Russia Imprisoning Dozens Of Social Media Critics For 'Hate Speech'

from the be-aware dept

We just wrote about the big social media companies agreeing to quickly take down content for "hate speech" in the EU, and warned about how problematic this was. The definition of "hate speech" matters quite a bit, and we've pointed out in the past how "hate speech" laws frequently morph into a tool for government censorship. So perhaps it should be no surprise at all that just around the same time that Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft agreed to start censoring "hate speech" in the EU, we get another story from the Associated Press about how Russia is using its own hate speech laws to imprison dozens of critics who mocked the government on social media.

As the Kremlin claims unequivocal support among Russians for its policies both at home and abroad, a crackdown is underway against ordinary social media users who post things that run against the official narrative. Here the Kremlin's interests coincide with those of investigators, who are anxious to report high conviction rates for extremism. The Kremlin didn't immediately comment on the issue.

At least 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech last year, most of them for sharing and posting things online, which is almost five times as many as five years ago, according to the Moscow-based Sova group, which studies human rights, nationalism and xenophobia in Russia. The overall number of convictions for hate speech in Russia increased to 233 last year from 92 in 2010.

So what kind of "hate speech" on social media is now leading to Russians being sent to prison? Apparently anyone criticizing Russia's involvement in Ukraine:

Several months after his arrest, Bubeyev pleaded guilty to inciting hatred toward Russians and was sentenced to a year in prison. His offense was sharing articles, photos and videos from Ukrainian nationalist groups, including those of the volunteer Azov battalion fighting Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Among them was an article about the graves of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine and a video describing Russia as a "fascist aggressor" and showing Russian tanks purportedly crossing into Ukraine.

Less than two weeks after the verdict, Bubeyev was charged again. This time, he was accused of calling for "acts of extremism" and "actions undermining Russia's territorial integrity." He had shared the picture of a toothpaste tube and also an article under the headline "Crimea is Ukraine" by a controversial blogger, who is in jail now, calling for military aggression against Russia.

And it's not like this guy was a widely known individual. The article quotes his wife saying: "His page wasn't popular — he only had 12 friends."

So for folks who think it's a good idea for platforms to become the police over "hate speech," take a moment and think about what your worst enemy would do if he or she were able to define what "hate speech" meant.

Filed Under: censorship, critics, free speech, hate speech, russia, social media

Judge's Overly Broad Discovery Order About Online Critics Allows Ubervita To Bully More Authors Of Critical Reviews

from the free-speech-bullies dept

Earlier this month, David Kravets over at Ars Technica, wrote about a questionable order from Judge Marsha Pechman, allowing nutritional supplement firm Ubervita to issue a subpoena to identify a bunch of negative reviewers on Amazon and Craigslist. The order was not only premature, but incredibly broad:

Ubervita may serve subpoenas on Amazon, Inc. (or other appropriate Amazon entity) and Craiglist, Inc. (or other Craigslist entity) intended to learn the John Doe defendants’ identities, including their names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, Web hosts, credit card information, bank account information, and any other identifying information.

Yikes! Paul Levy at Public Citizen took note of this ruling, and contacted Ubervita's lawyer to note his intention to ask Judge Pechman to reconsider the order. As Levy notes, there were a variety of problems with the order:

We were concerned, however, because the early discovery had been authorized even though the motion was exceptionally bareboned, without any showing of legal and evidentiary merit, as required by the Dendrite rule, and because Ubervita’s moving papers, and Judge Pechman’s early discovery order, had been maddeningly unspecific about which critical comments were the subject of Ubervita’s claims of product disparagement and unfair competition. The complaint itself cited a couple of adverse comments but went on to allege that there were many other criticisms, unspecified, whose authors were Doe defendants. This unspecificity violated the prong of the Dendrite test that requires the precise actionable words to be spelled out.

Even more troubling was the fact that Ubervita was using the ruling to intimidate any new negative reviewers, posting comments in response to negative reviews, claiming that the reviews were libelous, that it had already filed a lawsuit about other commenters and that the court had allowed the names to be subpoenaed. One comment notes:

On July 2nd, 2014, we filed suit in Federal Court in Washington State to subpoena various websites for the identities of our attackers. The attacks have gone far beyond these anonymous bad-mouthings and 1-star reviews. While we won't elaborate on that issue here, you can Google it or search the Justia.com legal search engine website to see it. It was just filed today, so it may take a few days to propagate those search engines.

To our attackers: you should probably stop before you get into a lot of legal trouble.

As Levy notes, this use of the broad order to intimidate other commenters is quite problematic:

Even worse, Ubervita had started invoking Judge Pechman’s decision to post responses to critical comments, including comments made AFTER the lawsuit was filed which therefore could not have been alleged in the lawsuit to be false and defamatory, warning that Ubervita was suing its critics and inviting commenters to conduct a Google search to learn about the case – presumably, directing them to the Ars Technica article that warned of the supposed “unmasking” order. (I have linked above to PDF's of the threatening comments, not to the comments on Amazon's site, because Amazon has been removing them).

Once Levy contacted Ubervita's lawyer, Mike Atkins, the company promised to limit the subpoena being sent to Amazon to just trying to target those that the company believes are really from an Ubervita competitor. Still, Levy is reasonably troubled both by the court order and the ability of Ubervita to use such a ruling to stifle critical speech.

I give credit to Atkins for promptly responding to my expression of concern by agreeing to limit his initial discovery efforts directed to Amazon; in my own mind I remain uncertain on whether he deliberately sought an overbroad order. It is apparent from his client's to use the early discovery order to bully its online critics, however, that Ubervita itself has the evil intent of suppressing all criticism.

Not only does it deserve condemnation for this conduct; you also have to wonder how good its products can be if success in the marketplace depends on suppression of criticism.

Filed Under: anonymity, critics, discovery, marsha pechman, reviews, subpoena, supplements
Companies: amazon, craigslist, ubervita

Fox News Too Cowardly To Refuse Critical Ad Because It's Critical, Claims Copyright Instead

from the wimps dept

It's become something of a sport in the past decade for roughly half of America to mock, dismiss, and otherwise tear down the Fox News channel. Personally, I'd rather like to see all of cable news go away, but there are times when I think the criticism is a tad selective and unfair. For instance, it'd be very easy to lambaste the network for the man-clowns they trotted out in the wake of a Pew Research study that showed that mothers currently make up nearly half of American household's primary wage-earners. What was for me a meh-inducing announcement was a sign of the surely-coming apocalypse for Lou Dobbs, Erick Erickson and Juan Williams. They're easily targeted as examples of the bad on the station, but if you're blinded by ideology or party alliance, you probably didn't bother to shine a light on the absolutely glorious rebuttal by Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

What we have there is an example of Fox News presenting two sides of the debate and among their own hosts to boot. In case you can't see it, Kelly uses clips from Lou Dobbs' show within her own to demonstrate her point. I mention this only to demonstrate that Fox News was not sufficiently embarrassed by the dumb things said by some of their commentators to keep from re-airing them on another of their shows. When an advocacy group wants to use those same clips for an ad-spot, however, suddenly the scramble to copyright claims has occurred. An anti-sexism group named UltraViolet submitted the ad to air on Fox's channel, painting the commentators in a negative light and then asking them to be retired from Fox News. You might expect the channel to dismiss the ad simply on the grounds that they don't want to denigrate their own programming, but that wouldn't help in trying to keep the spot off of other networks, would it? So Fox instead relied on the go-to protocol for censoring negative information. Per UltraViolet's media buyer, Buying Time, LLC:

Team – Just heard back from Fox Business. Unfortunately, Fox has rejected the ad. Due to their copyright rules, they can’t air an ad that uses their material in a spot.

It's a dumbfounding refusal on its face and is almost certainly being used as an excuse rather than a legitimate claim. Certainly nothing in copyright law would keep a network from airing commercials that use its own footage, valid copyright claim or not. It's their footage. Beyond that, this seems like a clear-cut case of fair use, the clips being central to a critique which does not seek commercial gain, are not significantly long in use, and in a way that certainly doesn't compete against Fox's own programming. Watch the ad for yourself:

Whether you think that women being primary bread-winners is okay, or whether you think that it's just the first step in the lizard-people's plot to systematically ruin American families so that children will be easy pickings for their hungry salamander love-children, using copyright claims to put down criticism is an abuse. Thankfully, UltraViolet is savvy enough to still put their spot up on YouTube instead of being too scared to show it.

Filed Under: commercials, copyright, critics, fox news

Toronto School Board Spokesperson Sends Police Out To Hassle One Of Its Critics

from the if-you-can't-beat-'em,-intimidate-'em dept

As we've seen occur in multiple instances, bogus infringement claims have been used to make things disappear from the web. When that isn't an option, vague claims of libel or defamation are used to shut down critics. And if it isn't either of the above, the entity being criticized will fall back on the law -- or rather, law enforcement -- to achieve silence through intimidation.

Sometimes it works all too well. Other times, it backfires completely. Such is the case with longtime critic of the TDSB (Toronto District School Board), Arnie Lemaire, who writes the Blazingcatfur blog. A member of the school board sent the Toronto PD over to Lemaire's place after finding something "threatening" in a six-week old blog comment. (via)

"We received a knock at our door a little after 8 a.m.," said Lemaire. "Two detectives from Toronto Police Services identified themselves and asked if they could come in to discuss a matter."

Enter Det.-Consts. Irene Liska and Sergiy Lobanets, from 32 Division.

They presented "a photocopy of my post about the TDSB teaching children that the Black Panthers were a harmless social justice organization link" and specifically the "OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground" stinger.

It was almost laughable. He thought everybody would understand it was meant figuratively and obviously not literally.

Unlike other cases where the police have overreacted first before circling back to ask a few questions (for instance, strip-searching a man whose daughter drew a picture of a gun in class, or detaining a teen for three hours over some misheard Will Smith lyrics on a voicemail message), the responding officers had this sorted out in a matter of minutes, finding the whole thing nearly as laughable as Lemaire did.

[Lemaire] added he "assured them I had no intention of torching the TDSB."

Police, he said, "were immediately satisfied with that explanation and assured me there would be no charges."

The police must have been less than amused by being used to run errands for the school district as they generously gave up the name of the complainant -- TDSB spokesperson Sheri Schwartz-Maltz. Schwartz-Maltz was "out of the office" when contacted for comment but another board member offered this in the way of explanation.

[F]ellow TDSB spokesman Ryan Bird explained "when certain words or terms are used in relation to schools or the board, they are flagged -- as per protocol -- to the Toronto Police Service without exception to determine if there is any threat that would require further investigation."

Oh, look. It's our old friend "zero tolerance," once again making an ass of itself and the people willing to blindly adhere to "protocol." Lemaire's comment was clearly non-threatening. Note the lack of first-person ("I would like to burn TDSB to the ground...") or any call to action directed at others ("someone needs to burn TDSB to the ground...").

If it is indeed the policy of the school board to flag certain terms for police investigation, one wonders why it took the board six weeks to get this horrible "threat" investigated. Presumably, safety still remains first for the district. A lag of six weeks from threat to response isn't going to stop bad things from happening, no matter how low the "tolerance." [Currently at "zero."]

No, this is just old-school intimidation. Call the cops around to make a point about saying things the offended party feels just shouldn't be said. But Lemaire's having none of it, returning to his anti-TDSB blogging with the headline "Dear TDSB, You Can't Silence Me." The school board, on the other hand, has returned to the security of its "protocol," apparently seeing nothing wrong with calling the cops over a few nasty, hyperbolic words.

Filed Under: critics, free speech, school board, toronto

Russia Uses New Internet Censorship Bill To Silence Prominent Reporters Who Criticized The Government

from the for-the-children! dept

Last summer, Russia passed an internet blacklist bill which required ISPs to censor certain sites. At the time, of course, Russian officials insisted it would be used to "protect the children" from "harmful information," including child porn, suicide instructions, and pro-drug propaganda. They insisted it would not go beyond that. Of course, within weeks, a popular blogging site, LiveJournal, was censored, followed by the Russian equivalent of Wikipedia.

And now they're targeting journalists as well. Access is reporting that added to the blacklist has been a site used by prominent free speech / civil liberties reporters in Russia who have been critical of the government. The government claims (of course) that they put the site on the blacklist due to "child pornography elements," but Access points out that rather than just removing such content, they've blocked access to the entire site, which is notable given the usage by critical reporters.

At least two prominent journalists host their blogs on LJRossia.org: Andrei Malgin, a journalist who has been very critical of the government and hosts a mirror site at LJR, and Vladimir Pribylovsky, who has been targeted for publishing a large database of government misdeeds and for disclosing official documents that expose corruption.

Once you've set up tools that enable censorship, you know they'll eventually be used for censorship.

Filed Under: censorship, critics, free speech, internet, russia

How To Make A Mockery Of Your Own Law School: Sue Your Critics

from the oops dept

Someone named "tuna" was the first of a few of you to point us to the ongoing debacle that is the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Apparently administrators there aren't too happy about the fact that some of its students were not pleased with the school, and gave the school negative reviews online. So, rather than responding to the complaints or figuring out ways to improve, the school filed a lawsuit to determine the identity of four anonymous people online who wrote mean things about the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. One of the anonymous people has filed a motion to quash against the school's efforts:

"In contrast to their own mission statement, Cooley Law School is now seeking to use its power to stymie the constitutional right of free speech of its own students -- albeit speech that negatively portrays the school consistent with other empirical data," Berkley attorney John Hermann said in the motion, filed on behalf of his client, Rockstar05. "Ironically, Cooley is now the emperor who appears angry at being told he is not wearing any clothes."

The school itself publicized this particular lawsuit, as well as a separate lawsuit against some lawyers who claimed to be putting together a class action lawsuit against Cooley over (the lawyers claimed) "manipulating post-graduate employment data and salary info." You can see both complaints embedded below.

I have no idea if the statements made by anyone targeted by Cooley rise to the level of defamation. Certainly many of the statements highlighted could be seen as statements of fact, though many appear to be standard hyperbole from someone who had a negative experience. Still, all of this had me wondering about the Cooley Law School, as I have to admit never having heard of it, so I decided to check it out. The law school's biggest claim to fame appears to be that it has the largest faculty, and if you count all of its various students, the largest student body as well. Bigger is better! But is the school any good?

Well, that's where things get hilarious.

You see, if you look at the various rankings for law schools, Cooley is considered near the bottom of the heap. The US News rankings have put it as a "fourth tier" law school, in the past, and currently has it as "unranked" because it apparently "did not supply enough information to U.S. News to calculate a ranking." But, wouldn't you know it, according to Cooley itself, it's actually the second top ranked school in the country, behind only Harvard.

How's that? Well, you see, Cooley's administration decided to create its own rankings system! A report from last year (at which point Cooley ranked merely #12 on its own ranking criteria, demolished the way Cooley's own rankings system works:

How did they arrive at this order? Cooley can only make this claim by sufficiently broadening the number of factors and then allotting them equal weight. Traditionally, highly important considerations are GPA, LSAT, Bar passage rate, and employment upon graduation. However, in this scheme they are given the same weight as Total Volumes in Library, Total Applications, Total Law School Square Footage, Program Achievement Rating Rank.

That blog post then goes on to display how Cooley minimizes the importance of the numbers that actually matter. Meanwhile, it appears that some others were similarly flabbergasted by Cooley Law presenting itself as the 2nd highest ranked law school, based on its own silly rankings. Cooley's own rankings explanation says that they got rid of pesky things like "reputation," and declare that, without question, "bigger is better than smaller" (even though, amusingly, in the same list, they claim that smaller class sizes are better than bigger!).

The thing is, I wouldn't have gone out and learned any of this if Cooley hadn't decided to jump and sue some of its critics. Even if some of the statements turn out to be defamatory, suing your critics is an open invitation for people to take a closer look at you and what you do, and what comes up for Thomas M. Cooley Law School does not look good at all.

Filed Under: critics, defamation, law schools, rankings
Companies: thomas m cooley law school

Demand Media Threatens Critic Blog

from the are-these-lawyers-stupid? dept

There are a ton of so-called "sucks sites" out there, set up to critique or just ridicule a particular company. Early on, companies often tried to sue such sites out of existence using questionable trademark claims. These efforts mostly (though not always) failed. But, more importantly, the process really backfired thanks to the Streisand Effect. Every time a company went legal after a sucks site, the site and its content only got significantly more attention. Two years ago, it was claimed that corporate lawyers had finally wised up and realized that going legal on such sites only gave those sites significantly more attention.

However, since then, we still hear about such legal threats all the time. Apparently there are still a lot of lawyers out there who haven't received the message. The latest apparently is Demand Media, the content farm giant. Its lawyers sent a cease & desist and a takedown to Demand Studio Sucks.

Rather than a full legal threat against the site, it was focused on the fact that some users on the site had apparently uploaded a presentation in the forums, which Demand considered to be proprietary. Thus, the basis of the takedown was that it violated the company's copyrights and trademark. It appears that DSS's ISP overreacted and rather than taking down the specific content, took down the entire forum. Of course, all this has done is drive much more attention to the content Demand wants removed: a presentation slide showing how Demand is trying to increase quality (now that Google has changed its algorithm to punish crappy quality content that Demand has been associated with in the past).

Demand's lawyers claim:

Demand Media has not granted you any license to use the Demand Media trademark, to publish or copy Demand Media copyrighted content, or to publicize Demand Media�s confidential and proprietary business information. Accordingly, in addition to violating Demand Media�s intellectual property rights in the referenced materials, the postings are disruptive, damaging and harmful to our business practices and reputation.

The intellectual property claims seem totally unfounded. There's no trademark claim. There's no consumer confusion or dilution here at all. No one thinks that DSS is "endorsed" by Demand Media. The copyright claim is dubious. Looking at the blog post in question, I can't see how it's not fair use. It's showing a single slide from a presentation that's certainly relevant, and providing significant commentary on that slide.

The "damaging and harmful to our business practices and reputation" claims are also pretty dubious, though I guess there could be some random state law claims they're thinking they could use here. But, I just don't see it. Someone reporting critically on your business may be disruptive and damaging, but is not illegal. And, honestly, the slide presentation in question is hardly some giant corporate secret. The slide is so bland and pointless and corporatey, it doesn't really give away anything.

Honestly, it's hard to believe anyone thought it was a wise move to go after DSS this way. It just gets them more attention and makes Demand look petty and silly. It's no surprise that the Forbes coverage of this story (the original link above) highlights that this happened at the same time as Demand's valuation dropped under $1 billion for the first time....

Filed Under: blogs, critics, legal threats, sucks sites
Companies: demand media

City Councilor Sue Uteck Silences, Threatens To Sue, Person Who Set Up FakeSueUteck On Twitter

from the recalibrate-your-humor-sensors dept

Comboman alerts us to yet another story of yet another politician totally overreacting to something online. Up in Halifax, Canada, someone had created typical "fakeperson" accounts for city councilor Sue Uteck (FakeSueUteck) and the mayor, Peter Kelly (FakeMayorKelly). As you hopefully know, the "fakeperson" phenomenon is pretty popular on Twitter (and blogs), with pretty much every famous (and often semi-famous) people having "fake" personas, clearly stated as such, making silly statements. Most people roll with it, but not Uteck and Kelly, who both went to the police, who apparently contacted Twitter, leading to the accounts disappearing. They both seem to claim that this was bad because people would think it was really them, but that's just ridiculous. Both accounts were named as fake and clearly were fake. But Uteck isn't backing down and is now threatening to sue whoever set up the account, if she can figure out who it was. Update: In the comments, it's been pointed out that Uteck has now backed down and is saying she'll start ignoring the fake tweets now saying "I don't want the police to waste any more precious resources on it." Seems kind of a shame they had to waste any resources on it, doesn't it?

Filed Under: canada, critics, free speech, halixfax, peter kelly, sue uteck
Companies: twitter

Plastic Surgeon Sues Online Reviewers Who Gave Her Bad Reviews

from the slapp-anyone-lately? dept

Alan Bleiweiss points us to the news of a plastic surgeon, Kimberly Henry, in Marin, California, who is not at all happy that some people wrote bad reviews of her work on Yelp and DoctorScorecard. You can see the Yelp reviews and DoctorScorecard reviews to see for yourself. It's true that some of them are really quite scathing. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to respond to such things... and Dr. Henry has chosen to sue all of her critics for " libel and defamation, invasion of privacy and interference with prospective economic advantage" and is "seeking $1 million in general damages, $1 million in special damages, unspecified punitive damages, legal costs, injunctions against the reviewers and restraining orders."

Similar lawsuits in the past have ended poorly -- especially in California where there are pretty well-defined anti-SLAPP laws that protect commenters from abusive lawsuits designed to silence criticism. Of course, if the comments actually are defamatory, that might be a different story. If you look at the DoctorScorecard reviews, it's interesting to see some of the reviews have responses from Dr. Henry's office claiming that what's said in the reviews are not true, and there's some back and forth on some of the reviews. It's also interesting to note that DoctorScorecard handed over the IP and email addresses of commenters when asked -- with the guy who runs the site later admitting he didn't realize that he didn't have to do that (and that he no longer does just hand over the info). Update: To clarify, DoctorScorecard received a subpoena, not realizing that a subpoena could be fought.

Filed Under: critics, defamation, reviews

Facebook Restores Accounts Of 3 Critics It Mysteriously Deleted

from the don't-piss-off-facebook? dept

Apparently, three Argentines who worked on a book that mocks Facebook mysteriously had their Facebook accounts deleted in January. On top of that, a Facebook group of fans, who numbered in the tens of thousands, also disappeared. After the deleted profiles finally started getting attention, Facebook admitted it made a "mistake" and put the profiles back. The three individuals had been trying to get an explanation from Facebook for weeks with no luck -- and it was only when the press started picking up on the story that Facebook admitted its "mistake." Either way, it's a reminder that what you do on Facebook can disappear in an instant based on the company's whims.

Filed Under: accounts, critics, deleted
Companies: facebook