If Trump Ever Actually Creates A Social Network Of His Own, You Can Bet It Will Rely On Section 230

from the i-mean,-come-on dept

There have been rumors for ages that former President Donald Trump might "start" a social network of his own, and of course, that talk ramped up after he was (reasonably) banned from both Twitter and Facebook. Of course Trump is not particularly well known for successfully "starting" many businesses. Over the last few decades of his business career, he seemed a lot more focused on just licensing his name to other businesses, often of dubious quality. So it was no surprise when reports came out last month that, even while he was President, he had been in talks with Parler to join that site in exchange for a large equity stake in the Twitter-wannabe-for-Trumpists. For whatever reason, that deal never came to fruition.

But, over the weekend, Trump spokesperson (and SLAPP suit filer) Jason Miller told Fox News that Trump was preparing to launch his own social network in the next few months. Amusingly, right before Miller made this claim, he noted exactly what I had said about how Trump being banned from Twitter and Facebook wasn't censorship, since Trump could get all the press coverage he wanted:

“The president’s been off of social media for a while,” he told Fox News Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz, “[but] his press releases, his statements have actually been getting almost more play than he ever did on Twitter before.”

But he then followed that up with an offhand comment saying:

I do think that we’re going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform.

And this is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does. But it will be his own platform.

Many, many people have assumed that -- just like revealing his tax returns, infrastructure week, and his shiny new healthcare plan -- that this announcement was just bluster and nonsense with no actual expectation that anything will ever be done. And that is perhaps likely. Even Trump's normal allies seem less than thrilled with the idea, though mainly because it may lead to further fragmenting among the "social media website for MAGA conspiracy theorists." Others have, quite reasonably, pointed out that a social media site built on Trump's cult of personality is likely to be crazy boring and just not that interesting.

However, I kind of do hope that it actually comes to be, if only to see just how quickly Trump's new social network has to rely on Section 230 to defend itself in court. Remember, Trump spent the last year of his presidency slamming Section 230 (which he completely misrepresented multiple times and never seemed to actually understand). You may recall that one of the parting shots of his presidency was to try to block military funding if Congress wouldn't completely repeal Section 230.

But, of course, if a TrumpBook ever came into actual existence, you can bet that (1) it, like Parler, would need to speedrun the content moderation learning curve, and (2) would certainly be subject to some lawsuits regarding whatever insane crap its users would post. Trump's own comments on his own site would not be protected by Section 230, as that would be content created by an "employee" of the site itself, but the site would be protected from liability from whatever nonsense his sycophantic fans posted. And you can bet that his lawyers (assuming he could find any who would work for him) would very quickly lean on Section 230 to protect the company from any such lawsuits.

I mean, we've already seen Trump rely on anti-SLAPP laws in court, despite demands to "open up our libel laws." So he's already got a precedent for relying on the very same laws he hates in court. Hell, Trump has even relied on Section 230 in court to argue that he wasn't legally liable for his own retweets.

So, sure, let him start his own social network, and then be forced to recognize how Section 230 is actually something that he needs.

Filed Under: donald trump, section 230, social media

Records Show President Trump Loved Going After Whistleblowers Even More Than Obama Did

from the MAGA-by-being-Obama-on-steroids dept

Ah, we were so young then. We excoriated the Obama administration for attacking and prosecuting whistleblowers at a faster clip than any other administration in history.

This happened despite the fact Obama presided over some of the most historic leaks in history -- ones that kickstarted changes in surveillance programs and surveillance attitudes. The Obama Administration claimed to be the most transparent ever, but behind the scenes, it worked tirelessly to punish whistleblowers and leakers who were bringing actual transparency to entities that had long resisted it.

The facts about the late, not-so-great Trump Administration are continuing to leak out. And Obama's enthusiasm for punishing professional and amateur transparency enthusiasts has been outdone by his successor -- a man who often engaged in leaking himself through his Twitter account. Here's Ken Klippenstein with the details:

In 2017, there were a staggering 120 referrals for leak investigations from government agencies to the Department of Justice — higher than any year since at least 2005. There were also 88 criminal referrals for leaking classified information in 2018, according to the document, 71 in 2019, and 55 for the first three quarters of 2020, according to the most recent data available. By comparison, during the Obama administration, there were 38 referrals in 2016, 18 in 2015, and 41 in 2014.

Trump was determined to be everything Obama wasn't. His efforts often seemed solely focused on overturning everything his predecessor had established. Judging from these numbers, this also includes the number of people punished for daring to speak truth to power.

The Trump Administration always had a problem with leaks. The man who often treated the government as a weapon to be deployed against his enemies directed multiple executive agencies to hunt down those who offended him by doing nothing more than exposing his words and actions.

Enforcement is nothing without deterrence. And even if most of these referrals never resulted in criminal charges or sustained accusations, the message was made clear: fuck with the Prez and his buddies and you're going to find yourself in a world of hurt.

In its leak indictments, the Justice Department has stressed how it hopes to “deter” further leaks, as it did in its 2019 indictment of military intelligence analyst Henry Kyle Frese, accused of leaking classified information to two reporters. That deterrence also has a political dimension: As The Intercept has reported, most leaks prosecuted by the Trump administration have pertained to the Russia investigation.

This may only detail "referrals," but every referral is a chance to prosecute. That most of these referrals never resulted in criminal charges indicates how baseless they were, rather than how receptive the Trump Administration was to additional accountability.

And for those of you who focus on the fact that these were "leak" investigations rather than the retaliatory targeting of whistleblowers who chose to work within the system, I'll just point out two things:

First, leaking works better than whistleblowing because it doesn't give the chain of command a chance to bury unfavorable facts.

Second, the Trump Administration -- like the one before it -- engaged in retaliation against whistleblowers who chose to follow the rules, suggesting the better route is to get the information to reporters who will expose wrongdoing, rather than be buried along with their objections.

And while we're burying Trump for being worse on issues we routinely excoriated Obama for, let's not forget his administration was particularly enthusiastic about extrajudicial killings. Obama's position as King of the Drone Strikes has been usurped by one of the worst presidents in history.

In 2019, air strikes from the US and its allies in Afghanistan killed 700 civilians, more than in any other year since the beginning of the war in 2001 and 2002, according to new research from Brown University's Cost of War project.

The new data casts light on US President Donald Trump's aerial warfare policies across the Middle East and in countries neighbouring the region, which have become less restricted and more opaque.

The report chronicled the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and Afghan air strikes over the past three years.

"From 2017 through 2019, civilian deaths due to US and allied forces' airstrikes in Afghanistan dramatically increased," the report said.

So, not only were we killing more people based on metadata than ever before, we've been killing more innocent people than ever before. GOD BLESS THE USA.

We'll see what Biden does with his first term in office. Despite running as the anti-Trump, Biden has shown no less enthusiasm for participating in forever wars. We may finally have someone who acts like a statesman, rather than a petulant child, in office. But that doesn't mean we, as a constitutional republic, can't still be as awful as ever.

Filed Under: barack obama, donald trump, leaks, transparency, whistleblowers

Trump Appointee Who Wanted To Turn Voice Of America Into Breitbart Spent Millions Of Taxpayer Dollars Investigating His Own Staff

from the holy-shit dept

Remember Michael Pack? That's the Steve Bannon protégé who Trump appointed last year to head the US Agency for Global Media. USAGM is the organization that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting and the Open Technology Fund. It was an open secret that Pack was appointed to turn those widely respected, independent, news organizations into pure Breitbart-style propaganda outfits. He wasted little time causing a huge fucking mess, firing a ton of people in a manner so upsetting that even Republican Senators were concerned. It also turned out that many of the people he fired... he legally had no right to fire.

In the fall, things got even more ridiculous as it came out that Pack had been investigating VOA journalists to see if they were "anti-Trump" and then moved to get more power to directly dictate how VOA should be reporting. One of President Biden's first official acts in office... was to fire Pack, who laughably claimed that his being fired was "a partisan act" that would harm the credibility of USAGM.

Meanwhile, the latest story, as revealed by NPR, is that Pack spent millions of tax payer dollars investigating staff throughout the various organizations to try to come up with reasons they could be fired. This was in response to the courts pointing out he couldn't just randomly fire people in these organizations.

Last summer, an appointee of former President Donald Trump was irate because he could not simply fire top executives who had warned him that some of his plans might be illegal.

Michael Pack, who was CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media that oversees Voice of America, in August suspended those top executives. He also immediately ordered up an investigation to determine what wrongdoing the executives might have committed.

Instead of turning to inspectors general or civil servants to investigate, Pack personally signed a no-bid contract to hire a high-profile law firm with strong Republican ties.

The bill — footed by taxpayers — exceeded a million dollars in just the first few months of the contract.

And hiring an outside law firm is an abuse of his position, according to the Government Accountability Project, which discovered the details of this contract via a FOIA request:

"The engagement constitutes gross mismanagement, gross waste of taxpayer dollars and abuse of authority," David Seide of the Government Accountability Project, wrote in a letter Thursday to Congressional committees with oversight of the committee.

"The 'deliverables' provided by McGuireWoods are — always were — of questionable value," he wrote. "The investigations produced nothing that could justify the kind of discipline Mr. Pack sought to impose on current USAGM employees he did not like — he wanted them fired (they have since been reinstated). Investigations of former employees also yielded nothing."

It seems almost cartoonish what Pack did here:

The group's analysis of the new documents, shared with NPR, found the law firm McGuireWoods charged more than $320 per hour for 3,200 billable hours from August through October alone. It devoted five partners, six associates, two lawyers "of counsel," two staff attorneys, seven paralegals, three case assistants, 14 other timekeepers, and 11 "outsourced attorneys" to the work.

[....]

The invoices reflect that McGuireWoods' legal team, among other duties, reviewed social media posts, "news articles relating to Michael Pack" and an "[Office of Inspector General] audit on Hillary Clinton's email breach."

It truly is insane how obsessed Trumpists are over Hillary's emails.

But the main crux of the "investigation" appears to have been to cook up any reason at all to justify Pack firing all the non-Trump people he wanted to fire:

The nonprofit group's review found the McGuireWoods team spent nearly 2,000 hours in a massive review of documents and emails, 400 hours on fact investigation, and nearly 700 hours on what was labeled as "analysis/strategy." The records also show the legal team conducted voluminous legal research on federal ethics regulations and U.S. statutes. Such tasks for federal departments are typically, though not exclusively, undertaken by government attorneys, inspectors general, and human resources employees.

Incredible.

Filed Under: donald trump, intimidation, investigations, michael pack, propaganda, taxpayers, usagm, voice of america
Companies: voice of america

Random Jackass Attempts To Trademark 'Mayor Of Mar-A-Lago' In The Most Hilarious Way

from the not-how-it-works dept

For years now, I have railed on the USPTO for its overly permissive posture when it comes to granting trademarks. The whole thing is far too easy, with far too little concern shown by examiners as to how distinct or useful proposed marks actually are. All of that being said, there are still some hoops you have to jump through to get a trademark. And there are some rules governing how to get through those hoops.

It appears someone needs to give Natale Passaro some lessons in how trademarks work, then. See, Passaro recently filed for a trademark on the term "Mayor of Mar-A-Lago." The proposed classes for the mark are to be for "shirts" and "consulting services". Part of the application requirements, however, is documentation on "specimen of use." This is basically the USPTO asking the applicant to show evidence of the mark's current or proposed use.

A specimen of use is a real-world example of how the mark is being used on goods and/or services. A real-world example means that it is an actual object that bears the mark, not just a photo or drawing of the mark. For goods, a person can submit tags, instruction manuals, containers, labels, or packaging materials.

What the Passaro submitted for his specimen, um, doesn't cut it.

Now, I truly wish that it was Donald Trump's hand that scrawled the phrase over a picture of a building at the club and a cartoon depiction of himself, because that makes all of this funnier. Unfortunately, it appears that this application came instead from someone just trying to cash in on the club and former President. That this initially confused a bunch of people, including me, is also a pretty good argument against any approval for this trademark.

But, again, that isn't how this works when it comes to the specimen of use. The USPTO is not going to take some scribbles of a proposed... I don't know, logo? That simply doesn't work for a specimen of use, it isn't in any way the behavior of a professional organization, and it calls into question just how serious this trademark application is if this really is the best Passaro can do on a trademark application. Given that this all also seems to be some strange attempt to get Mar-A-Lago incorporated as its own township and out of the jurisdiction of Palm Beach for... reasons, this all probably doesn't bode well for the success on that effort, either.

Filed Under: donald trump, mar a lago, mayor of mar a lago, natale passaro, trademark, use in commerce, uspto

The Copia Institute To The Oversight Board Regarding Facebook's Trump Suspension: There Was No Wrong Decision

from the context-driven-coin-flip dept

The following is the Copia Institute's submission to the Oversight Board as it evaluates Facebook's decision to remove some of Trump's posts and his ability to post. While addressed to the Board, it's written for everyone thinking about how platforms moderate content.

The Copia Institute has advocated for social media platforms to permit the greatest amount of speech possible, even when that speech is unpopular. At the same time, we have also defended the right of social media platforms to exercise editorial and associative discretion about the user expression it permits on its services. This case illustrates why we have done both. We therefore take no position on whether Facebook's decision to remove former-President Trump's posts and disable his ability to make further posts was the right decision for Facebook to make because choosing to do so or choosing not to is each defensible. Instead our goal is to explain why.

Reasons to be wary of taking content down. We have long held the view that the reflex to remove online content, even odious content, is generally not a healthy one. Not only can it backfire and lead to the removal of content undeserving of deletion, but it can have the effect of preserving a false monoculture in online expression. Social media is richer and more valuable when it can reflect the full fabric of humanity, even when that means enabling speech that is provocative or threatening to hegemony. Perhaps especially then, because so much important, valid, and necessary speech can so easily be labeled that way. Preserving different ideas, even when controversial, ensures that there will be space for new and even better ones, whereas policing content for compliance with current norms only distorts those norms' development.

Being too willing to remove content also has the effect of teaching the public that when it encounters speech that provokes the way to respond is to demand its suppression. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, this burgeoning tendency means that discourse becomes a battlefield, where the view that will prevail is the one that can amass enough censorial pressure to remove its opponent—even if it's the view with the most merit. The more Facebook feeds this unfortunate instinct by removing user speech, the more vulnerable it will be to further pressure demanding still more removals, even when it may be of speech society would benefit from. The reality is that there will always be disagreements over the worth of certain speech. As long as Facebook assumes the role of an arbitrator, it will always find itself in the middle of an unwinnable tug-of-war between conflicting views. To break this cycle, removals should be made with reluctance and only limited, specific, identifiable, and objective criteria to justify the exception. It may be hard to employ them consistently at scale, but more restraint will in the long run mean less error.

Reasons to be wary of leaving content up. The unique challenge presented in this case is that the Facebook user at the time of the posts in question was the President of the United States. This fact cuts in multiple ways: as the holder of the highest political office in the country Trump's speech was of particular relevance to the public, and thus particularly worth facilitating. After all, even if Trump's posts were debauched, these were the views of the President, and it would not have served the public for him to be of this character and the public not to know.

On the other hand, as the then-President of the United States his words had greater impact than any other user's. They could do, and did, more harm, thanks to the weight of authority they acquired from the imprimatur of his office. And those real-world effects provided a perfectly legitimate basis for Facebook to take steps to (a) mitigate that damage by removing posts and (b) end the association that had allowed him to leverage Facebook for those destructive ends.

If Facebook concludes that anyone's use of its services is not in its interests, the interests of its user community, or the interests of the wider world Facebook and its users inhabit, it can absolutely decide to refuse that user continued access. And it can reach that conclusion based on wider context, beyond platform use. Facebook could for instance deny a confessed serial killer who only uses Facebook to publish poetry access to its service if it felt that the association ultimately served to enable the bad actor's bad acts. As with speech removals, such decisions should be made with reluctance and based on limited, specific, identifiable, and objective criteria, given the impact of such terminations. Just as continued access to Facebook may be unduly empowering for users, denying it can be equally disempowering. But in the case of Trump, as President he did not need Facebook to communicate to the public. He had access to other channels and Facebook no obligation to be conscripted to enable his mischief. Facebook has no obligation to enable anyone's mischief, whether they are a political leader or otherwise.

Potential middle-grounds. When it comes to deciding whether to continue to provide Facebook's services to users and their expression, there is a certain amount of baby-splitting that can be done in response to the sorts of challenges raised by this case. For instance, Facebook does more than simply host speech that can be read by others; it provides tools for engagement such as comments and sharing and amplification through privileged display, and in some instances allows monetization. Withdrawing any or all of these additional user benefits is a viable option that may go a long way toward minimizing the problems of continuing to host problematic speech or a problematic user without the platform needing to resort to removing either entirely.

Conclusion. Whether removing Trump's posts and further posting ability was the right decision or not depends on what sort of service Facebook wants to be and which choice it believes it best serves that purpose. Facebook can make these decisions any way it wants, but to minimize public criticism and maximize public cooperation how it makes them is what matters. These decisions should be transparent to the user community, scalable to apply to future situations, and predictable in how they would, to the extent they can be, since circumstances and judgment will inevitably evolve. Every choice will have consequences, some good and some bad. The choice for Facebook is really to affirmatively choose which ones it wants to favor. There may not be any one right answer, or even any truly right answer. In fact, in the end the best decision may have little to do with the actual choice that results but rather the process used to get there.

Filed Under: appeals, content moderation, donald trump, facebook supreme court, free speech, oversight, review
Companies: facebook, oversight board

Trump And Oracle's Dumb TikTok Cronyism Falls Apart

from the end-of-the-line dept

Remember when America spent a year and a half hyperventilating about a Chinese teen dancing app instead of securing American infrastructure from Russian hackers or other threats? Remember when a bunch of GOP officials with a long track record of not caring whatsoever about consumer privacy or internet security exploited xenophobic fears about the app to land political allies Oracle and Walmart a major windfall? Remember when 90% of the press couldn't be bothered to inform readers this was all performative cronyism by an unqualified nitwit? Good times.

This morning the Wall Street Journal announced that the much hyped deal to sell ByteDance-owned TikTok to Oracle and Walmart is looking unsurprisingly dead in the wake of previous legal challenges and Trump's election loss. Instead, the government appears poised to do what made sense from the start: focus on the broader problem of lax privacy and dodgy security standards across the board in telecom/adtech/tech, instead of singling out a teen dancing app:

"We plan to develop a comprehensive approach to securing U.S. data that addresses the full range of threats we face,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said. “This includes the risk posed by Chinese apps and other software that operate in the U.S. In the coming months, we expect to review specific cases in light of a comprehensive understanding of the risks we face."

Again, this whole effort was about little more than Trump trying to gain leverage in a ham-fisted and unproductive trade war, while using the power of his office to hand over a successful business to his political buddies at Oracle and Walmart. Yet somehow, they managed to get the majority of the US technology press to believe this was some genuine, good faith effort to shore up consumer privacy. There were a few exceptions to this rule in press and policy circles, but they were the exception, not the norm:

Of course it was never really about security and privacy, since there's a parade of other more pressing issues Trump and the GOP clearly didn't care about. Trumpland opposed absolutely anything even resembling consumer privacy rules and standards for the internet era. It opposed funding improved election security. It clearly failed to secure US networks from hackers, and did little to nothing to shore up very real US security vulnerabilities be it the SS7 flaw or the dumpster fire that is the internet of broken things. They didn't genuinely care about internet privacy and security. They just didn't.

As such this wasn't just a failure for Trump, it was an immense failure for the US technology press, which successfully parroted Trump's claims that they were just really worried about consumer data privacy, despite zero evidence on any other front that this was actually true. While the Journal tries to feebly suggest that a deal could still be struck to sell TikTok, that doesn't seem likely. Instead the saga appears to be dying with a sad, quiet whimper, with the only winners being those who gobbled up the millions in billable legal hours to pursue this idiotic tech policy brain fart.

Filed Under: china, donald trump, larry ellison, performative nonsense, political theater, privacy, security theater
Companies: oracle, tiktok, walmart

Without Twitter, Trump Is Left To Write Tweets He Would Have Said On Paper

from the that's-so-pathetic dept

With both Twitter and Facebook banning Donald Trump's account last month, after he inspired a mob of goons to ransack the Capitol, there has been something of an eerie quiet in the world. Having spent years making sure that every one of his often disconnected-from-reality tweets makes headlines or ruins many peoples' days, the sudden quiet has been kind of odd.

Many people have wondered why he hasn't gone elsewhere. While Parler is still down (but expected to return soon), many were surprised that Trump never used it, since his base basically adopted it as their own. However, late last week it was revealed that the Trump Organization had been negotiating (while Trump was President) with Parler for him to first take a huge equity ownership stake in Parler before joining the platform. For whatever reasons the agreement did not materialize.

However, a Daily Beast article, mostly about Trump's views on Liz Cheney, drops a little hint about how Trump has been dealing with his inability to tweet: he's writing out what he would have tweeted on paper and hoping someone else will tweet it for him:

But due to Twitter’s banning of the @realDonaldTrump account following the Capitol riot that Trump instigated, he has not been able to personally trash Cheney via his once widely read tweets. He has written out insults and observations, several of them about Cheney, but with no ability to tweet them himself, he has resorted to suggesting put-downs for others to use or post to their own Twitter, according to a person with direct knowledge of this new habit.

This is... just incredibly pathetic.

But it's also a combination of weird and a little fascinating. The simple fact is that Trump could easily post these little thoughts online. It would not be difficult for his team to set up a personal webpage that would host these tweets -- which would easily get plenty of attention (perhaps not as much and not as immediately as tweets, but still way more than most people). There's even code out there he could make use of to effectively set up his own mini-Twitter, where it was just him posting his thoughts.

But he doesn't do that. He just writes them out where no one but the people around him can see them. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but one possibility is that the thing he liked most about Twitter was not so much the ability to speak, but the audience it guaranteed. At the very least, that's interesting to think about, considering that we tend to view the use of these platforms more about our ability to speak, and less about our ability to have reach for that speech.

Either way, take some solace in the fact that while most of us can continue to tweet, the former President is sitting around with a sharpie and a piece of paper, analog tweeting into nothingness.

Filed Under: bans, content moderation, donald trump, social media
Companies: parler, twitter

Oversight Board Agrees To Review Facebook's Trump Suspension

from the shit-just-got-real dept

On Thursday morning, the Oversight Board (you're apparently not supposed to call it the "Facebook Oversight Board" since it's -- theoretically -- independent) announced that it had agreed to review Facebook's decision to indefinitely suspend former President Donald Trump.

Today the Oversight Board accepted a case referral from Facebook to examine their decision to indefinitely suspend former US President Donald Trump’s access to post content on Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has also requested policy recommendations from the Board on suspensions when the user is a political leader.

Facebook’s decision to suspend Mr. Trump’s access to post on Facebook and Instagram on January 7, 2021, has driven intense global interest. The Oversight Board has been closely following events in the United States and Facebook’s response to them, and the Board is ready to provide a thorough and independent assessment of the company’s decision.

I'll note that this actually surprises me. When the Oversight Board was first announced, it was said that, at least initially, the Board would focus on individual content decisions, rather than on full account bans. But... apparently that changed. It's also interesting that Facebook has asked the Board for policy recommendations. If I remember correctly, Facebook can request such input, but that input is not binding on the company, which has made many skeptical of its value.

Still, this strikes me as an important moment for the Oversight Board. This will obviously be followed very closely. While I share the skepticism of many that the Oversight Board will be that useful in the long run, I do think it's a worthwhile experiment, and something that is worth watching and seeing how it plays out over time. This, obviously, will be its most high profile and important decision to date.

The Board really only got up and running in late October, and didn't announce its first cases until December. And, obviously, none of those were nearly as high profile or consequential as this question regarding former President Trump and his account.

Of course, that also makes this... a tricky issue. People have lots of opinions on the decision to suspend Trump, and many, many, many people are completely sure that their view (either for or against the suspension) is the only correct view. They are also quite sure that anyone who believes the opposite view is bad/corrupt/evil/biased/etc. Personally, I think the issue involves a lot of nuance, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides, especially if you taken into account the larger context.

Unfortunately, though, because people are so sure about what they think the result will be, it likely means that for a significant portion of people, no matter what the Oversight Board comes back with, it will be seen as illegitimate. If the Board agrees with Facebook's decision to suspend, people will argue (falsely) that the Oversight Board is just there to rubber stamp and whitewash Facebook's decisions. If the Board says the decision was a mistake, it will be seen by those who disagree as proof that Facebook never really wanted to ban Trump in the first place, and the move was just to give them political cover.

Like so much in the content moderation world, all of this puts those making these calls in a no win situation. But... at least from an outsider perspective, it should be fascinating to watch what happens and to understand the results. And, personally, as someone who spends way too much time thinking about the trade-offs and consequences of content moderation decisions, I hope to learn something from whatever the Board decides, whether or not I agree with their eventual recommendations and decision.

Filed Under: content moderation, donald trump, oversight board
Companies: facebook

Trump's Facts-Optional Assault On Chinese Tech Continues With Blocking Of Xiaomi

from the glass-houses dept

All of these statements can be true:

• The Chinese government engages in all manner of dangerous, unethical behavior and Chinese companies should be carefully monitored for threats to national security, facing productive penalties when public evidence is provided.
• The US government engages in all manner of dangerous, unethical behavior and US companies should be carefully monitored for threats to national security, facing productive penalties when public evidence is provided.
• Some of the US hyperventilation over Chinese tech and telecom is xenophobic nonsense exploited by US companies for financial gain.

Throughout the Trump administration's assault on Chinese companies, transparent evidence of wrongdoing has been an afterthought. There was little to no evidence provided by the administration to justify its year-long assault on TikTok, which arguably distracted government leaders from far more pressing threats to national security. Similarly, while blocklisted network hardware vendor Huawei engages in some atrocious behavior around the world, evidence that the company directly spies on US citizens at the behest of China (the core accusation) has also never been publicly proven, despite ample hyperventilation.

Fast forward to last week, when the Trump administration announced it had blocklisted Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi for its alleged ties to the Chinese military:

"The Defense Department said that Xiaomi, along with eight other firms it added to its blacklist, was working to support China’s People’s Liberation Army by giving it access to its technology. In a statement, the Defense Department accused Xiaomi of being part of an orchestrated campaign to support the "modernization goals of the People's Liberation Army by ensuring its access to advanced technology and expertise."

The problem, again, is that there's no evidence of this, and when the shoe is on the other foot, US companies get understandably angry. Xiaomi, which recently passed Apple to become the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, has denied any connection to the Chinese military, and the Trump administration has provided no evidence that one exists. A not insubstantial portion of these efforts are driven by xenophobia and greed (in many instances US companies just don't want to compete with cheaper kit), yet there's an over-arching pretense in the press that this somehow isn't the case.

The other problem we like to downplay is the US' blistering hypocrisy on this subject. US telecom giant AT&T is fused so tightly to our global intelligence efforts, you'd have a hard time physically determining where AT&T ends and the NSA begins. The US had no problem breaking into Huawei to install its own backdoors, or stealing network hardware in transit to install backdoors, or, you know, spying on absolutely everybody, including allies, all the time, for several generations, with zero respect for boundaries or the rule of law. We provided IT support to a continent of brutal fascists during Operation Condor, for fuck's sake.

If the US wants to be taken seriously on this subject, it has a hell of a lot of work to do, starting with leading by example. And again, if there's direct evidence that a Chinese company has been spying on Americans, then provide it and let's have a transparent conversation about it. But most coverage and discussion of Trump's war on Chinese tech involves pretending a lack of public evidence is okay, pretending the US' dodgy history on this very subject doesn't exist, pretending that a lot of these efforts aren't driven by bigotry or simple greed, and pretending that the Trump administration has any idea whatsoever what it's doing.

Filed Under: china, donald trump
Companies: xiaomi