Public Records Plumb The Depths Of Illinois Law Enforcement's Accountability Black Hole

from the regular-rogues-gallery-of-[lol]-public-servants dept

The Chicago Police Department isn't willing to police itself. That much is apparent from the actions of its officers, which includes the department setting up an inner city "black site" where arrestees were separated from the rights and representation in order to coerce confessions.

Nonexistent oversight has led directly to horrific outcomes, like unjustified killings and -- in just one jaw-dropping stat -- 100 misconduct accusations resulting from a single SWAT team raid of a wrong address.

Will it ever get better? It seems unlikely. In Illinois, police accountability isn't even an afterthought. Some reforms were passed earlier this year but with a large concession to police departments: a partial burial of officers' misconduct records.

At the same time that the 2021 law expanded the information in the misconduct database and required local departments to check it, a last minute amendment closed the database to the public and courts.

That loophole is on pg. 669 of the text. It reads: “The database, documents, materials or other information in the possession or control of the Board that are obtained by or disclosed to the Board pursuant to this subsection shall be confidential by law and privileged and shall not be subject to discovery or admissible in evidence in any private civil action.”

That's a pretty big loophole. There's a workaround, but it requires parties to approach individual law enforcement agencies to obtain these records, rather than simply get them from the state's Training Standards Board, which is charged with collecting them from all over the state. A little secrecy goes a long way. Records can still be obtained, but it all but makes it impossible for outsiders to quantify how much misconduct is being reported across the state or how much of that misconduct is resulting in punishment.

That's the way the police like it. Cops in the state -- especially in Chicago -- are tough on crime… unless it's criminal acts or rights violations committed by officers. The Pulitzer Center has obtained a number of records from across the state via public records requests, which shows how often officers walk away from sustained allegations and criminal charges.

Eighty-one Chicago police officers lost their badges over the past 20 years, but only after being investigated for 1,706 previous offenses – an average of 21 accusations per officer.

When law enforcement agencies say some horrible thing in the news is the result of a "bad apple," they're referring to officers like these ones. But agencies are obviously fine with having bad apples floating around their barrels. Bad apples create more bad apples. The simplest thing to do would be to send these officers packing when it becomes apparent they can't be trusted. Somehow, it is always anyone but police officials pointing out the worst of the worst, months or years after sustained damage has been done.

This is what Illinois residents' tax dollars are paying for:

From 2000 to 2020 law enforcement officers in Illinois kept their badges even if they engaged in domestic abuse, sexual harassment, racism, perjury, most misdemeanors and other offenses unbecoming of a police officer.

Over the entire year of 2020, Illinois decertified two officers – one for theft and the other for an offense labeled “other,” an ambiguous category occasionally used in the state’s decertification records.

From Jan. 1, 2000, to Jan. 1, 2021, Illinois decertified 347 officers, an average of fewer than 17 a year.

But that's not even the worst of it. This is:

[Norberto] Rodriguez held on to his police license for almost a decade after he went to prison on a 52-month sentence for transporting four kilos of heroin. The state decertification board said Chicago officials failed to notify them of the conviction.

Chicago police investigated Rodriguez for domestic abuse three times during the 1990s and he was suspended or asked to take an unpaid leave for a total of 48 days. In 1992, the department investigated him for assault/battery, an allegation the department sustained.

In 1997 prosecutors charged him with the attempted murder of his wife, Irma, for shooting her in an argument. These charges were dropped, but the department fired him.

[...]

Rodriguez killed his wife, Irma, in 2009, and a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in 2017.

The twist? His police certification wasn't revoked until two years after he murdered his wife. And he held onto it for nine years after he pled guilty to federal drug charges and for twenty years after he was fired by the PD.

The Chicago PD has employed two officers who murdered their spouses.

[Rafael] Balbontin was decertified in 2007 for a “felony.” Before this, Chicago police investigated him for “murder/manslaughter” in 2005, which the department later changed in its final complaint category to a “domestic altercation,” for which it fired him.

The “domestic altercation” was in 2005 when Balbontin stabbed his wife, Arcelia, to death in her home. He was later convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The PD can't even bring itself to acknowledge the actual crime committed by its officer. A "domestic altercation" can result in murder, but murder is never just a "domestic altercation"... unless it has to be documented in an officer's employment record.

And bad cops (there are plenty listed in this report) were free to bounce around the state, infecting other agencies after being (in very rare cases) fired or forced to resign. It wasn't until this year that the state's law enforcement agencies were required to perform background checks and verify prospective officers were still certified. Agencies were always free to approach the state's law enforcement training board to check on officers' certifications. But they never did.

In response to a FOIA request, the board acknowledged it had no record of a local department requesting the certification status of an officer from 2000 to 2019.

The board excused this lack of interest in its certification records by pointing out agencies could get the same information from the Professional Misconduct Database that was created in 2019. Most agencies couldn't be bothered to do that either.

This database was used 48 times in its first year of operation but never by the Chicago Police Department as of December 2020, according to a FOIA request.

Don't ask, don't tell: law enforcement edition. This is how the Chicago PD (and others in the state) came to employ (for years on end) rapists, fraudsters, extortionists, domestic abusers, actual murderers, and officers with misconduct rap sheets longer than the criminal records of the people they arrested. If accountability begins at home, the state's police agencies stepped out to buy a pack of smokes shortly after formation and never looked back.

Filed Under: chicago pd, foia, illinois, public records, transparency

Court Case Brought By Dairy Queen Over 'Blizzard' Trademark Infringement On 'Blizzard Water' Begins And Is Dumb

from the brrrrrr dept

I don't know how in the world I missed this over the past couple of years, but I'm just in time to introduce you to a trademark lawsuit brought by the Dairy Queen people against W.B. Mason, an office supply and grocerer, over the latter's "Blizzard Water" brand. This story actually starts back in 2017, when W.B. Mason applied for a trademark on the water product. The company had actually been selling Blizzard Water since 2010, but the trademark application appears to have been what made Dairy Queen aware of that.

And as a result, Dairy Queen filed suit over trademark claims. Dairy Queen argued in its initial complaint that its "Blizzard" mark is famous, which, yeah it is. It also argued that W.B. Mason selling Blizzard Water in its stores was going to cause confusion of origin or association with the buying public. Which... no, come on now. Ice cream is not water and no moron in any kind of hurry is going to confuse the two. Why does Dairy Queen say that product difference doesn't matter? Well, from the filing...

A substantial portion of Dairy Queen's approximately 4,500 DAIRY QUEEN® restaurants in the United States sell bottled water branded with third party marks in close proximity to sales of, and advertising featuring, Dairy Queen's BLIZZARD® treats and the BLIZZARD® Marks. For example, DASANI® bottled water was a featured item on DAIRY QUEEN® restaurant menus in February 2018, in close proximity to BLIZZARD® treats.

And that's pretty much it. Because Dairy Queen sells Dasani water and also Blizzard treats, suddenly it becomes trademark infringement for W.B. Mason to sell branded water. That's... not how this works. It's also worth mentioning that W.B. Mason didn't come up with this branding for water purely to trade off of Dairy Queen's product. Instead, as is detailed out in the court's refusal to both sides to rule for either in summary judgement, W.B. Mason has been selling other "blizzard" branded items for some time, namely paper in its office supplies division. In its analysis on summary judgement, the court essentially falls back on both parties having submitted competing evidence, meaning a trial must ensue. But the court also said:

[The court] notes that the record evidence of intent is weak and Dairy Queen will need to present legal authority to rely on any post-notice evidence supporting intent at trial.

In other words, Dairy Queen indicated that W.B. Mason had knowledge of Dairy Queen's mark but didn't bother to present any evidence of that. On the rest of the trademark claims for the purposes of summary judgement, the court again points to competing evidence, but notes, again, that any evidence of intent to confuse the public is very weak and, while allowing this case to continue due to competing evidence, that there is a ton of evidence on record to demonstrate that (sigh) ice cream treats and water are not directly competing products.

Look, this is all very elongated, complicated, and, ultimately, stupid. I have no idea why Dairy Queen is spending the time and resources to keep an office supply store from selling Blizzard-branded water. It is no threat to Dairy Queen. There are plenty of other companies out there in unrelated markets using the "blizzard" mark as well.

Perhaps the company's legal team is on some kind of manic sugar high.

Filed Under: blizzard, blizzard water, trademark
Companies: dairy queen, w.b. mason

Clearview Is So Toxic Even Other Surveillance Tech Purveyors Want Nothing To Do With It

from the bring-back-spitting-in-disgust-old-world-style dept

Outside of Clearview's CEO Hoan Ton-That, it's unclear who truly likes or admires the upstart facial recognition tech company. In the short time since its existence was uncovered, Clearview has managed to turn itself into Pariah-in-Chief of a surveillance industry full of pariahs.

Clearview hasn't endeared itself to the sources for its 10-billion image database, which are (in descending order) (1) any publicly-accessible website/social media platform, and (2) their users. The company has been sued (for violating state privacy laws) in the United States and politely asked to leave by Canada, which found Clearview's nonconsensual harvesting of personal info illegal.

It has subpoenaed activists demanding access to their (protected by the First Amendment) conversations with journalists. It has made claims about law enforcement efficacy that have been directly contradicted by the namechecked police departments. It has invited private companies, billionaire tech investors, police departments in the US, and government agencies around in the world to test drive the software by running searches on friends, family members, and whoever else potential customers might find interesting/useful to compile a (scraped) digital dossier on.

Clearview intends to swallow up all the web it can. Caroline Haskins' report for Business Insider (alt link here) catches Clearview's vice president of federal sales pretty much saying the only way to avoid being added to Clearview's database is to stop being online.

"People are constantly dumping their — it's just a constant," Clearview's Jones said during the roundtable event, referring to the steady stream of people posting their photos online, only for Clearview to scrape them.

The same report shows why Clearview's is so bad at PR. It has a PR team -- one that continually stresses the AI does not provide "matches," but rather "investigative leads." The difference between the terms is the extent of liability. If Clearview only generates leads, it cannot be blamed for false positives. If it says it delivers "matches," it possibly can be sued for wrongful arrests.

But CEO Hoan Ton-That can't stop using the terms interchangeably, which indicates he feels his software generates matches, thus inviting additional culpability.

"No one has done what we do at this scale with this accuracy," he said later in the conference, adding that anyone "is able to solve cases instantaneously if they get matches in the system."

The "accuracy" Ton-That claims no one can match is "98.6% accuracy per one million faces" -- an assertion Clearview's made for a couple of years now. Whether this claim is anywhere near 98.6% accurate remains to be seen. The AI has never been independently tested or audited.

We know how Clearview feels about itself. But how do the competitors in the market feel about it? Caroline Haskins spoke to other surveillance tech purveyors at the Connect:ID industry event and found other providers of facial recognition AI weren't thrilled Clearview was out there giving already-controversial tech an even worse reputation.

Several industry professionals openly expressed not liking or respecting the company. One government contractor said Clearview was "creepy." He told me he'd read about the company's extensive ties to the far right and was alarmed by that.

In one discussion, an attendee called the company "the worst facial-recognition company in the world."

Well, there's one thing surveillance tech purveyors and surveillance tech targets can agree on: Clearview took a bad thing, made it worse, and seems willing to trade paint with the internet at large to maintain its "Images in a facial recognition database [privately-owned]' lead.

While it's normal for competitors to criticize their rivals, the statements made here imply Clearview is bad for the facial recognition tech industry -- something that threatens these competitors' livelihoods. And that's not acceptable, even if the collective marketing of problematic AI to government agencies doesn't appear to bother them a bit.

Filed Under: facial recognition, surveillance
Companies: clearview

RFK Jr. Abusing The Courts To Harass Pseudonymous Blogger For Pointing Out RFK Spoke At German Event Organized By Far Right Extremists

from the how-do-you-say-streisand-effect-in-german? dept

How big of an embarrassment is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Beyond all the anti-vax nonsense, he filed a ridiculously embarrassing lawsuit against Facebook because he was fact checked. The case was laughed out of court earlier this year. And now he's trying to abuse the courts to out a pseudonymous blogger for writing about how RFK Jr. spoke at a German rally last year that appeared to be organized by folks with ties to rightwing extremists.

Paul Levy from Public Citizen, who is trying to stop RFK from succeeding in this bullshit effort, has a blog post with all of the details.

Our latest effort to defend the right to speak anonymously about issues of public concern brings us up against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Last summer, Kennedy spoke at an August 29 rally convened by the German far right to protest government restrictions aimed at corralling the COVID pandemic. Kennedy was, apparently, the third choice speaker, after appeals from a rightwing group called Querdenken to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin went unheeded.  But when this group learned that Kennedy was coming to Germany for other reasons, it issued a public invitation and he responded. The German right waxed rhapsodic about the way in which Kennedy’s presence was lending legitimacy to their activity.

The rally and his speech were widely covered in the mainstream media, which reported that his rally was heavily attended by neo-Nazis  and that a variety of antisemitic and neo-Nazi factions  had been involved in organizing the event. Kennedy was infuriated by this coverage of the audience to whom he had become connected by speaking at the rally.  His position is that any neo-Nazis were at some other rally on the same day, and that Querdenken is a fine group unsullied by neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic ties. Our expert witness says otherwise.

Kennedy took no action against the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others who took note of these connections. Instead, he directed his ire at what, I assume, he viewed as a defenseless target: DowneastDem, an otherwise obscure blogger on the Daily Kos who generally writes about German and Maine politics. This blogger wrote a post entitled “Anti-Vaxxer RFK JR. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin 'Anti-Corona' Protest,” linking in turn to an eyewitness account in a major Berlin newspaper whose sub-headline mentioned the participation of neo-Nazis (English translation here).  Kennedy responded by having a lawyer post a heated comment in the form of an open letter, denying the accuracy of the blog post and demanding that it be taken down immediately.

As Levy notes, the mere denial by Kennedy's lawyer wasn't enough -- and Kennedy hired the pre-eminent law firm these days for trying to shut people up, Boies Schiller Flexner. As you may recall, the "Boies" in Boies Schiller Flexner is David Boies, who famously was deeply involved in trying to silence Harvey Weinstein's accusers, deeply involved in trying to punish Theranos whistleblowers, and also tried to silence reporting on the Sony hack years back.

As recounted by Levy, RFK Jr. got the lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner to convince a court to do some sketchy things in order to try to unmask the blogger:

When the blogger did not take the post down, Kennedy upped the ante, calling in a large firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, to file a pre-action petition for discovery to identify Kennedy’s critic. The proceeding was filed in Kennedy’s hometown court, Westchester County, New York, despite the fact that Daily Kos, owned by California company Kos Media, cannot be subpoenaed there, and despite the fact the New York has deliberately limited the reach of its long-arm statute to preclude defamation suits against alleged defamers who do not live in New York. The petition was verified, not by Kennedy himself but by his lawyer, who swore on personal knowledge that the blog post was false, even though the lawyer had not been in Berlin and thus could not have personal knowledge of what had happened there. The local judge nevertheless authorized the issuance of a subpoena to identify DowneastDem, deciding that admissible evidence that the allegedly defamatory statements were false was not needed because under existing precedents in New York’s Second Department, mere allegations of wrongdoing were enough to support issuance of a pre-litigation subpoena.

As Levy further notes, RFK's lawyers started a new lawsuit in California based on the questionable NY subpoena, and that's where Levy and Public Citizen have entered the case, seeking to quash the effort:

Thus, we filed a petition to quash the subpoena, and secured a briefing schedule that would give both sides a fair opportunity to brief the issues. Kennedy’s lawyers started trying to avoid having to address our arguments, first filing a parallel motion to compel Kos Media to comply with the subpoena, with a hearing date before our motion to quash was scheduled to be heard, then trying to strike our motion papers altogether. Once those efforts were denied, Kennedy, using an unusual California procedure that gives parties a peremptory strike to change the judge assigned to a case, claimed that the judge who had rejected his procedural evasions was prejudiced against him, and got the case reassigned. At this point, however, our motions are fully briefed and the cross-motions are scheduled to be heard on November 2, 2021.

Kennedy’s opposition to the motion to quash was rhetorically strong but surprisingly anemic in substance. We had anticipated that he would use his considerable resources to produce eyewitness affidavits from his German collaborators to attest to his version of the facts – that is why we insisted on a briefing schedule that would give us ample time to find eyewitnesses to the rally at which he spoke. Instead, his opposition is based only on Kennedy’s own affidavit. Kennedy’s affidavit says broadly that the blog post contains false statements, which seems inadequate to the task of showing based on personal knowledge what was said at the rally, and by whom, considering that he does not appear to be fluent in German, and at the end of his speech, as shown on his own website, he appears to have headed to his bus to leave as soon as he was done speaking. On this sort of evidence, Kennedy risks a William Westmoreland style outcome  -– that is to say, a ruling that, so far as the record shows, what DowneastDem said about his participation in the protest was essentially true.

As Levy notes, underneath all this nonsense, there is an interesting question regarding anonymity:

If the case gets past Kennedy’s failure to present any admissible evidence of falsity, the utter lack of personal jurisdiction in the New York court, and the expiration of New York’s one-year statute of limitations since DowneastDem posted her blog article, the California judge could end up reaching an interesting issue that has been bothering me since we achieved our first round of success in getting the Dendrite analysis (or the related Cahill approach some state courts have adopted)— whether the requirement of an evidentiary showing extends to the issue of actual malice. Cases like Krinsky leave that issue open, and this case could be a good one to explore it.

Imagine, for example, that Bill Clinton wanted to identify an anonymous blogger who said, in 2021, that Clinton had sex with a White House intern – would Clinton get to identify his accuser by doing no more than swearing under oath, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”? Or, considering the wealth of publication about Clinton’s conduct, would some showing on the issue of actual malice be required?

Similarly here, the defamation claim is not addressed to speech that is based on personal knowledge about what occurred in the course of a controversy that occurred in private, or between two or three people; so the speech was not based on facts known only to the defendant. The blogger here presented her take on what happened at a public rally, heavily covered by the mass media, and with thousands of people present (the very first post about this litigation on the web site of Children's Health Defense claimed the “speech that Kennedy delivered [was] to more than 1 million people” (although that same blog post said that the speech was on August 22 – you can see how careful Kennedy is with facts); another said that this was “one of the biggest demonstrations in [German] history.”  In context, the blog post could represent DowneastDem’s opinion about the meaning of the media reports (which would not be actionable). Alternately, it could be treated as a characterization of the facts reported by the many media reports; if the characterization of such facts is itself a fact, it would not likely be the product of actual malice considering how many reputable media sources made just the same statements.

If Kennedy had sued DowneastDem as a Doe defendant in either Maine or New York, his lawsuit would have been vulnerable to a motion to dismiss under the anti-SLAPP laws in those two states, and he would have had to present prima facie evidence of actual malice without knowing the Doe’s identity. Where Kennedy has evaded anti-SLAPP motions by seeking the remedy of outing his critic, without actually filing an action that could be met with an anti-SLAPP motion, it is fair and reasonable to require him to present evidence that suggests some likelihood that the allegedly false facts about a widely-reported public event were stated with actual malice, before a court issues an order depriving the blogger of the First Amendment right to speak anonymously.

Of course, all of this has created something of a Streisand Effect. How many people were aware that RFK spoke at this German rally before all of this? How many more people are aware now?

Filed Under: anonymity, defamation, downeast dem, germany, rallies, rfk jr., robert f. kennedy jr., subpoena
Companies: daily kos

Daily Deal: The 2021 Complete All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The 2021 Complete All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle has 12 courses designed to teach you about video editing, animations, photography, design, and more. Courses cover popular Adobe products like Lightroom, After Effects, Photoshop, and Adobe XD. The bundle is on sale for $34.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Let Me Rewrite That For You: Washington Post Misinforms You About How Facebook Weighted Emoji Reactions

from the let's-clean-it-up dept

Journalist Dan Froomkin, who is one of the most insightful commentators on the state of the media today, recently began a new effort, which he calls "let me rewrite that for you," in which he takes a piece of journalism that he believes misled readers, and rewrites parts of them -- mainly the headline and the lede -- to better present the story. I think it's a brilliant and useful form of media criticism that I figured I might experiment with as well -- and I'm going to start it out with a recent Washington Post piece, one of many the Post has written about the leaked Facebook Files from whistleblower Frances Haugen.

The piece is written by reporters Jeremy Merrill and Will Oremus -- and I'm assuming that, like many mainstream news orgs, editors write the headlines and subheads, rather than the reporters. I don't know Merrill, but I will note that I find Oremus to be one of the most astute and thoughtful journalists out there today, and not one prone to fall into some of the usual traps that journalists fall for -- so this one surprised me a bit (though, I'm also using this format on an Oremus piece, because I'm pretty sure he'll take the criticism in the spirit intended -- to push for better overall journalism on these kinds of topics). The article's headline tells a story in and of itself: Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation, with a subhead that implies something similar: "Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds." There's also a graphic that reinforces this suggested point: Facebook weighted "anger" much more than happy reactions. And it's all under the "Facebook under fire" designation:

Seeing this headline and image, it would be pretty normal for you to assume the pretty clear implication: people reacting happily (e.g. with "likes") on Facebook had those shows of emotions weighted at 1/5th the intensity of people reacting angrily (e.g. with "anger" emojis) and that is obviously why Facebook stokes tremendous anger, hatred and divisiveness (as the story goes).

But... that's not actually what the details show. The actual details show that initially when Facebook introduced its list of five different "emoji" reactions (to be added to the long iconic "like" button), it weighted all five of them as five times as impactful as a like. That means that "love," "haha," "wow," and "sad" also were weighted at 5 times a single like, and identical to "angry." And while the article does mention this in the first paragraph, it immediately pivots to focus only on the "angry" weighting and what that means. When combined with the headline and the rest of the article, it's entirely possible to read the article and not even realize that "love," "sad," "haha," and "wow" were also ranked at 5x a single "like" and to believe that Facebook deliberately chose to ramp up promotion of "anger" inducing content. It's not only possible, it's quite likely. Hell, it's how I read the article the first time through, completely missing the fact that it applied to the other emojis as well.

The article also completely buries how quickly Facebook realized this was an issue and adjusted the policy. While it does mention it, it's very much buried late in the story, as are some other relevant facts that paint the entire story in a very different light than the way many people are reading it.

As some people highlighted this, Oremus pointed out that the bigger story here is "how arbitrary initial decisions, set by humans for business reasons, become reified as the status quo." And he's right. That is the more interesting story and one worth exploring. But that's not how this article is presented at all! And, his own article suggested the "reified as the status quo" part is inaccurate as well, though, again, that's buried further down in the story. The article is very much written in a way where the takeaway for most people is going to be "Facebook highly ranks posts that made you angry, because stoking divisiveness was good for business, and that's still true today." Except none of that is accurate.

So... let's rewrite that, and try to better get across the point that Oremus claims was the intended point of the story.

The original title, again is:

Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation

Let's rewrite that:

Facebook weighted new emojis much more than likes, leading to unintended consequences

Then there's the opening of the piece, which does mention very quickly that it applied to all five new emojis, but quickly pivots to just focusing on the anger:

Five years ago, Facebook gave its users five new ways to react to a post in their news feed beyond the iconic “like” thumbs-up: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.”

Behind the scenes, Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals to push more emotional and provocative content — including content likely to make them angry. Starting in 2017, Facebook’s ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than “likes,” internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business.

Facebook’s own researchers were quick to suspect a critical flaw. Favoring “controversial” posts — including those that make users angry — could open “the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently,” a staffer, whose name was redacted, wrote in one of the internal documents. A colleague responded, “It’s possible.”

The warning proved prescient. The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news.

Let's rewrite that, both using what Oremus claims was the "bigger story" in the article, and some of the information that is buried much later.

Five years ago, Facebook expanded the ways that users could react to posts beyond the iconic "like" thumbs-up, adding five more emojis: "love," "haha," "wow," "sad," and "angry." With this new addition, Facebook engineers needed to determine how to weight these new engagement signals. Given the stronger emotions portrayed in these emojis, the engineers made a decision that had a large impact on how the use of those emojis would be weighted in determining how to rank a story: each of those reactions would count for five times the weight of the classic "like" button. While Facebook did publicly say at the time that the new emojis would be weighted "a little more" than likes, and that all the new emojis would be weighted equally, it did not reveal that the weighting was actually five times as much.

This move came around the same time as Facebook's publicly announced plans to move away from promoting clickbait-style news to users, and to try to focus more on engagement with content posted by friends and family. However, it turned out that friends and family don't always post the most trustworthy information, and by overweighting the "emotional" reactions, this new move by Facebook often ended up putting the most emotionally charged content in front of users. Some of that content was joyful -- people reacting with "love" to engagements and births -- but some of it was disruptive and divisive, people reacting with "anger" to false or misleading content.

Facebook struggled internally with this result -- while also raising important points about how "anger" as a "core human emotion" is not always tied to bad things, and could be important for giving rise to protest movements against autocratic and corrupt governments. However, since other signals were weighted significantly more than even these emojis -- for example, replies to posts had a weight up to 30 times a single "like" click -- not much was initially done to respond to the concerns about how the weighting on anger might impact the kinds of content users were prone to see.

However, one year after launch, in 2018, Facebook realized weighting "anger" so highly was a problem, and downgraded the weighting on the "anger" emoji to four times a "like" while keeping the four other emoji, including "love," "wow," and "haha" at five times a like. A year later, the company realized this was not enough and even though "anger" is the least used emoji, by 2019 the company had put in place a mechanism to "demote" content that was receiving a disproportionate level of "anger" reactions. There were also internal debates about reranking all of the emoji reactions to create better news feeds, though there was not widespread agreement within the company about how best to do this. Eventually, in 2020, following more internal research on the impact of this weighting, Facebook reweighted all of the emoji. By the end of 2020 it had cut the weight of the "anger" emoji to zero -- taking it out of the equation entirely. The "haha" and "wow" emojis were weighted to one and a half times a like, and the "love" and "sad" were weighted to two likes.

From there, the article could then discuss a lot of what other parts of the article does discuss, about some of the internal debates and research, and also the point that Oremus raised separately, about the somewhat arbitrary nature of some of these ranking systems. But I'd argue that my rewrite presents a much more accurate and honest portrayal of the information than the current Washington Post article.

Anyone know how I can send the Washington Post an invoice?

Filed Under: algorithm, emoji, facebook papers, framing, frances haugen, journalism, let me rewrite that for you, ranking, reactions
Companies: facebook

Interpol Has Been Weaponized By Governments Seeking To Hunt Down Critics And Activists

from the can-it-be-fixed? dept

Interpol has become a weapon. The international consortium of law enforcement does have a legitimate purpose. It's there to prevent people from escaping justice just because they've left the country where they've committed crimes. It's a worthy goal, but it's an easily abused mechanism.

For instance, there's Turkey's government, which really wants to keep its top position on the "Most Journalists Jailed" list. It can't do this without the help of Interpol. In 2018, Turkey sent "red alert" notices to Interpol seeking journalists accused of whatever bullshit the government made up in hopes of having police forces in other nations round up the two self-exiled writers the government wanted to punish.

The problem is ongoing. And it may be getting worse, according to this report from Josh Jacobs for The Guardian.

Alongside the growth of [Interpol's] most-wanted list, international legal experts say there has also been an alarming phenomenon of countries using Interpol for political gain or revenge – targeting nationals abroad such as political rivals, critics, activists and refugees. It is not known how many of roughly 66,000 active red notices could be based on politically motivated charges; Interpol does not release data on how many red notices it rejects. But a number of reports, including from the US Congress, the European parliament and academics have documented the misuse of Interpol in recent years. Bromund says: “I don’t think there’s any dispute that […] the number of abusive red notices is growing.”

Using Interpol's alert system to hunt down political opponents and critics violates Interpol's constitution. But constitutions get violated all the time (just look at ours!). But vetting is time-consuming and certain countries are more than willing to swamp the system in hopes of sneaking illegitimate requests through.

And there are certain countries that abuse the process more than others. Russia alone generates nearly 40% of all public red notices, which have been used to target people the government wants to punish for reasons other than what's stated in the notice. Russia is also known to send more informal requests via another Interpol option called a "diffusion," which allows national governments to connect directly with each other with information about wanted fugitives. The breadth of abuse this allows hasn't been quantified but it leads to things like this:

A less-formal Interpol option for hunting fugitives, called “diffusions”, are often regarded as more vulnerable to misuse. Through these alerts, Interpol members can send arrest requests directly to each other. That is how Nikita Kulachenkov, a Russian-born Lithuanian refugee, spent several weeks imprisoned in Cyprus, after he was detained at the airport in 2016 en route to visit his mother.

Kulachenkov faced a five-year prison term in Russia for allegedly stealing a street artist’s drawing. His Interpol alert was issued after he began working on investigations for the Anti-Corruption Foundation in Russia, founded by the opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with the nerve agent novichok last year and is now imprisoned in Russia.

When governments straight up lie to Interpol, it can be difficult for Interpol's vetting staff to disprove allegations or suss out the real reason for the notice. Things get past the filtering system all the time, like the case of Turkmen human rights activist, Annadurdy Khadzhiev, who was detained in Bulgaria after a notice was issued accusing him of embezzling money from Turkmenistan's national bank. The problem was the accusations claimed the embezzlement took place four years after Khadzhiev had stopped working for the bank.

The other problem is known abusers are still allowed to use the system. The report notes Interpol rejected more than 700 of Turkey's requests last year, and yet the country is still allowed to issue red alerts and diffusions. Known human rights horror show Syria has just had its access to Interpol reinstated, over the protests of several members. China is somehow in good standing despite using the system to hunt down Uighur activists who've left the country to avoid near-constant oppression by the government.

Is there an upside? Yes, but it's limited given the number of countries with access to Interpol's system and the abuse that's been observed and documented over the years. Known bad actors are still being given access to the system, but hopefully the system is becoming better at weeding out bogus requests.

Under [Secretary General Jurgen] Stock, Interpol has strengthened its oversight body – the commission for the control of Interpol’s files (CCF), which reviews appeals and can delete red notices – and publishes more information about decisions on complaints. He has also bolstered the specialist squad that reviews notices before they are published. Critics have welcomed the changes, but some say the system is still not robust enough. Stock acknowledges that there is more work to be done. “I don’t have the silver bullet at [this] stage for what else we can do,” he says, but stresses that he is committed to further strengthening safeguards, where possible, during his final three years in the post.

More needs to be done, but at least it's being helmed by a Secretary General who knows work needs to be done, and perhaps more importantly, has been open and direct about the challenges Interpol faces and where it has fallen short of its ideals.

There are no easy answers when it comes to limiting abuse of the red alert system. Interpol could kick out rogue states, but that may just encourage more use of completely extrajudicial measures, like extraordinary rendition or sending state agents to straight up murder political opponents and government critics. At least with Interpol, there's a paper trail that can show how the system is being abused and who's behind politically motivated alerts.

Filed Under: activists, authoritarians, critics, interpol, journalists, law enforcement, red notices, russia, turkey

New Study Indicates Recreational Screen Time For Kids Makes Very Little Difference

from the leave-them-kids-alone dept

When I became a parent nearly seven years ago, I tasked myself with reading up on what to expect and how to be a good parent. Among many more important things, one prominent point of reading that led to many discussions in our household was screen time for children. And, as you might expect, that conversation has been ongoing to date. There are lots of theories out there about just how much screen time kids should get at certain ages, but the unifying force behind those theories typically is that it should be relatively limited. Some nations have even gotten into the game of forcing screen time limitations on children, or at least many have gone that route for targeted types of screen time, such as video games.

But what if I told you that all that worrying done by parents, all the reading on the topic, and all of the effort put into it by governments is basically for nothing? Well, that seems to be the main conclusion reached by a new study that finds that the impact of recreational screen time on children is statistically negligible.

Even when kids spend five hours a day on screen – whether computers, television or text – it doesn’t appear to be harmful. That’s what my colleagues and I at the University of Colorado Boulder discovered after analyzing data taken from nearly 12,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study – the largest long-term study of its kind ever in the U.S.

The participants included children between the ages of 9 to 10, from diverse backgrounds, income levels and ethnicities. We investigated how screen time was linked to some of the most critical aspects of their lives: sleep, mental health, behavior and friendships.

Now, there are a ton of caveats to all of this. The most important of those include that this is a correlative study, not one looking for causality. It's also a narrow age group being studied, even as the study has an impressive sample size. And there were also both positive and negative correlations uncovered.

For instance, increased screen time in the sample group correlated to stronger interpersonal relationships with peers. That would be the opposite of the old parental dogma that suggests that looking at a screen means you aren't going to have any friends. On the other hand, increasing screen time on the far end of the spectrum did correlate with declining sleep and academic performance. So what does this mean? Screen time is good? Screen time is bad?

Perhaps neither one: When looking at the strength of the correlations, we see only very modest associations. That is, any association between screen time and the various outcomes, whether good or bad, is so small it’s unlikely to be important at a clinical level.

Some kids scored lower than others on these outcomes, some scored higher; screen time only explained 2% of the difference in the scores. This suggests the differences are explained by many variables, not just screen time. It’s a very small piece of a much larger picture.

Which should mostly tell us what we already know: outcomes in children are nuanced and complicated, involving many factors, and every child's needs are different. What isn't true, based on this study, is that parents should be given blanket recommendations on the amount of screen time their children should be allowed to have.

And, because, again, these are correlative studies, even correlation found doesn't equate to screen time being a root cause.

For example, we found that adolescents who spend more time on screens may display more symptoms of aggression. But we can’t say screen time causes the symptoms; instead, maybe more aggressive children are given screen devices as an attempt to distract them and calm their behavior.

There are so many boogeymen set up for parents to jump at these days. At the very least, it's probably time to make it so that reasonable spectrums of screen time for children are not on the list.

Filed Under: children, screen time, studies