William Barr's Move To Rid The DOJ Of Independence Shows One Of Many Reasons Josh Hawley's FTC Plan Is Dangerous

from the a-banana-republic-if-you-can-keep-it dept

Karl already took some time to highlight just one of the many absurdities in Senator Josh Hawley's "plan" to revamp the FTC by turning it into a sub-agency of the Justice Department, rather than an independent agency. First of all, the Justice Department is the law enforcement arm of the government, and the FTC is supposed to be engaged in protecting consumers from "unfair or deceptive acts" by businesses. It is a separate and different focus than straight law enforcement by the Justice Department.

But, even more telling is that at just about the same time as Hawley was making his pitch to dump the FTC's current five commissioner structure, in favor of a single director working directly for the Attorney General, we find out that the current Attorney General, William Barr, has broken with decades of tradition that had made it clear that the Justice Department was an independent agency, separate from the White House. As was widely reported, Barr has made it clear that he will step in and protect the President on matters that concern the President. As such, the DOJ is no longer an independent law enforcement agency, but it is now the state police, doing the bidding of the President.

That should concern just about everyone -- no matter which party you're in. And the idea that the FTC should take sole orders from what is now a political office, including in investigating companies and potentially fining or breaking them up, is hugely problematic. You would think that Republicans, like Hawley, would recognize this. However, Hawley -- who once pretended to be for smaller government and for "keeping government out of business" -- has long shown his true colors as someone who simply loves to use the government to get his own interests in place. And if that means enabling his vendetta against a group of companies he doesn't like, so be it.

We've had our concerns with both the DOJ and the FTC over the years, but putting the FTC into the Justice Department will make all of those concerns worse, not better. At a time when the Justice Department can no longer be considered an independent agency from the White House, it is especially concerning that someone would seek to shove the FTC into that setting.

Filed Under: doj, ftc, independent agencies, josh hawley, politicization, politics, william barr

Singapore Government Tests Out Its Fake News Law Against An Opposition Party Leader

from the who-didn't-see-this-coming dept

Singapore's new "fake news" law has been deployed for the first time. The law the government is using to expand domestic surveillance and minimize dissent is definitely doing the latter. Bhavan Jaipragas reports the initial recipient of a "fake news" citation is none other than opposition leader Brad Bowyer.

The supposedly "fake" news Bowyer posted to Facebook has been subjected to government scrutiny. The government's official rebuttal website -- unbelievably named "Factually" -- performs a point-by-point debunking of Bowyer's claims using its own set of facts. This should have been enough. The Singaporean government wields a great deal of power. This site proves the government doesn't need a fake news law, and yet it has one anyway, presumably because it provides so many side benefits.

Bowyer alleged the Singapore government controls or directs investment companies Temasek and GIC's investment decisions. While it's impossible to say for sure, there certainly is room for conjecture without sliding into "fake news." Both are owned entirely by the Singapore government. Temasek officials have stated publicly the government is not consulted on "day-to-day business" but other companies have complained the government engages in opaque bidding processes that favor government-owned corporations and has displayed other forms of favoritism.

So, Bowyer's implication could have been greeted by this response from the government and pointers to company statements to the contrary. Instead, it chose to invoke the law and issue a rebuttal -- one aimed at political opposition that has not held any significant amount of power in more than 50 years.

Other things Bowyer implied were similarly uncontroversial. He suggested some bad investments had been made by the government. This seems like a normal thing for opposition government officials to do. But the Singapore government isn't willing to be criticized without putting the force of law behind its response.

Fortunately, all the government ordered Bowyer to do is post a correction note on top of his original post with a link to the government's site. It's still government interference in political speech, but he wasn't fined, forced to issue a retraction, or otherwise told to stop talking about government-linked corporations.

But that doesn't make the law innocuous. The government has its own mouthpiece -- the "Factually" section of the government's website -- to issue rebuttals and corrections. This makes the law extraneous. But the government likes the law because it allows the party in power -- the one in power for decades -- to more easily control the narrative. And it allows the government to control what's seen online by turning service providers into extensions of its domestic surveillance programs.

This initial salvo may have been delivered with a light touch, but when things heat up around elections and the discussion of controversial legislation, expect the government's blows to land with a little more force.

Filed Under: brad bowyer, chilling effects, fake news, free speech, intimidation, politics, singapore

Yes, The DNC's Debate Format Sucks, And There's An Easy Fix

from the DIY dept

Man, these presidential election years sure seem to last longer than a year, don't they? And, in our hyper-partisan world of never ending political stupidity, it's somewhat comforting that the one thing we can all agree on is that the debate formats recently have basically sucked out loud. The complaints about debate formats started with the 2016 RNC primaries, with its crowded field and strange varsity/JV debate night structure. Fast-forward to 2019 and the DNC's Democratic debates are being pilloried as well. In the latter case, the chief criticism appears to be that there is far too little substance discussed, with moderators for cable and OTA networks instead focusing on getting the candidates to clash in the most easy-to-soundbite fashion. Even from the major print media, you get takes such as:

Democrats woke up Thursday to find that the debate format they have agreed to is an unmitigated disaster designed to hype ratings (hence baiting the candidates to attack one another) but not to educate voters or really test candidates’ fitness for office.

Sure, getting rid of most of the field in September by raising the qualifications to 2 percent support in designated polls and 130,000 unique donors will help. If the threshold went up a percentage point each month, we might finally get to a manageable field in which candidates have more than one minute to spit out an answer and 30 seconds to rebut. However, this won’t solve all the problems with the current system

That's right, although it seems somewhat lost that the real problem here is identified in that opening paragraph. The system today is one in which the DNC and RNC partner with cable and OTA broadcasters to televise the debate. As part of that deal, those same broadcasters put their own news personalities in the chairs of moderators. This creates a pretty obvious conflict of interest. The debates is supposed to be a method through which small-D democratic process functions: voters are introduced to candidates they may not previously have been aware of, they learn those candidates' positions, and all of this is reflected in public polling to inform those candidates as to whether they should stay in the race or not. This process winnows the field down to a functional choice between select candidates.

But this isn't what happens. Instead, the moderators, many of which host their own news programs, push the preferred process of the founding fathers to the side and instead adopt the ideals of the founder of the Maury Pauvich Show. Candidates are incentivized both in the coverage and by the time-restrictions on responses to questions to spit out sound-bite-y quips rather than debate true policy. And there is a pretty simple way to change the misalignment of incentives in all of this: the DNC should stream and broadcast the debate itself and then license network and cable TV providers to rebroadcast it.

Thanks to the internet and the rise of quality equipment with which to stream stuff, the parties no longer need to dole out broadcast partnerships for their debates. Instead, the parties can handle all of this themselves and stream the debates either on their own sites, or via platforms like Facebook or YouTube. TV partners can then be allowed to re-transmit that, which they'll absolutely want to do. If they somehow do not, the stream will be available on the internet.

This move would do several things. First, it would end the insanity that is DMCA notices and platform bans that happen when people re-transmit the broadcast of a TV partner on streaming sites. The idea that a major party debate should be locked up behind copyright notices surely would make the founding fathers shit themselves. And, yet, that's what's happening today.

More importantly, it would leave moderator seats vacant for those with actual expertise on the topics to be discussed. Those moderators would also not be incentivized to generate soundbites or easy-to-repackage quips for cable news broadcasts. Literally everything would be better and there is no longer a technological or cost barrier to do all of this.

So, RNC and DNC: when the campaigns start for 2024, which will likely start roughly ten minutes after the 2020 election, consider this your DIY project.

Filed Under: debate, dnc, election, politics, primaries

This Is Why We Can't Have Fun Things: The Copyright Dispute Over Lord Buckethead's UK Political Career

from the well-that's-silly dept

You might recall during the 2017 UK elections, some attention was paid to the ongoing tradition of quirky, satirical political candidates running for office. But none got more attention than one "Lord Buckethead." There are lots of videos and photos showing Lord Buckethead on stage with Theresa May on election night, but the best summary of the whole situation came from John Oliver:

Of course, this was not, in actuality, the first time "Lord Buckethead" had run for office. There was a Lord Buckethead who ran against Margaret Thatcher in 1987. And against John Major in 1992. Those were both done by Mike Lee, who was a video distributor and indie film producer, who thought it might get him some attention for some of his movies. In 2017 comedian Jon Harvey took up the cause.

But all of it was actually based on a character from a 1984 science fiction movie called Hyperspace, which was a (pre-Space Balls) Star Wars parody that you've probably never heard of, starring Chris Elliott and Paula Poundstone. Lee released the film in the UK, retitling it "Gremloids" in an attempt to capitalize on Gremlins... a totally different movie that was two years old by that point. Hyperspace/Gremloids was originally written and directed by an American filmmaker, Todd Durham.

After the 2017 return of Lord Buckethead, Durham apparently decided to exert his copyright on the character and take all the fun away:

Online interest was enormous, with offers coming in from around the world. This ultimately ended with Harvey, who once worked with Armando Iannucci on the Time Trumpet series, making contact with Todd Durham, the film-maker behind the original Gremloids. Initially friendly conversations later broke down, with the US film director asserting his control over his previously forgotten creation.

Harvey had attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to the Twitter account and felt he had some degree of moral ownership over how the character had developed. “Todd said that the Twitter account I created wasn’t legal as it stood, and that to rectify it I needed to give him the password to the account. I didn’t know then – and still don’t know now – what my rights were and I couldn’t find an affordable way to find out, so eventually I acquiesced.”

Early this year the account began tweeting again and someone else in a newly commissioned costume began appearing at People’s Vote rallies, raising £15,000 to stand in the EU elections, only for the electoral bid to be abandoned when it was pointed out that a run would be likely to take votes away from remain-supporting parties.

From there you get lots of typical copyright-speak:

Durham – who also created the successful Hotel Transylvania franchise – said the crowdfunded money had been returned. He also asserted that no one else had “any legitimate claim nor right of control to my copyright-protected character for any reason”.

“The comedic intergalactic space lord character that I created and developed was not taken in a new direction by others in 2017,” said the director, citing the historical occasions when different individuals had stood as the character against Margaret Thatcher and John Major. “Then, in subsequent decades, I continued to develop the political direction of Lord Buckethead’s character through projects of my own.”

Yeah, sure. But the only reason Lord Buckethead has any attention now in the political climate we're in is because of what Harvey did with it. And this gets at some of the many problems with copyright today, in which ownership of "the copyright" may be wholly disconnected with what makes a work popular or interesting. This keeps happening where someone takes some mostly ignored/obsolete piece of popular culture and makes it relevant again -- only to find the copyright holder suddenly demanding money for it.

You can argue, of course, that Harvey never should have used the Buckethead character in the first place, but it's a bit laughable to argue that Harvey wasn't what drove all of the new interest in the character in the past few years. But, because copyright does not recognize this possibility, and gives so much control to the holder of the copyright -- even if they're not using it -- we end up in situations like this where we lose out on some fun because people get so obsessed with owning cultural ideas and memes.

Filed Under: copyright, gremloids, hyperspace, jon harvey, lord buckethead, mike lee, politics, todd dunham, uk

Chris Hughes Helped Get Obama Elected, But Now That Facebook Helped Elect Trump, He Wants To Break It Up?

from the funny-that dept

Last week we wrote about Facebook co-founder Chris Huges' long, but remarkably uncompelling argument for why Facebook should be broken up. The post itself was quite long, but could be summed up in that Hughes listed out a variety of problems he attributed to Facebook, and then suggested breaking the company up and regulating speech on the internet in response. However, some of the problems he attributed to Facebook are not, in fact, because of Facebook, and he made no effort to show how his proposed solutions would actually solve any of those problems (indeed, there are arguments it might make some of them worse).

Dare Obasanjo tweeted a quite insightful tweet in response to Hughes' piece, noting that a lot of Hughes' (and others') concerns about Facebook can be traced back to the fact that Donald Trump won the election, and a lot of people believe that Facebook helped create that result:

It's quite wild to me that we're likely to see Facebook punished for the "crime" of getting Trump elected while he Teflon Don's his way through every scandal.

And then, he noted, that it's useful to put Hughes' comments into context, in that a decade ago, Hughes was being celebrated for using Facebook and social media to help elect President Obama. Hughes, famously, left Facebook to go work on the Obama campaign, and built up MyBO, the online platform to organize supporters of Obama's campaign.

His key tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, a surprisingly intuitive and fun-to-use networking Web site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another — not unlike a more focused, activist Facebook. MyBO also let the campaign reach its most passionate supporters cheaply and effectively. By the time the campaign was over, volunteers had created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.

It's not quite the same thing, obviously. However, it does seem notable that Hughes used social media effectively to help elect one President, and now seems to be quite disturbed and upset by the fact that it helped elect a different President. You can, perhaps reasonably, argue that the tactics, the scale, and the overall context are quite different today (organizing excited Millennials is pretty different than Russian trolls sowing discord), but it certainly does seem like valuable context in thinking about this.

Social media is -- like many technologies -- a tool. It can be used for things people like, and for things they dislike. We should be wary of assuming all the good comes solely from the technology at the same time we should be wary of assuming all the bad does as well.

Filed Under: barack obama, chris hughes, disinformation, donald trump, elections, get out the vote, politics
Companies: facebook