrate… a zone of freedom that unleashes creativity."
Tucker recently sat down with Reason TV's Nick Gillespie to discuss Liberty.me, how the site embraces "spontaneous order," and the benefits to providing both public and private spaces on the platform.
6 minutes. Edited by Joshua Swain. Shot by Swain and Todd Krainin.
The post Jeffrey Tucker on Liberty.me and How the Internet Undermines the Nation-State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For nine dollars a month, participants of the website can access a library of libertarian classics, privately message members without interference from the National Security Agency, learn from professors teaching classes on everything from Bitcoin to firearm safety, and more.
"We are so fortunate in this generation to have access to tools our forebearers didn't have. We have the digital cloud. That's a place where we can migrate… a zone of freedom that unleashes creativity."
Tucker recently sat down with Reason TV's Nick Gillespie to discuss Liberty.me, how the site embraces "spontaneous order," and the benefits to providing both public and private spaces on the platform.
6 minutes. Edited by Joshua Swain. Shot by Swain and Todd Krainin.
Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new videos go live and scroll down for HD, Flash, MP4, and MP3 versions.
The post Jeffrey Tucker on Liberty.me and How the Internet Undermines the Nation-State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Adam Gorightly's blog Historia Discordia is devoted to the Discordians, a gang of anti-authoritarian pranksters who, among other activities, seeded the press of the 1960s and '70s with hoax articles blaming the Illuminati for the world's evils. Gorightly has posted a trove of ephemera from the Discordians' glory days, ranging from a membership card in the John Dillinger Died for You Society to a 1970 Playboy story.
The Playboy piece is unsigned but was probably written by Robert Anton Wilson and/or Robert Shea, two Discordians who were editors at the magazine and who would later produce the cult novel Illuminatus! The article claims that a libertarian "corporate commune" called "Mad Dog, Inc." plans "to buy a small town," where it will "endorse gambling, saloons, prostitution, marijuana, dueling, spitting in public, lascivious carriage, cohabitation and every other wholesome vice known to modern man." All untrue, but who knows how many readers thought otherwise? —Jesse Walker
The post Collecting Discord appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A terrible Supreme Court decision yesterday probably hasn't gotten the attention it really deserves. That's likely because the decision wasn't made by the justices but rather by a group of journalists who have the power to decide who gets credentials to cover Congress (which in turn helps determine who gets credentials to cover the Supreme Court). The Standing Committee of Correspondents of the Senate Press Gallery, at the same time as the Supreme Court was announcing new rulings, declared that SCOTUSBlog, one of the best resources to keep track of and understand the intricacies of the rulings of our highest court, did not qualify for media credentials.
Thousands turn to SCOTUSBlog for their explanations of Supreme Court decisions. The site's publisher, Tom Goldstein, noted in his response to the committee's decision that 10,000 people were watching their liveblog of yesterday's decisions at the same time that the committee was denying the press credentials.
And the main reason the committee denied credentials for SCOTUSBlog is also the main reason why people turn to the site: It has lawyers who have argued before the court writing for them. The committee argued that SCOTUSBlog lacks editorial independence because Goldstein is both the publisher of the site and "lobbies the government" as a lawyer. It's a decision that fails to grasp how the Internet has changed how the public can avoid certain gatekeepers (or perhaps just vainly hopes to hold back the tide). Experts no longer need to be filtered through journalists in order to communicate to the public, and there are times where this can be an improvement, such as dealing with some very complicated Supreme Court decisions. Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conpsiracy (hosted at The Washington Post, which has an employee on the Standing Committee of Correspondents), criticized the choice for these reasons:
By making it possible for anyone to communicate to the world at large, the Internet makes feasible (among other things) reporting and analysis by experts in the field — not just reporters who often lack the experts' experience, education, or specialization, and not just by large mainstream media organizations that understandably lack a commitment to truly deep coverage of a particular issue.
If you're interested in the latest decisions about computer crime law, you are no longer limited in reading what reporters who know little about computer crime law have to say about it; you can also come to this blog and read Orin Kerr, the leading American expert on computer crime law. If you're interested in breaking news stories about appellate decisions, you can read appellate lawyer Howard Bashman's posts on How Appealing. If you're interested in linguistics stories in the news, you can read the linguistics professors at Language Log. If you're interested in the Supreme Court, you can read the unparalleled resources put together by SCOTUSblog, which was founded by Tom Goldstein, one of the nation's leading Supreme Court litigators.
And you can read these items without the filtering, oversimplification, and distortion that usually happen when nonexpert journalists write about technical issues — and that often happen even when the best, most knowledgeable nonexpert journalists write about such issues. Of course, you can still choose to read nonexpert journalists' stories on the subject, precisely because you value the filtering and simplification that the nonexpert journalists provide; often, that's what one wants, especially on subjects in which one has only modest interest. But sometimes, you want to go straight to someone who has decades of professional experience actually working on what he's writing about.
And of course, the 24/7 news cycle results in infamous mistakes. Everybody remembers the contradictory reports of the outcome of the Supreme Court's ruling on the constitutionality of Obamacare mandates with Fox and CNN both getting it wrong. Does anybody remember that White House staff were watching SCOTUSBlog's live feed to get the right information?
What I find most amusing—or perhaps galling (I am often amused by things that are galling)—about the committee's decision is how it treats traditional news outlets as though they aren't huge businesses that also frequently lobby the government. Media is probably the only industry in the world where a huge chunk of its own employees simply cannot grasp that they are part of a business. Does every journalist turn in his or her credentials when a free press issue comes before the court? Don't be silly. Newspapers cover lawsuits even where the newspaper itself is a party. They simply are transparent with readers that they have a connection with the case. SCOTUSblog also indicates when a lawyer with the site has a connection with any case they're covering. It's up to the readers to decide how much weight to give that knowledge when reading the blog's analysis of a case. The same is true for traditional media outlets. Maybe that's what's scary for some journalists; that even knowing of potential biases at SCOTUSblog, some readers still see them as having better command of the information.
The post Beltway Journos Grasp at Credential Authority to Try to Keep Out Blogger Experts Like SCOTUSBlog appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>He's also gone legal a bunch of times, suing a bunch of websites, threatening fan sites for posting photos and album covers on their sites, suing musicians for creating a tribute album for his birthday, issuing DMCA takedowns for videos that have his barely audible music playing in the background and 6-second Vine clips that are clearly fair use.
Given that, many may not be surprised about his his latest lawsuit against 22 fans who posted links to apparent bootleg recordings of Prince concerts, suing each of them for $1 million. However, the lawsuit takes it all up a notch from the insanity of his earlier actions. The lawsuit was first spotted by Antiquiet and got some attention from Spin, though neither seem to understand just how nutty the lawsuit actually is. Spin, incorrectly, claims he's suing "webmasters," but even that's not true. He's suing a bunch of users of Google's blogger platform and Facebook for linking to apparent bootlegs.
The post Prince Sues Fans for Linking to Bootleg Copies of His Music appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Virginia Court of Appeals yesterday ruled that Yelp must reveal the identities of seven anonymous individuals who wrote negative reviews of a carpet-cleaning business.
Hadeed Carpet Cleaning claims they could not match seven posts on the business review site to actual customers. Courthouse News explains, "The business sued the John Doe authors of seven critical reviews and subpoenaed Yelp to learn the identities of the anonymous reviewers. Yelp repeatedly refused to respond to it, however, leading the trial court to hold Yelp in contempt."
The case reached the state appeals court, which ruled 2-1 that Yelp cannot conceal the users' identities. Judge William Petty wrote the majority opinion, explaining that " the freedom of speech—and within this, the freedom to speak with anonymity—is not absolute." He believes that "the review is based on a false statement of fact… and 'there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact.'"
Techdirt suggests that "the Virginia court had no jurisdiction over Yelp, a California company," and that the court ignored the precedents set by Dendrite International, Inc. v. Doe No. 3 and other cases, which "require giving the anonymous users a chance to respond and (more importantly) require the plaintiff to present enough evidence to prove there's an actual case."
Paul Levy of Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, represented Yelp in the case. He told the Washington Times that this was the first time he's "seen an appellate court order the identification, the first case in which I've represented a party in which we thought the Doe was clearly protected and the court said they were not." Levy also expressed a skeptical view of the merits of Hadeed's claims and how they were used in court:
They don't say that the substance is false… They say, well, we can't be sure this person is a customer. No one with this pseudonym from this city is in our customer database. Well, of course! It's a pseudonym. They haven't shown anything that really would lead any person to believe that this isn't a customer.
[…]
If you've been defamed, you ought to be able to [show evidence of your claim of defamation]… And that's both what Hadeed didn't do here—they just refused—they didn't do that here and the court didn't require them to do that.
The dissenting judge on the appellate court expressed a similar sentiment, adding that "Anonymous speech is protected by the Constitution of the United States and by Article 1, Section 12 of the Constitution of Virginia."
The review website has previously exercised robust enforcement of its terms and conditions by removing falsified write-ups and taking action against their authors. Yelp plans to take its case to the Virginia Supreme Court.
The post Court Rules Against Yelp and Free Anonymous Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That's what WordPress.com's parent company, Automattic, Inc, did today and we couldn't be more pleased. Represented by Durie Tangri, LLP, Automattic has joined two lawsuits in federal court under Section 512(f) of the DMCA. Section 512(f) is the provision that allows users to hold people accountable when they make false infringement accusations.
The suits respond to two particularly egregious examples of DMCA abuse. The first involved Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. Their website, Retraction Watch, provides a window into the scientific process by documenting the retraction of scientific papers due to everything from honest error to falsified data. A disgruntled researcher allegedly copied portions of the Retraction Watch site onto his own site, claiming the work as his own, and then issuing a DMCA takedown notice against Retraction Watch.
The post WordPress Goes to Court to Fight Copyright Takedown Abuse appeared first on Reason.com.
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