Cards Against Humanity's Trolling Of Trump's Border Wall Shows How The Internet Has Removed Gatekeepers

from the trump-card dept

I suppose because too many of my fellow citizens in America have devolved into hyper-partisan rage-beacons, I have to issue the following stupid caveat that I shouldn't have to issue at all: this post is not a commentary on Trump's border wall policy. Great. I'm sure that will keep our comments free and clear of anyone insisting otherwise. With that being said, a common topic we discuss here is how one of the chief benefits of the internet is how it has removed gatekeepers that have long stood in the way of new businesses, or have governed how established businesses do their business. Typically, we have focused on the former, detailing how the internet has allowed for new players in everything from the entertainment industry to products that would have previously existed solely at the pleasure of brick and mortar retail stores.

But this post is about the latter. You may have heard about the viral video making the rounds from the folks behind the hit card game Cards Against Humanity. If you haven't, here it is.

I have to admit, the video is really well done. If nothing else, it serves to remind us that content is advertising and advertising is content.

But it's also true that a campaign that essentially trolls the sitting American President by buying a piece of land where his proposed border wall is going to go and then vowing to defend that land legally for as long as possible is controversial to say the least. Some not inconsequential percentage of Americans -- and, likely, our readers -- think that the border wall is good policy. Some other percentage do not. Whatever you might think, it should be clear that this campaign is likely to piss off some decent chunk of the company's potential customer base. Why the company wants to do this is a valid question, but I'd like to point out why they can do this.

Given the nature of the game, the company has no problem being a bit brash, and because they are self-owned, and don't rely on big box stores to push their product, the company can get away with a bit more.

That's putting it mildly. It's nearly impossible to envision the company taking so staunch a political stance as this were it forced to rely on traditional retail stores, which would likewise feel backlash from supporters of the border wall. You likely have already imagined how many calls there would be on retailers to drop the product if this happened, except it's more likely that the folks behind Cards Against Humanity never would have done this in the first place, save for their ability to sell directly to consumers via the internet.

Political stances are also not a new habit for the company. It's even addressed on the company's FAQ page on its website.

On its FAQ page for the new expansion, one question asks: I don't like that you're getting political. Why don't you just stick to card games?

Their answer? "Why don’t you stick to seeing how many Hot Wheels cars you can fit up your asshole?"

My kind of people, obviously. Again, whatever your political leanings, it's worth recognizing how any company is now more free to engage in controversial behavior like this simply because the gatekeepers are gone and the internet reigns.

Filed Under: card games, cards against humanity, gatekeepers, politics

Republican Governors Association Sets Up Partisan News Site & Forgets To Tell Anyone As It Pumps Out 'News'

from the that's-not-news dept

I like to assume that everyone is as tired as I am of the term "fake news." The term, which once seemed to have a fairly coherent meaning, has since been co-opted by pretty much everyone to mean any number of things that mostly amount to "news I don't like." That's incredibly annoying, as is all of the partisan mold that has grown upon this now dead and useless term.

That said, one does struggle to find different terminology to use when referring to a very strange thing the Republican Governors Association did when it set up a site that purported to be a "news site", but which only served as a GOP governors propaganda outfit, while forgetting to tell anyone who was behind it all.

The Republican Governors Association has quietly launched an online publication that looks like a media outlet and is branded as such on social media. The Free Telegraph blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively. It asks readers to sign up for breaking news alerts. It launched in the summer bearing no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.

Only after The Associated Press inquired about the site last week was a disclosure added to The Free Telegraph's pages identifying the publication's partisan source.

It should be noted that this source identification was not some simple omission, but rather a calculated effort to fool people into thinking the site was some objective source of journalism. The evidence for that is rather plain. Over the summer, the site was registered through Domains By Proxy, a service solely useful for its ability to hide the identities of those registering websites. The social media accounts for The Free Telegraph projected the site as everything from an "outside Washington perspective" to putting the site in the "Media/News Company" category on Facebook. The site was, of course, absolutely none of these things, instead being a GOP operation run squarely from inside Washington that was engaged in obvious partisan messaging as opposed to anything resembling news or journalism.

And, just so some of you don't think we obvious pinko commie Antichrists here at Techdirt are slanting this, Republicans themselves made sure it was known how itchy all of this made them.

"It's propaganda for sure, even if they have objective standards and all the reporting is 100 percent accurate," said Republican communications veteran Rick Tyler, whose resume includes Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign.

Democrats, meanwhile, rightly point out that a site like this can serve two purposes, neither of them in the category of honest. The site can fool readers themselves into thinking they are reading objective or even slanted "journalism", when instead they are drinking from the hose of one of the country's major parties. Perhaps equally important, however, is how the "news" and "headlines" on the site could be used in future campaigns.

Democrats say Republicans are laying the groundwork with headlines that will appear in future digital and television ads, while also providing individual voters with fodder to distribute across social media.

"They're just seeding the ground," said Angelo Carusone, who runs Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group. "They are repackaging their opposition research so it's there as 'news,' and at any moment that publication could become the defining moment of the narrative" in some state's campaign for governor.

Again, I really want to call all of this something other than "fake news" because of what that term has become, but it's hard to find an appropriate substitute. What I wonder is how anyone could trust this particular governors association again, given this fairly bald-faced attempt at this offshoot of gaslighting voters.

Filed Under: fake news, news, politics, republican governors association, the free telegraph

SESTA Is Being Pushed As The Answer To A Sex Trafficking 'Epidemic' That Simply Doesn't Exist

from the reality-check dept

The rationale behind the Section 230-upending SESTA bill is that sex trafficking is such a huge problem, some collateral damage is a small price to pay. The push begins with the targeted criminal behavior itself. No one wants to appear as though they're opposed to fighting trafficking, so that scores some quick wins with a few legislators. It continues with inflated numbers suggesting trafficking has become a multi-billion dollar industry here in the US.

Two backers of an earlier human trafficking bill - Rep. Bob Goodlatte and Rep. Ann Wagner -- both cited unsupported numbers while discussing the criminal activity. Goodlatte claimed "child sex trafficking alone is a $9.8 billion industry." Wagner's money quote was about the same -- $9.5 billion -- but didn't narrow it down to just child sex trafficking.

It doesn't matter whether the number included children or not. The numbers are false. The Washington Post dug into the stats and couldn't find anything independently verifiable that added up to the $9 billion price tag asserted here. What WaPo found was the $9 billion was a worldwide estimate based on some very questionable extrapolation from a few small data sets with large sampling errors. The paper tracked the numbers all the way back to figures provided by ICE in 2003, which was a worldwide estimate that also included human smuggling.

Other reports have suggested an incredible amount of profit per exploited person:

The ILO in 2014 released another report on human trafficking with updated profit estimates. This report provided a calculation of $26 billion in profits for “forced sexual exploitation” in the 36 industrialized countries, based on the assumption of 300,000 prostitutes, earnings of about $115,000 a year, and profits of $80,000.

These are the sort of numbers being pointed to by supporters of SESTA. This is the extremely fuzzy math that leads SESTA frontman Sen. Rob Portman to declare sex trafficking an "epidemic" in America. The real numbers are never cited because they'll never convince anyone to sign off on an internet-damaging bill like SESTA. Elizabeth Nolan Brown does the actual math using actual FBI crime figures and there's nothing approaching a $10 billion/year trafficking epidemic.

Human trafficking arrests are almost nonexistent in most states, according to the FBI's newly released U.S. crime statistics for 2016.

Part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) project, the new data on sex and labor trafficking shows that arrests for either offense are rare and that many suspected incidents of trafficking did not ultimately yield results.

Lots of law enforcement resources get poured into human trafficking investigations but the expenditures vastly outweigh the results.

For instance, Florida reported 105 investigations into human-trafficking offenses in 2016 but zero human trafficking arrests last year. Nevada worked on 140 human trafficking investigations but made only 40 arrests on trafficking charges. Louisiana looked into 123 potential cases of human trafficking but only arrested 16 people for it.

Last year, supporters of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act were claiming 1,000 children become victims of sex trafficking in Ohio alone every year. These numbers were based the same sort of small data set + sampling errors + baseless extrapolation used to reach the national figures.

[T]he study’s authors took that 15-per-year figure [number of minor victims IDed in Toledo] and applied it to all girls ages 12 through 17 in the state of Ohio. That population, 337,961, yields an estimate of 202 girls per year.

Then, the commission multiplied 202 by five, because a University of Toledo study claimed that each sex trafficking victim they interviewed knew an average of five more underaged minors "not known to law enforcement, but who were engaging in the sex trade."

One big problem: The Ohio study did not control for the fact that Toledo’s child sex trafficking rates were the highest in the state, which inflates their estimate even before multiplying it by five.

The commission then threw in some boys for good measure, reasoning that being gay, transgender or a runaway are "risk factors" for becoming a child sex trafficking victim. Because 3 to 5 percent of the overall US population identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, the committee added 63 males to the estimated number of child victims.

The attorney general’s trafficking study concluded that an annual 1,078 minors in Ohio were potential victims.

More than 1,000 children exploited every year by traffickers! And by the wiliest of traffickers, apparently. Actual arrests in Ohio for trafficking? Five in 2014. Zero in 2015 and 2016.

Even some of those nominally supportive of SESTA are finding it difficult to reason with citizens affected by government-led sex trafficking hysteria. Roseville (CA) Police had to take to Facebook to combat misinformation being spread about sex trafficking by a viral social media post. The post detailed the "suspicious" activity of a man spotted in a grocery store parking lot. To those passing around the post, "suspicious man" = "proof of rampant human trafficking." The Roseville PD responded with some nice, cold facts.

[T]he post mentions that the suspicious man was probably a human trafficker looking to kidnap children. This is highly unlikely, as kidnapping by strangers is a rare crime in the United States. Stranger abductions of children are so frightening and so unusual that when they do happen, they make national news. According to national research, children taken by strangers or slight acquaintances represent only one-hundredth of 1 percent (.01%) of all missing children.

[...]

The Roseville Police Department has never taken a report of anyone being kidnapped by a stranger and forced into the sex trade. Our vice officers have interviewed numerous prostitutes and exploited victims over the years, and asked them how they got into their situations. None have said they were originally kidnapped.

[...]

We recently conducted undercover operations in retail areas, and found no evidence that human traffickers were there recruiting strangers.

Human trafficking in the US does exist. No one's denying that -- and no one's denying that it's devastating for those victims and their families. But it's not the multi-billion epidemic it's portrayed as by politicians and SESTA supporters. The problem should be addressed, but there are plenty of laws on the books already that allow for the pursuit and prosecution of actual sex traffickers. Throwing third-party service providers into the mix does nothing more than allow the government to attack third parties (because it's easier) rather than engage in the more difficult work of targeting traffickers themselves.

Filed Under: moral panic, politics, sesta, sex trafficking

Intelligence Community Leaks Are Normalizing Domestic Surveillance Abuses

from the nation's-shit-to-remain-fucked-for-the-forseeable-future dept

It's the normal state of things, but familiarity makes it no less enjoyable to observe: power changes hands in the White House and suddenly everything the previous president authorized with the support of his followers becomes a dangerous weapon in the hands of the new guy. The only surprising thing is the cycle never ends.

As has been noted here, longtime fans of government surveillance under Obama were suddenly deeply concerned about Trump's command of the nation's spycraft. Then there were all those Republicans who helped assemble the surveillance machinery in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, expressing their displeasure with the FBI, NSA, and others using powers they'd granted them. Domestic surveillance is fine, they argued. Years later, it's NIMBY but for recently-elected presidents.

But there's a darker current running below the irony and schadenfreude. Both sides applaud possible surveillance abuses when they harm their political enemies, but act like these are Espionage Act violations when the target is one of their own. The ultimate problem isn't the right/left, Republican/Democrat partisan divide and the hypocrisy that goes with it. The problem is the abuse/misuse of surveillance powers for political gamesmanship.

The FBI didn't go rogue after Trump canned Director James Comey in the most duplicitous, chickenshit way ever. It had been coloring outside of the lines for months, if not years, with Comey making the most of his many grandstands to push his personal agenda at the expense of the agency's. He routinely made statements others in the DOJ have refused to back up and broke protocol (twice) by openly discussing investigations that resulted in no criminal charges.

The Trump presidency has been notable for the number of leaks it has prompted, which seem to spring from nearly every agency with access to collected intelligence. The reaction to the leaks by the Trump Administration has been awful in pretty much every way, and the looming threat of prosecution by Jeff Sessions' god-guns-and-government DOJ hasn't done much to slow the bleeding.

What's being overlooked is the danger this autonomy poses. While some would love to see every presidential administration undermined by intelligence leaks [raises hand], this isn't always a good thing. Nor is it something that should be cheered on without reservation when it's the other side sustaining damage. Agencies with access to domestic communications (and there are a lot of them, thanks to loosened information-sharing restrictions) have their own agendas to push, too, and they're rarely directly aligned with either party.

As Julian Sanchez notes, partisans need to stop cheering when things go their way and crying foul when they don't. The problem goes far beyond politics and stabs at the heart of rights and protections the government is supposed to be ensuring for everyone.

If we take it at face value (leaving aside whether that’s proper), the Flynn intercept reveals a president-elect apparently worried that his foreign policy would be undermined by his own government’s intelligence agencies. It would be easier to dismiss that fear as yet another fit of Trumpian paranoia if it didn’t seem like we were learning about that conversation from wiretaps.

Progressives who’ve recently learned to stop worrying and love the surveillance state should think hard about the precedent such leaks set — and the implicit message they send to political actors — even if any particular instance can be justified as serving the public interest. The leaks may not be, as conservative media would have it, the only real scandal, but nobody should be too enthusiastic about the prospect of living in a country where officials who antagonize spy agencies find their telephone conversations quoted in news headlines.

Speaking personally, as much as I'd like to see every president supportive of constant surveillance and law enforcement mission creep be the victim of an apparatus they think they control, I also want overreaching agencies to be subjected to the same involuntary transparency and accountability. But the power has tipped too far in one direction, thanks largely to the alienating acts of the current administration. The IC is not-so-subtly sending out a warning to meddling politicians and enemies of their desires. In an effort to undermine an administration they don't like, unnamed intelligence community operatives are undermining the entire system. It won't stop here. It will only get worse.

The response to the leaks only aggravates the issue. A desire to punish leakers for exposing the administration's misdeeds will result in harsher policies and punishments for whistleblowers, who cannot help but be caught up in the purge the DOJ is threatening. The agencies themselves have already put themselves in the position to nullify their oversight through the existential threat of leaked communications. A hunt for whistleblowers and leakers (often the same thing) will only increase the agencies' autonomy, making them even more dangerous in the future.

Filed Under: intelligence, intelligence community, leaks, partisan politics, politics, surveillance, surveillance abuse

House Votes Overwhelmingly To Make The Copyright Office More Political & To Delay Modernization

from the what-a-farce dept

This isn't a huge surprise, but unfortunately, today -- after a mostly ridiculous "debate" on the House floor full of claptrap and bullshit about how important copyright is to "protecting jobs" (despite this bill having nothing to do with any of that) -- the House voted 378 to 48 to approve a bill that makes the head of the Copyright Office, the Copyright Register, a Presidential appointment rather than an appointment by the Library of Congress, as it's been throughout the entire history of the Copyright Office. As we pointed out just yesterday, Congress appears to be rushing this through for no clear reason. It held no hearings on the issue (other than the fact that the current Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, was getting ready to appoint her own Copyright Register).

Again, every reason given by supporters of this bill doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. They claimed, falsely, that copyright creates 5 million jobs (one Rep -- Tony Cardenas -- even claimed that the Copyright Register "oversees" those jobs). But this is not true. They claimed that the Copyright Office needs to be modernized -- which is true. But Carla Hayden has already commenced a massive modernization project, which this bill will stop dead in its tracks. They claimed that this would provide "greater oversight" over how the Copyright Office is run, but that's not even remotely true. The bill actually takes away the oversight from the Librarian of Congress... and gives it to no one other than the President, who isn't likely to be paying much attention to what's happening at the Copyright Office.

This bill serves no purpose other than to take power away from the Librarian of Congress and give it to powerful lobbyists who will have a major say in who runs the Copyright Office. The bill will now move to the Senate where it is also likely to get an easy approval, and no doubt the President will sign the bill (which gives him more power, even if he's shown little sign of actually appointing people to the nearly 500 open positions which this will add to). It's a bad bill, and it's a gift to Hollywood, even as it will harm the actual content creators who will have to wait even longer for the office to actually be modernized.

Filed Under: carla hayden, congress, copyright office, copyright register, library of congress, modernization, politics, presidential appointment