Tag Archive for: Down

Fearing Cyber Attacks, Microsoft Takes Down a Risk to the Election – The New York Times

Fearing Cyber Attacks, Microsoft Takes Down a Risk to the Election  The New York Times
“cyber warfare news” – read more

YouTube shuts down livestream of US college event honoring Palestinian hijacker – The Times of Israel

  1. YouTube shuts down livestream of US college event honoring Palestinian hijacker  The Times of Israel
  2. A vicious Palestinian terrorist’s university speech gets canceled. Good.  New York Post
  3. Zoom criticised for cancelling webinar with Palestinian activist Leila Khaled  Middle East Eye
  4. Zoom cancels Leila Khaled webinar at San Francisco State University  The Jerusalem Post
  5. Zoom cancels Palestinian icon Leila Khaled’s webinar at California University  Middle East Monitor
  6. View Full Coverage on read more

“HTTPS hijacking” – read more

Trump Gets Mad That Twitter Won’t Take Down A Parody Of Mitch McConnell; Demands Unconstitutional Laws

I’m still perplexed by Trumpian folks insisting that the President is a supporter of free speech (or the Constitution). It’s quite clear that he’s been a huge supporter of censorship over the years. The latest example is, perhaps, the most bizarre (while also being totally par for the course with regards to this President). For unclear reasons, the President has retweeted someone with fewer than 200 followers, who posted a picture of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in traditional Russian soldier garb… while complaining that Twitter won’t take that image down, while it has “taken down” manipulated media from his supporters.

The tweet says:

Why does Twitter leave phony pictures like this up, but take down Republican/Conservative pictures and statements that are true? Mitch must fight back and repeal Section 230, immediately. Stop biased Big Tech before they stop you!

He then tags two Republican Senators who have spent years pushing bullshit bills and making misleading arguments about how evil certain internet companies are.

There are so many things wrong with this one tweet, I feel it’s best to number them:

  1. First of all, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, so it never is reasonable to use a single anecdote to prove bias or to claim that Twitter is somehow doing something wrong. And that’s even if this image should have been taken down, which it should not have.
  2. Next, this is just parody. And it’s obvious parody (except, I guess to our humorless President). There’s no reason to take down parody.
  3. Twitter isn’t taking down “Republican/Conservative pictures and statements that are true.” They are taking down or putting warnings on manipulated media that has been posted with the intent to mislead. No one is going to look at the picture of McConnell and think it’s proof that he really is doing Putin’s bidding.
  4. And, what “Republican/Conservative pictures and statements that are true” has Twitter actually taken down?
  5. Repealing Section 230 would make this situation worse for Trump and his fans, not better. If Twitter was likely to face lawsuits for tweets that infringe upon rights, then it has much stronger incentive to take down the kinds of defamatory, bogus tweets that Trump and his fans like to put up regularly.
  6. And it would still have no reason to take down a parody image like the one Trump is tweeting.
  7. Even if Twitter was choosing to take down content from Trump fans and allowing content from his critics to stay up that’s perfectly legal (and, again, there remains no evidence to support this claim). There is nothing against the law about being politically biased. If there were, then Fox News, Breitbart, OANN and others would be in a deep pile of shit. Yet, somehow all the “social media is biased!” folks never seem to address any of that.
  8. Bonus round: Because of Trump’s continued unwillingness to understand the Streisand Effect, he just gave this image that very few people saw, a massive boost in attention. For what?

But, of course, Josh Hawley rushed in to use this travesty to push his blatantly unconstitutional bill.

Hawley doesn’t say which of his many, many anti-Section 230 bills he’s talking about, but in saying that it’s the bill that would “permit individuals unfairly censored by #BigTech to sue!” he likely means this particularly unconstitutional pile of garbage. Even if the bill somehow passed (and it won’t) both Houses of Congress and somehow wasn’t judged unconstitutional (it would be), it still wouldn’t do what Hawley and Trump seem to want it to do.

Without Section 230 protections Twitter would be much quicker to take down this kind of nonsense to avoid liability. It wouldn’t magically decide to keep up Trumpian propaganda that might get it sued. We already know this is true because we see it in the copyright space. In copyright, there is much more liability for leaving infringing content up, because of the DMCA 512 safe harbors not being nearly as broad as Section 230’s immunity provision. And, because of that, we’ve seen Twitter take down infringing content from Trump and his fans much more frequently than they take down (or label) other content. Because the lack of a liability shield means that Twitter would have more pressure to take this content down.

It’s difficult to believe that someone like Josh Hawley doesn’t know this. But Josh Hawley — the very definition of the elite — has made his reputation by lying to stupid people, while pretending to be against the elite. And so he knows that this bill can’t pass and that it’s unconstitutional, and that it would do the opposite of what he claims. But he seems to be betting on stupid people buying into this latest culture war.

Techdirt.