In the week leading up to a potentially extremely consequential election, Congress is once again setting its sights on its favorite whipping boy, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Section 230 clarifies that users are responsible for the content they post online, not the websites that host it. Yet, this simple law was the subject of a hearing which brought the CEO’s of Twitter, Google and Facebook to the hill to be questioned over the law. These companies have been blamed for everything from increasing hate speech online, promoting election disinformation, and censoring conservative speech.
Seemingly sensing the winds of change are blowing against them, some of the companies brought to the hill have acquiesced that Section 230 will be reformed and will support some changes to the law. What exact changes to the law they will support remains unclear, but what does have clarity is that this tactic is a monumental mistake.
The problem is supporting the reform of Section 230, or even changing the law, will do nothing to get Congress off their back, as any change to the law will fail to address the concerns of those demanding reform. If anything, changing Section 230 will only exacerbate those problems, leading to further scrutiny and calls for reform.
Examine the standard Democratic and Republican complaints. Democrats are concerned that there is far too much hate speech, disinformation, and fake news allowed on various platforms. They want the websites to proactively remove more content they believe is poisoning the civil discourse.
Republicans, meanwhile, are upset that websites are removing too much content. Twitter blocked the posting of the Hunter Biden laptop story for days, leading to claims of election interference. Similarly, posts from the satirical Babylon Bee have also been subject to removal. These actions place no doubt in the minds of many on the right that big tech is out to censor them.
Listening to these complaints, it seems Section 230 is the cause of both too much and not enough content being removed? How can this possibly be?
One thing is certain--the problem is not Section 230. The problem lies with the fact that platforms aren’t conforming to one side or the other’s content moderation preferences. But rather than admitting that, both sides are using Section 230 as a pretext to haul the companies before Congress and question them on moderation decisions.
It’s likely that our political leaders already know this. If, by chance, they were able to agree and Section 230 disappeared tomorrow, websites would be left with two choices. They can moderate at an incredibly high rate to attempt to avoid liability, thus angering Republicans. Or, they can choose to not moderate at all, leaving any conspiracy theory, offensive speech or disinformation up, which would certainly anger Democrats.
Any other proposal that attempts to cut the baby in half will similarly fail to leave both sides happy, and we will be stuck right back where we started.
Giving in to these political demands is a mistake. The Congressional approval rating remains dramatically low, while technology companies are more popular than ever in wake of COVID-19. The general public does not care about this issue, and reforms will not fix the problems of those that have a bone to pick with certain tech companies. Any changes to Section 230 will not only fail to get Congress off their back, but they also threaten the very internet ecosystem that has made them rich and enriched the lives of people across the globe.
Congress should leave Section 230 alone, and tech companies should be prepared to fight back against the disinformation spouted about the law.
The law is working exactly as intended.
Eric Peterson lives in New Orleans where is he the Director of the Pelican Center of Technology and Innovation
As you well know if you've been reading this site for the last few years, there's a garbage myth out there that the internet companies have an "anti-conservative" bias. First of all, even if this were true, there's literally nothing wrong with that. Historically, media companies have long had political biases, going all the way back to the founding of the country (seriously you should read how crazy it was). This is literally part of the reason the 1st Amendment exists in the form that it does. The founders knew that allowing the government to crack down on biased media would create problems over time.
But, it's also important to note that there remains no actual evidence for this so-called bias. There are certainly plenty of examples of the big companies kicking off or otherwise limiting trolls and assholes, but not evidence that it's targeted towards any particular political viewpoint. Indeed, there have been trolls and assholes on both sides of the political spectrum removed, but it does appear that there may be slightly more (and slightly more prominent) trolls and assholes on the Trumpist side of the political scale. Even the one study people tout seems to simply show an anti-Nazi and anti-troll bias, but the study counted accounts like the "American Nazi Party" as "conservative".
Meanwhile, other research has suggested that, if anything, Facebook's moderation efforts have been biased in the other direction, favoring more Trump-friendly news organizations. Some people have blamed the fact that two of Facebook's top policy execs are long-term, hardcore Republican operatives, including former FCC chairman Kevin Martin and former Scalia clerk Joel Kaplan. And Facebook execs will even admit (off the record, apparently) that the Trumpist content thrives on the platform and just does much better.
Of course, a new giant WSJ piece suggests another idea. Despite all the huffing and puffing by Republicans -- or perhaps because of it -- Facebook made the decision to diminish left-leaning sites in its algorithm. As you may recall, facing a ton of criticism about how news flowed on Facebook, Zuckerberg announced plans to diminish the overall importance of "news" and to focus on friends and family more. Of course, he's made that promise more than once, as you might note from the dates on these two separate NY Times articles written a year and a half apart:
Anyhow, as Facebook engineers set about making that work (not very successfully by all accounts), it appears that there was a fear within Facebook that whiny snowflake Trumpists would go insane if any of their sites got demoted. And thus, Facebook engineers tweaked the algorithm to make sure it harmed left-leaning sites in a weird attempt to stave off criticism from Trumpists:
In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans. “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesman said.
Of course, it hasn't worked in any sense of the word, because Republicans are still insisting that Facebook is biased against them -- because they see that it's working. Zuckerberg (pushed on by Kaplan and Martin) is bending over backwards to favor the Trumpists, and so they're just going to keep playing victim to continue to pressure the company not to make any moves that hurt their presence on the site, while actually harming those at the other end of the political spectrum.
In the WSJ article, the Trump campaign more or less admits that this is their strategy, first admitting that they think that Zuck is a "pragmatist" who is trying to stay out of political fights, and then immediately flipping to whine about how the company treats Trump content:
The Trump campaign considers Mr. Zuckerberg more of a pragmatist than top executives at other major tech companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. But the campaign also has sharply criticized Facebook’s policies. “Just like the rest of the Silicon Valley Mafia, Facebook erroneously believes it is the arbiter of truth and decider of elections,” said Samantha Zager, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, adding that tech companies increasingly censor Mr. Trump and conservatives.
Of course, running a giant company like this is going to involve lots of tradeoffs, and I'm sure that no news story can fully convey the reasons for various decisions made by the company. The most simplistic narratives are rarely true. But this absolutely includes the simplistic narrative that Facebook is somehow biased against "conservatives."
Late last year, we designed Threatcast 2020: a brainstorming game for groups of people trying to predict the new, innovative, and worrying forms of misinformation and disinformation that might come into play in the upcoming election. We ran a few in-person sessions before the pandemic hit and ended our plans for more, then last month we moved it online with the help of the fun interactive event platform Remo. We've learned a lot and hit on some disturbingly real-feeling predictions throughout these events, so this week we're joined by our partner in designing the game — Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play — to discuss our experiences "threatcasting" the 2020 election. We really want to run more of these online events for new groups, so if that's something you or your organization might be interested in, please get in touch!
French government entities continue to clamp down on speech. Following a terrorist attack on a French satirical newspaper, government leaders vowed to double down on protecting controversial speech. The govenment then fast-tracked several prosecutions under its anti-terrorism laws, which included arresting a comedian for posting some anti-semitic content. It further celebrated its embrace of free speech by arresting a man for mocking the death of three police officers.
A half-decade later, that same commitment to protecting speech no one might object to continues. The country's government passed a terrible hate speech law that would have allowed law enforcement to decide what content was acceptable (and what was arrestable.) Fortunately for its citizens, the country's Constitutional Court decided the law was unlawful and struck down most of it roughly a month later.
But that's not the end of bad speech laws in France. Government officials seem to have an unlimited amount of bad ideas. Some government officials are being hit with far more than objectionable words. Assaults of French mayors continue to occur at the rate of about once a day. Mayors assaulted and unassaulted have asked the French government to do more to protect them from these literal attacks.
Any insult targeted at a French mayor will now be treated as contempt - an offence that carries a maximum penalty of community service or a €7,500 fine - France's justice minister has announced.
“Any attack perpetuated against a mayor is an attack perpetuated against the Republic”, warned French Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti on Wednesday after a ministerial meeting to which local mayor associations were invited, according to BFMTV.
Assault is already a crime, so the government has ways to deal with those who physically attack government officials. This new wrinkle makes being mean to them a crime. The Republic as a whole will feel every insult targeting a town mayor. So will the people uttering the insults. $7,500 fines and/or 280 hours of community service await those who like to fight with their words, rather than their fists.
This may trim down the number of public insults but it's hardly going to make the government any more popular with the governed. If French citizens are physically attacking mayors 300+ times a year, there's something more going on that just a little bit of assholishness that's gotten out of hand. Protecting people from violence is something any government should do. But protecting them from being insulted is something only authoritarians do.
Summary: Nextdoor is the local “neighborhood-focused” social network, which allows for hyper-local communication within a neighborhood. The system works by having volunteer moderators from each neighborhood, known as “leads.” For many years, Nextdoor has faced accusations of perpetuating racial stereotyping from people using the platform to report sightings of black men and women in their neighborhood as somehow “suspicious.”
Black lives matter. You are not alone. Everyone should feel safe in their neighborhood. Reach out. Listen. Take action. pic.twitter.com/PVCYdA9Xrj
With the various Black Lives Matter protests spreading around the country following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, many companies have put out messages of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, including Nextdoor, which put up a short blog post entitled Black Lives Matter, with a few links to various groups supporting the movement.
This happened around the same time that the site started facing criticism because users posting support of the Black Lives Matter movement were finding their own posts being removed as leads were claiming that posts about the protests violated guidelines not to discuss “national and state” political issues (even when the posts were about local protests).
Meanwhile, many of the “leads” were using their own forum to complain about the company’s public support for Black Lives Matter at the same time that they believed discussing such issues on the platform violated rules. The ensuing discussion (which in many ways mimicked the wider national discussion) highlighted how frequently local leads are bringing their own political viewpoints into their moderation decisions.
When the company also added posts to local Nextdoor communities that highlighted black-owned businesses, as part of its support for Black Lives Matter, it again angered some leads who felt that such posts violated the rules they had been told to enforce.
Decisions to be made by Nextdoor:
When there are national conversations around movements like Black Lives Matter, when is it appropriate to take a public stand? How will that stand be perceived by users and by local moderators?
If the company is taking a stand on an issue like Black Lives Matter, should it then make it clear that related content should be kept on the platform -- even if some moderators believe it violates other guidelines?
How much leeway and power should local, volunteer moderators have regarding what content is on the platform?
How much communication and transparency should there be with those local moderators?
How involved should the company get with regards to implicit or unconscious bias that may come from non-employee, volunteer moderators?
Is it feasible to have a rule that suggests that local communities should not be a platform for discussing state or national political issues? How does that rule play out when those “national or state” issues also involve local activism?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
When issues of national importance, such as civil rights, come to the forefront of the public discussion, there is often the likelihood of them becoming politically divisive. When is it important to take a stand despite this, and how should any messaging be handled -- especially in cases where some staff or volunteers may feel otherwise?
Issues of race are particularly controversial to some, and yet vitally important. How should companies handle these questions and debates?
Using volunteer moderators to help moderate targeted niche communities has obvious benefits, but how might historical bias and prejudice manifest itself in doing so?
Resolution: Nextdoor has continued to support the Black Lives Matter movement, and Gordon Strause, the company’s director of community, went onto the forum where some leads were complaining to explain the company’s position and why they were supporting Black Lives Matter, and to push back against those who argued that the movement itself was discriminatory, while also highlighting how there were a variety of perspectives, and there was value in learning about other viewpoints:
In an attempt to quell the furor, Gordon Strause, the company’s director of community, wrote on the leads forum on Monday from his “own perspective” and not “on behalf of Nextdoor.” Noting that “it’s of course absolutely true all live [sic] matters, whether they are black, white, brown, blue, or any other color,” he explained his views on Black Lives Matter.
“The goal of the BLM movement, at least as I understand it, is simply to make the point that black lives matter as much as any other lives but too often in America that isn’t actually what happens in practice and this dynamic needs to change,” he wrote.
“While no one that I know or respect believes that looting helps anything, there are folks that I respect (including people in my own family) who believe that riots may be a necessary step to help the country finally understand the scale of injustice that has been happening," he wrote, "while other folks I respect believe that the riots will be counterproductive and will only undermine the goals they are meant to achieve.” Strause then went on to recommend a book from psychologist Jonathan Haidt and urged leads “to listen and not to judge.”
“While Nextdoor is generally not the place for discussions of national issues, I think it’s going to [sic] hard to restrain those discussions in the coming days without being perceived as taking sides. So rather than trying to do so, I would recommend that Leads instead focus on a different goal: keeping the discussions as civil and issue focused (rather than personality focused) as possible,” he wrote.
How was your Wednesday? I spent 5 and a half hours of mine watching the most inane and stupid hearing put on by Rep. David Cicilline, and the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial & Administrative Law. The hearing was billed as a big antitrust showdown, in which the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon would all answer questions regarding an antitrust investigation into those four companies. If you are also a glutton for punishment, you can now watch the whole thing yourself too (though, at least you can watch it at 2x speed). I'll save you a bit of time though: there was very little discussion of actual antitrust. There was plenty of airing of grievances, however, frequently with little to no basis in reality.
If you want to read my realtime reactions to the nonsense, there's a fairly long Twitter thread. If you want a short summary, it's this: everyone who spoke is angry about some aspect of these companies but (and this is kind of important) there is no consensus about why and the reasons for their anger is often contradictory. The most obvious example of this played out in regards to discussions that were raised about the decision earlier this week by YouTube and Facebook (and Twitter) to take down an incredibly ridiculous Breitbart video showing a group of "doctors" spewing dangerous nonsense regarding COVID-19 and how to treat it (and how not to treat it). The video went viral, and a whole bunch of people were sharing it, even though one of the main stars apparently believes in Alien DNA and Demon Sperm. Also, when Facebook took down the video, she suggested that God would punish Facebook by crashing its servers.
However, during the hearing, there were multiple Republican lawmakers who were furious at Facebook and YouTube for removing such content, and tried to extract promises that the platforms would no longer "interfere." Amusingly (or, not really), at one point, Jim Sensenbrenner even demanded that Mark Zuckerberg answer why Donald Trump Jr.'s account had been suspended for sharing such a video -- which is kind of embarrassing since it was Twitter, not Facebook, that temporarily suspended Junior's account (and it was for spreading disinfo about COVID, which that video absolutely was). Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Rep. Cicilline was positively livid that 20 million people still saw that video, and couldn't believe that it took Facebook five full hours to decide to delete the video.
So, you had Republicans demanding these companies keep those videos up, and Democrats demanding they take the videos down faster. What exactly are these companies supposed to do?
Similarly, Rep. Jim Jordan made some conspiracy theory claims saying that Google tried to help Hillary Clinton win in 2016 (the fact that she did not might raise questions about how Jordan could then argue they have too much power, but...) and demanded that they promise not to "help Biden." On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jamie Raskin complained about how Facebook allowed Russians and others to swing the election to Trump, and demanded to know how Facebook would prevent that in the future.
So... basically both sides were saying that if their tools are used to influence elections, bad things might happen. It just depends on which side wins to see which side will want to do the punishing.
Nearly all of the Representatives spent most of their time grandstanding -- rarely about issues related to antitrust -- and frequently demonstrating their own technological incompetence. Rep. Greg Steube whined that his campaign emails were being filtered to spam, and argued that it was Gmail unfairly handicapping conservatives. His "evidence" for this was that it didn't happen before he joined Congress last year, and that he'd never heard of it happening to Democrats (a few Democrats noted later that it does happen to them). Also, he said his own father found his campaign ads in spam, and so clearly it wasn't because his father marked them as spam. Sundar Pichai had to explain to Rep. Steube that (1) they don't spy on emails so they have no way of knowing that emails were between a father and son, and (2) that emails go to spam based on a variety of factors, including how other users rate them. In other words, Steube's own campaign is (1) bad at email and (2) his constituents are probably trashing the emails. It's not anti-conservative bias.
Rep. Ken Buck went on an unhinged rant, claiming that Google was in cahoots with communist China and against the US government.
On that front, Rep. Jim Jordan put on quite a show, repeatedly misrepresenting various content moderation decisions as "proof" of anti-conservative bias. Nearly every one of those examples he misrepresented. And then when a few other Reps. pointed out that he was resorting to fringe conspiracy theories he started shouting and had to be told repeatedly to stop interrupting (and to put on his mask). Later, at the end of the hearing, he went on a bizarre rant about "cancel culture" and demanded each of the four CEOs to state whether or not they thought cancel culture was good or bad. What that has to do with their companies, I do not know. What that has to do with antitrust, I have even less of an idea.
A general pattern, on both sides of the aisle was that a Representative would describe a news story or scenario regarding one of the platforms in a way that misrepresented what actually happened, and painted the companies in the worst possible light, and then would ask a "and have you stopped beating your wife?" type of question. Each of the four CEOs, when put on the spot like that, would say something along the lines of "I must respectfully disagree with the premise..." or "I don't think that's an accurate representation..." at which point (like clockwork) they were cut off by the Representative, with a stern look, and something along the lines of "so you won't answer the question?!?" or "I don't want to hear about that -- I just want a yes or no!"
It was... ridiculous -- in a totally bipartisan manner. Cicilline was just as bad as Jordan in completely misrepresenting things and pretending he'd "caught" these companies in some bad behavior that was not even remotely accurate. This is not to say the companies haven't done questionable things, but neither Cicilline nor Jordan demonstrated any knowledge of what those things were, preferring to push out fringe conspiracy theories. Others pushing fringe wacko theories included Rep. Matt Gaetz on the Republican side (who was all over the map with just wrong things, including demanding that the platforms would support law enforcement) and Rep. Lucy McBath on the Democratic side, who seemed very, very confused about the nature of cookies on the internet. She also completely misrepresented a situation regarding how Apple handled a privacy situation, suggesting that protecting user's privacy by blocking certain apps that had privacy issues was anti-competitive.
There were a few Representatives who weren't totally crazy. On the Republican side, Rep. Kelly Armstrong asked some thoughtful questions about reverse warrants (not an antitrust issue, but an important 4th Amendment one) and about Amazon's use of competitive data (but... he also used the debunked claim that Google tried to "defund" The Federalist, and used the story about bunches of DMCA notices going to Twitch to say that Twitch should be forced to pre-license all music, a la the EU Copyright Directive -- which, of course, would harm competition, since only a few companies could actually afford to do that). On the Democratic side, Rep. Raskin rightly pointed out the hypocrisy of Republicans who support Citizens United, but were mad that companies might politically support candidates they don't like (what that has to do with antitrust is beyond me, but it was a worthwhile point). Rep. Joe Neguse asked some good questions that were actually about competition, but for which there weren't very clear answers.
All in all, some will say it was just another typical Congressional hearing in which Congress displays its technological ignorance. And that may be true. But it is disappointing. What could have been a useful and productive discussion with these four important CEOs was anything but. What could have been an actual exploration of questions around market power and consumer welfare... was not. It was all just a big performance. And that's disappointing on multiple levels. It was a waste of time, and will be used to reinforce various narratives.
But, from this end, the only narrative it reinforced was that Congress is woefully ignorant about technology and how these companies operate. And they showed few signs of actually being curious in understanding the truth.
We've long noted how Bill Barr, a former Verizon lawyer (and forefather of our domestic surveillance apparatus) isn't a big fan of this whole "rule of law" thing. It had already been established that he'd been wielding the DOJ's antitrust authority as a personal Trump bludgeon, using it to launch capricious, unnecessary probes (the whole short-lived and nonsensical inquiry into California automaker emissions), and prop up the interests of companies willing to kiss Trump's ass voraciously enough (the decision to rubber stamp the Sprint/T-Mobile merger while ignoring all objective data).
But in testimony this week before Congress, longtime agency employee turned whistleblower John Elias made it very clear that it's all dumber and worse than we had previously known. The cornerstone of his testimony (pdf) involved noting that Bill Barr and DOJ antitrust boss Makan Delrahim routinely ignored staff advice and waged all manner of vindictive, facts-optional, politically motivated assaults on industry under the auspices of "antitrust."
Barr's biggest target appears to be the legal marijuana industry, investigations into which consumed upwards of 29% of agency resources. In many instances, he notes, Barr's DOJ launched inquiries into marijuana companies and smaller mergers that in no way posed competitive or monopolistic threats. In many instances, the merging companies didn't even compete with one another. Yet the inquiries pulled agency resources from investigations into, you know, actual monopolies:
"At one point, cannabis investigations accounted for five of the eight active merger investigations in the office that is responsible for the transportation, energy, and agriculture sectors of the American economy. The investigations were so numerous that staff from other offices were pulled in to assist, including from the telecommunications, technology, and media offices.
Reminder: most objective experts noted that the T-Mobile Sprint merger was a terrible idea, inevitably resulting in less competition, higher prices, and layoffs. The DOJ not only ignored its own staff's advise to block the deal, Delrahim personally helped usher the deal to completion via his personal email and text messaging accounts. Every last shred of objective data showing the deal was a bad idea was ignored. What wasn't ignored? Small legal weed companies that were targeted simply because King Dingus (and likely evangelicals, and the pharmaceutical and alcohol lobby) don't much like legalized marijuana.
In his testimony, Elias makes it clear that Delrahim's staff are frequently and fully aware that these inquiries are baseless bullshit:
"The head of the Antitrust Division, Assistant Attorney General Delrahim, responded to internal concerns about these investigations at an all-staff meeting on September 17, 2019. There, he acknowledged that the investigations were motivated by the fact that the cannabis industry is unpopular “on the fifth floor,” a reference to Attorney General Barr’s offices in the DOJ headquarters building. Personal dislike of the industry is not a proper basis upon which to
ground an antitrust investigation.
You don't say. Elias, throughout his testimony, also very politely makes it clear that the DOJ's antitrust responsibilities have been hijacked to cater to the daily Trump brain fart du jour, perfectly represented by the dumb and now defunct California emissions effort:
"When news of the investigation became public and spread within the Antitrust Division, many of my colleagues, who are familiar with the “state action” defense as well as the NoerrPennington doctrine, questioned why the Division was investigating conduct that appeared to be prompted by a state regulator. In response to criticism of the investigation, on September 11, AAG Delrahim circulated an all-Division email in which he stated that he “strongly believe[s] that the Division has a basis to investigate and that the standards for opening a preliminary investigation were more than satisfied based on the available facts.” AAG Delrahim simultaneously announced an all-staff town hall meeting for September 17. There, he stated that staff was not rushed into initiating the investigation. That representation conflicted with the recollection of a staff member who had assisted with the opening memorandum."
Keep in mind, this is the same Barr DOJ many journalists and "experts" somehow believe will not only conduct a fair inquiry into giants like Google, but will deliver valid, good faith remedies for the very real problems Google helped create (as opposed to say problematic remedies focused on aiding aspiring Google ad competitors like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon).
Like so many policy subjects (the environment, encryption, an open internet, police brutality, on and on and on...) Trump arrived at the worst possible time for a litany of reform efforts. That's doubly so for the government's antitrust authority, which has been steadily eroded for years and is in dire need of meaningful reform in the Amazon era. Instead we get... whatever the fuck this is supposed to be.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is very involved with the electorate. Well, perhaps not that involved with the residents of the state, but he does seem to keep a very close -- and very partisan -- eye on election security. Election security is important, especially as more states move to electronic ballots, but Kemp has spent most of the last four years using election security as a political football to score points with.
When President Obama was still leading the nation, Kemp (while still Georgia's Secretary of State) claimed the DHS had breached his office's firewall during its security testing -- something he had directly asked it not to do. Kemp claimed his state had already implemented the DHS's recommendations and had asked to be left out of this nationwide testing. The DHS apparently ignored that, resulting in Kemp making lots of noise about an overreaching federal agency.
Kemp's tune changed once Trump was elected. While running for the job of governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp -- a Republican -- generated a lot of bad press for himself by allegedly engaging in voter suppression efforts. He capped this off with a bad judgment two-fer.
First, he insisted the Democratic Party was trying to hack the voter registration system. The only evidence Kemp had for this is that a hacking attempt had been made. He responded to this by opening an investigation into the Democratic Party based on apparently nothing more than his animosity towards it. This was capped off a few days later when Kemp released a ton of absentee voting info, including names, addresses, and the reason they voted absentee.
Two years later, ProPublica -- using documents obtained from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) -- has published the investigation's findings. No surprise, GBI's conclusions don't agree with Kemp's baseless and partisan assertions.
“The investigation by the GBI revealed no evidence of damage to (the secretary of state’s office’s) network or computers, and no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data,” according to a March 2 memo from a senior assistant attorney general recommending that the case be closed.
Unlike Kemp's 2016 assertion about DHS meddling (which was later shown to be routine checks of the state's firearm database by law enforcement) where it wasn't asked to, the alleged "failed hacking attempt" seen by Brian Kemp's office was actually the DHS doing something the state had asked it to do.
The internet activity that Kemp’s staff described as hacking attempts was actually scans by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that the secretary of state’s office had agreed to, according to the GBI. Kemp’s chief information officer signed off on the DHS scans three months beforehand.
Kemp continues to be wrong about election security -- something that only seems to concern him when it can be leveraged to (incorrectly in every case) target political opponents. The state's election system still has security issues. The article points out the site where voters can check their information still contains a "significant vulnerability" that Kemp has been notified of, but refused to acknowledge.
All the bluster worked, though. Kemp was elected governor in 2018 and now has an even bigger platform to be wrong about election security issues. And he -- and his former office -- were completely wrong about this one. The other alleged hacking his office thought it was witnessing -- other than the DHS's pentest traffic -- was nothing more than someone doing what anyone could do: altering site URLs to view other voters' data.
That's not hacking. That's what anyone who knows how websites work can do at any time with zero skill or additional tools. And from that, an entire conspiracy theory was erected by Kemp's office, resulting in thousands of tax dollars being wasted to pursue Kemp's politically motivated accusations. There's some hackery going on here, but it's only of the partisan variety.
Of course, some are now wondering if that's part of the reason why the Trumpian wing of the GOP have come out against Burr. Because the Senate Intel Committee has released a report confirming that Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016. The report is not particularly surprising, highlighting many widely known points. However, in Trumpland, no one seems to be able to handle the nuanced differences between the campaign directly "colluding" with Russia (for which the evidence is more limited) with the idea that Russia independently sought to boost Trump (for which the evidence is overwhelming). So, Trump supporters have been clamoring for Burr's head on a platter for merely stating facts, which are not allowed in this world where pointing out that The Emperor is Naked is somehow deemed to be heresy.
Given Attorney General Barr's recent decisions to more fully weaponize and politicize the Justice Department, it can't be dismissed out of hand that there are political reasons for the FBI's sudden interest in Burr, but it still seems like a stretch. Sooner or later it's likely that there will be some fallout from which one can better assess the validity of the warrant, and whether or not Burr was engaged in insider trading.
One point that a few people have raised is to look at whether or not the FBI is looking into any of the other Senators who sold notable chunks of stock just before the pandemic hit, though as we explained in that original story, the situations and fact patterns with each of the other Senators is at least somewhat different than Burr's case. For what it's worth, there are reports that the FBI questioned Senator Dianne Feinstein, who also sold some stock during this period. However, as we pointed out in the original post, there's little indication that her sales were COVID-19 related, especially since it was mostly selling off biotech stocks (exactly the kind of stocks you'd think would go up in a pandemic).
The other Senator's selloff behavior that looked at least somewhat sketchy was Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose actions look worse and worse, as she denies things more vociferously. Just recently, she went on Fox News (natch) to claim that "this is 100% a political attack." Huh? What? You're the one who sold the stock. She also (get this) tried to blame socialism because why not?
This gets at the very heart of why I came to Washington, to defend free enterprise, to defend capitalism. This is a socialist attack.
Who knew that insider trading was "free enterprise"?
Either way, while Burr has had to hand over his phone and Feinstein had to answer questions from the FBI... Loeffler simply refuses to say whether or not the FBI has reached out to her. If it does turn out that the FBI has investigated the others, but left Loeffler entirely alone (whether or not her sales were aboveboard), that's certainly going to be some evidence to add to the pile that the focus on Burr was just as much political as it was about the legal issues at play.
Update: After this story was completed, Loeffler's office announced that she had handed documents over to the SEC and DOJ along with the Senate Ethics Committee. It's unclear if the DOJ/FBI asked for anything or if she just did this proactively. Just a few days ago, there was a report saying that her team was considering doing exactly this as a "hail mary" to try to get out ahead of this story that she can't seem to get rid of, and which appears to be having an impact on her campaign to retain the office that she was gifted a few months ago.
In 2018, Cambodia's government passed a "fake news" law. It was enacted shortly before a general election, allowing the government to stifle criticism of the Prime Minister. It also required all local websites to register with the government and put government employees to work scouring social media for violations.
The government's new power to decide what is or isn't "real" news allowed it to consolidate its power over the local press. One newspaper was sold to a Malaysian firm that also performed PR work for the Prime Minister, giving the PM the ability to produce news unlikely to ever be classified as "fake."
The appearance of the coronavirus in Cambodia has resulted in a spike in "fake news" arrests. A crisis like this shouldn't be allowed to go to waste and the Cambodian government is making the most of its new powers to silence critics, stifle dissent, and punish anyone who doesn't have nice things to say about the party in power.
Human Rights Watch documented 30 arbitrary arrests between late January and April 2020. Fourteen people remain in pretrial detention, apparently on baseless charges, including incitement, conspiracy, incitement of military personnel to disobedience, and spreading false information or “fake news.” Among those arrested in addition to the opposition activists was a journalist quoting a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen, and ordinary Cambodians who criticized the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The authorities released two on bail, one of whom was hospitalized. Their charges remain pending.
Part of this effort is apparently meant to deter citizens from reporting accurately about the spread of infection. Cambodia reported 122 positive cases but also claims there have been no new positive COVID-19 tests in the past 16 days. It appears the government wants its citizens -- and perhaps the rest of the world -- to believe the threat has passed, or is, at least, firmly under control. Many of those arrested were accused of posting "fake news" about COVID-19 to social media.
Even directly quoting the Prime Minister appears to be a crime under this law, as well as the new powers the government handed to itself by declaring a state of emergency.
On April 7, Phnom Penh police arrested an online journalist, Sovann Rithy, for allegedly “stirring chaos by quoting from a Hun Sen speech: “If motorbike-taxi drivers go bankrupt [because of the pandemic], sell your motorbikes for spending money. The government does not have the ability to help.” The authorities charged Rithy with “incitement to commit a felony” and ordered his detention at Phnom Penh’s Police Judiciare detention facility. The Information Ministry revoked the license for his online broadcasting site, TVFB, on grounds that Rithy had broadcast information “to generate an adverse effect on the security, public order and safety of society.”
This is the way "fake news" laws are used. Very rarely do these laws target anyone spreading false information. They're almost always used to silence criticism and allow governments to control the narrative. The President of the United States popularized the term "fake news," and almost every single use of the term by Trump refers to press coverage or press outlets he doesn't personally like. It has nothing to do with the accuracy of their reporting. The same goes elsewhere in the world, but the idea to treat "fake news" as a crime, rather than protected expression, is a lot easier to enact in countries where free speech protections are more minimal. And once these laws are enacted, they'll be in place forever.
