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Twitter Suspends Reporter For Reporting On Twitter Hack, Using Same Policy Old Twitter Used To Block NY Post Hunter Biden Story
from the ah,-it's-only-good-when-we-use-it dept
The nonsense never ends. As you’ll recall, there was a big kerfuffle (that still hasn’t fully ended) over a decision by Twitter in October of 2020 to block the sharing of a NY Post article about the contents of what was then alleged to be (and since mostly confirmed) Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop hard drive. What has since come out is that there was thorough debate within Twitter about whether or not this was a good idea, but the decision was made in an abundance of caution, as the provenance of the information was still unclear, and there were some questionable aspects to the information being released.
The policy used was Twitter’s “Hacked Materials” policy, which had been in place in March of 2019 and which we had highlighted as problematic a month before the NY Post kerfuffle, noting how it had already been used against journalistic activity by DDoSecrets after it published leaked police chat information and had its account banned.
In the wake of the NY Post story, Twitter admitted that the policy was a problem and changed the policy to no longer target journalists.
Except that was Twitter 1.0.
Now that we have Twitter 2.0, led by Elon Musk and trust & safety boss Ella Irwin, who have told us that they believe the NY Post banning was a mortal sin that should never be repeated… except that Musk/Irwin did also ban the NY Post’s account for a period of time just recently. And while they corrected that mistake, it’s still difficult to see how that was any different than Twitter 1.0.
But now we have the “Hacked Materials” policy showing up again, this time under Musk/Irwin’s control… and this time used in a manner I would argue is way, way, way more sketchy and problematic than earlier uses.
Specifically, Wired reporter Dell Cameron has had his account permanently suspended from Twitter as he revealed on Mastodon.
At issue? He just published a story at Wired about a hacker who got into culture war nonsense peddler Matt Walsh’s Twitter account and also his email account.
So why did Cameron’s account get suspended? Twitter claims he violated its “hacked materials” policy. You know, the same one that was used to block links to the NY Post story… and which Twitter had adjusted so as (in theory) not to target actual journalism.
I mean, it’s almost like content moderation is highly subjective and can be used in all sorts of ways.
But really, I can’t wait for all the people who had shit fits and ordered Congressional hearings over the whole NY Post / laptop story to twist themselves in pretzels to defend this banning of Cameron, who was reporting on a hack, but whose reporting did not reveal anything particularly sensitive or embarrassing. Oh yeah, who could forget this:
Of course, this should also remind journalists in particular that it is not safe to rely on Twitter for spreading your reporting. Musk and Irwin have made it clear that their only principle in handling trust & safety is to silence speech they find makes them look bad.
Filed Under: content moderation, dell cameron, ella irwin, elon musk, hacked materials, journalism, matt walsh, reporting
Companies: twitter, wired
ShotSpotter Attempts To Memory Hole Itself, Rebrands As ‘SoundThinking’
from the you-know-you-suck-when-you-have-to-order-new-embroidered-polo-shirts dept
You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbinQg past.
After killing innocent people while providing security to government forces in Iraq in 2007, Blackwater rebranded several times, hoping to keep one step ahead of negative news cycles. It became Xe Services in 2009, Academi in 2011, and — after a merger with Triple Canopy (another private security firm) — Constellis.
The same thing happened with Taser. Taser — named after its foremost product (itself a loose acronym for a 1911 young adult fiction novel: “Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle“) — found itself submerged by critical reporting. Pitched as “less lethal,” the electric stun gun was frequently lethal. So lethal, in fact, that Taser (the company) whipped up a brand new medical condition to explain why so many people ended up dead following Taser deployments by cops: “excited delirium.”
Unable to escape its past (and the nasty results served up during vanity searches), Taser rebranded. Now offering more than surprisingly lethal less-lethal weapons, Taser became Axon, a maker of body cameras and proprietary software that creates yet another barrier between criminal defendants and the evidence being used against them.
Joining this rogues gallery of government contractors changing d/b/a designations is ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter has found itself on the receiving end of plenty of negative press coverage. Not only that, but it’s found itself on the receiving end of lawsuits. But, most importantly, it’s found itself on the receiving end of law enforcement contract cancellations, most of them due to the tech’s inability to meaningfully impact gun crime.
Joshua Bote of San Francisco-focused news outlet SFGate reports the California tech firm is changing its name, presumably in hopes of distancing itself from its self-inflicted wounds.
ShotSpotter, the contentious Bay Area-based company that provides gunshot tracking technology to police departments and other law enforcement agencies, has rebranded following a dramatic stock drop just a day after the election of Chicago’s new mayor.
Now called SoundThinking, the company rebrand comes just a week after the election of Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson. Johnson, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, promised throughout his campaign to end the city’s ongoing relationship with the company despite outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s renewing the multimillion-dollar contract.
The tech “SoundThinking” sells to cops will still be called ShotSpotter, at least for now. No sense confusing folks who are happy with their shot spotting service provider, no matter how many false positives it generates or how little it actually contributes to closing criminal investigations.
Presumably, the tech will be renamed as soon as feasibly possible, because you can’t distance yourself from your own bad news when your flagship product is still wandering around under its own name, reeking of stigma.
The company’s press release begs to differ with all of my assumptions, but it does so in such a buzzword-laden piece of PR gimmickry even the most ardent fan of faulty gunshot detection tech might find themselves suppressing an eyeroll.
The new name reflects the company’s focus on public safety through industry-leading law enforcement tools and community-focused solutions for non-law enforcement entities to utilize for a holistic approach to violence prevention, social services and economic assistance.
As part of its corporate rebrand, SoundThinking is proud to introduce its SafetySmart Platform™, an integrated suite of four data-driven tools that enable law enforcement and community violence prevention and health organizations to be more efficient, effective, and equitable in driving positive public safety outcomes.
Equitable? Holistic? Give me a break. The press release lists ShotSpotter’s (I’m not going to help ShotSpotter launder its reputation) four offerings, three of which are just more the same cops-but-a-computer bullshit that has failed to make things more equitable (or safer) [or {vomits a bit} holistic] for years now.
- ShotSpotter is
an acoustic gunshot detection system that alerts police to virtually
all gunfire within a coverage area in less than 60 seconds, helping
reduce police response times to gun crimes and save lives.
- CrimeTracer is
a law enforcement search engine that enables investigators to search
through more than 1 billion criminal justice records from across
jurisdictions to generate tactical leads and quickly make intelligent
connections.
- CaseBuilder is
a one-stop investigative management system for tracking, reporting, and
collaborating on cases. It produces a single electronic courtroom-ready
document to help prosecutors clear cases and take offenders off the
streets.
- ResourceRouter is software that directs the deployment of patrol and community anti-violence resources in an objective way to help maximize the impact of limited resources and improve community safety.
Only the last one bothers to deal with the community, and then only the part of the community that has “anti-violence” resources, whatever the fuck those are. And it’s not actually about equitable, holistic policing. It’s just predictive policing under ShotSpotter’s kinder, gentler rebranding, which drops “ShotSpotter” from the verbiage, but otherwise is just cops feeding biased data into a system to generate biased “solutions” that allows cops to do what they’ve always done: go after the most vulnerable members of society.
ResourceRouter (formerly ShotSpotter Connect) is a patrol and analyst tool that automates the planning of directed patrols for all Part 1 crime data across an entire jurisdiction, daily. With ResourceRouter, analysts and supervisors review pre-generated directed patrol assignments that ensure officers are at the right place at the right time to maximize crime prevention while also guarding against over and under policing.
So, congrats ShotSpotter. You’ve got a new name but the same old game. If you want to spend millions plastering a new logo on everything, good for you. But you’re still the same company underneath all the SoundThinking coffee mugs and mouse pads. And we at Techdirt will never let you forget it.
Filed Under: gunshot detection, gunshots
Companies: shotspotter, soundthinking
‘Lovejoy’s Law’ And Tech Moral Panics
from the helen-lovejoy-joy-killing dept
One of the central arguments for a recent rash of age verification laws across the country is to “protect the children.” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called his signing of controversial social media laws a means for “protecting our kids from the harms of social media.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a press conference that her signing of the so-called Social Media Safety Act will help prevent the “massive negative impact on our kids.” Once he entered office, Sen. Josh Hawley, said that loot boxes in popular video games placed “a casino in the hands of every child in America.” Louisiana State Rep. Laurie Schlegel called her unconstitutional age verification bill in order to access pornography in the state a measure to counter how “pornography is destroying our children.” This all sounds the same.
“Won’t somebody please think of the children!” Do you all know who said that? The one and only Helen Lovejoy says this quote quite often in the fictional animated universe of The Simpsons. If we recall our elementary school ‘Simpsons’-ology, Helen is the morally crusading wife of the town reverend seeking to make the world a better place for the children. Or, at least, Helen making the world a better place for the children based on her worldview. Anything that pops Helen’s bubble of an ideal society for the small radioactive burg of Springfield, USA, is nothing more than a threat to the town’s morality. Helen leads grassroots campaigns to demonize and ban the things threatening her ideal, little bubble.
Some call this ‘Lovejoy’s law’ to further parody the over-the-top caricature of a socially-conservative moralist who believes that everything they disagree with is either the work of Satan or woke leftists. In criminology and sociology, this sort of individual could be referred to as a moral entrepreneur. Moral entrepreneurs are people who take the lead in developing and labeling a particular behavior or belief and spreading the label through the society at large. These individuals also lead in the construction of what they refer to as a criminally deviant or socially unacceptable behavior. These individuals also are those who organize at the grassroots level, like Mrs. Lovejoy, to establish and enforce a set of rules against behavior that these individuals define as criminally deviant or socially unacceptable. These fine folks perpetrate moral panic. Moral panic isn’t just a weird trope used by politicians and the punditry.
It’s a legitimate social phenomenon modeled by world-renowned criminologist Stanley Cohen. Cohen created a series of sequential levels to understand the role of “folk devils” as societal outsiders as labeled by the moral entrepreneurs who wish to do away with a particular class of individuals who engage in the identified behavior or action. Between the presence of mass media, moral entrepreneurs, a social control culture, and the general public, a moral panic can progress based on misinformed, disinformed, or outright false info surrounding the targets of the moral panic – or, as already mentioned above, the folk devils. Individuals like Spencer Cox, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Josh Hawley, Laurie Schlegel – even the fictional Helen Lovejoy – qualify as “moral entrepreneurs” attempting to take down their targeted folk devils in big tech, legal porn, and free speech proponents advocating for speech they disagree with.
All of these individuals have axes to grind against the folk devils, and are effectively doing so by proposing, passing, and implementing laws that have much greater impact and are likely to have very little effect on resolving the crises these people have identified. This is a standard belief among the moral entrepreneurs. And, this isn’t the first time technology – social media, age verification, cell phones, video games, online legal pornography, and excessive internet use, for example – has seen moral panic lead to public policies and socio-legal remedies rise to the level of restricting basic civil liberties.
Let’s consider some brief historical examples of a governmental response to technological moral panic. The office of the U.S. Surgeon General released an evidence report in 1972 in response to concerns that televised violence was adverse to the public health of youth. The actual report, however, found violent television doesn’t have an adverse effect on the vast majority of youth in the country but may influence very small groups of youth who are predisposed to be potentially aggressive or they are already aggressive.
But, these groups are also influenced by a plethora of external and internal factors. Critics of the report attempted to use the Surgeon General’s findings as further evidence that violent television negatively impacts youth, despite the fact that the peer-review of the existing literature of the time said this risk impacts a very small portion of youth who are stuck with the predisposition and effects pointed out.
Decades later, concern over violence in video games also rose from moral panic. U.S. Supreme Court, of all institutions, responded to the political and legislative pressures to censor violent video games during the 1990s by declaring that there is no clear connection between adverse violence in real life settings and the playing of video games with violent depictions. In fact, the American Psychological Association issued a policy statement that told news outlets that they “should avoid stating explicitly or implicitly that criminal offenses were caused by violent media” such as violent video games. Some studies have even correlated a reduction in violent crime with the rise of violent video gaming.
Internet pornography has similar history. Internet pornography is one of the longest persisting moral panics, and the development of the web has made the moral panic more prominent. Whether we discuss the moral panic of online porn that led to the proposal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 or the current attempts to restrict pornography “in the name of the children” at the state level, the moral entrepreneurs have the same belief guiding their motivations to eliminate the folk devils, or porn. They say that pornography itself is addictive. Or, pornography is somehow correlated to sex trafficking. Or, that pornography leads to increased instances of sexual violence and sexually related criminal offenses. But, as was the case for violence on television and in video games decades before, the opposite is true. Pornography addiction isn’t recognized by mainstream psychiatry. Incidence of sexual violence is much lower in jurisdictions where legally produced pornography is widely available. Online porn is regulated and there is little to no evidence to suggest that legally produced pornography is linked to trafficking.
All of these moral panics have led to some sort of political, legislative, or legal response where the moral entrepreneurs have lobbied their elected officials to push for policies that erode civil liberties and rights for people who are otherwise law-abiding, tax-paying, and productive members of society. Researchers Patrick M. Markey and Christopher J. Ferguson wrote on this issue for the American Journal of Play.
“Unfortunately, moral panics can be damaging,” Markey and Ferguson argue, adding that moral panics “can greatly damage the lives of individuals caught up in them.” Though they are writing on the panics related to violent video games, the commonality of the statements are clear regardless of the actual issue.
Markey and Ferguson also point out that researchers and organizations with a particular special interest or agenda have used the moral panic to conduct ethically and scientifically questionable research to just inflame the public’s fear even more. We’ve seen this with bogus studies on so-called porn addiction, internet addiction, and so much more. Now, we are starting to see this with “social media addiction.”
I wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune recently criticizing Utah’s social media bills. In the column, I discuss the claims that Gov. Cox made with regards to social media’s harms against minors.
Cox said that his office will conduct “research” into the harms of social media use among minors. In the tradition of the great Helen Lovejoy, the socially-conservative governor endorsed legislation that restricts access for minors based on a body of misguided and erroneous evidence. It’s this type of flawed research that gives moral entrepreneurs a supposed academic façade that further demonizes and damages the rights, welfare, and general wellbeing of the folk devils. Even if the folk devils are technology companies, there is this thing called the law of unintended consequences. Age-restriction laws on mainstream social media platforms can be perceived and rightfully registered as infringements on First Amendment rights for users of all ages. Social media regulations on age will harm modern socialization norms for youth.
Despite what the Helen Lovejoys of the world think, folk devils – regardless being tech companies or individuals – have rights. Restricting those rights through moral panic driven lawmaking is unethical.
Michael McGrady is a journalist and commentator focusing on the tech side of the online porn business, among other things.
Filed Under: age verification, josh hawley, laurie schlegel, lovejoy's law, moral panics, sarah huckabee sanders, spencer cox, think of the children
Hey, Lizzo, You’ve Been Lied To. KOSA Will Harm Kids
from the oh-no-not-lizzo dept
It’s always a mixed bag when entertainment industry stars get roped into supporting this or that internet regulation. Remember how there was a Hollywood-backed campaign to have a bunch of big name stars support FOSTA, the bill that sounded good to people who didn’t understand intermediary liability law, but has literally ended up killing women and increasing sex trafficking, while making it harder for law enforcement to stop sex trafficking?
We’re still waiting for the stars who stumped for FOSTA, including Amy Schumer, Tony Shalhoub, Josh Charles, Seth Meyers, and others to admit that they were lied to and co-opted into a dangerous marketing campaign that literally put women’s lives at risk.
It appears that the enemies of the internet are looking to use the same playbook for KOSA. KOSA is yet another anti-internet bill from Senator Richard Blumenthal (and Senator Marsha Blackburn, who once insisted that Congress shouldn’t be regulating the internet at all, noting that the internet should “never need a federal bureaucrat to intervene”) and it’s got massive, massive problems that will actually make the internet more dangerous for kids.
We’ve gone over this before, KOSA gives way more power to law enforcement, including state AGs (yes, including Republican ones) to effectively force websites to block information that they define as “harmful.” So, Republican states may no longer be able to access abortion information or information on LGBTQ+ communities. The bill’s “parental tools” mandate seems to not even comprehend that not every child has a relationship (or a good, loving relationship) with their parents, meaning it’s wide open to abuse by parents.
Furthermore, the whole nature of the bill, creating a “duty of care” for companies sounds good until you realize how it actually functions under the 1st Amendment: which is that it becomes either a tool that forces companies to stifle any kind of controversial speech (even important speech, such as those mentioned above) or it makes companies look the other way, because even with a “duty of care,” companies can’t be held liable for speech they were unaware of. Thus, it encourages websites to do much less to protect children, rather than do more.
It’s so bad that nearly 100 civil society organizations told Congress that the bill would be dangerous to kids last year.
But, if you don’t know all that, the bill sounds warm and fuzzy. It says it’s about protecting kids online, and who doesn’t want to do that.
Now, the supporters of KOSA have brought music superstar Lizzo into their campaign to push for this dangerous bill. Lizzo, who is the personification of using the internet in a good, positive, helpful way… now brought into the campaign to help make that kind of internet impossible. Bizarrely, this all seems to be coming from Dove, the soap company, which seems to have no clue how bad a law this is, and seems to have been suckered in themselves into supporting such a bad bill that is dangerous for children.
Lizzo’s known for being smart and thoughtful, so this is pretty disappointing. Again, though, it’s not surprising. Those who don’t understand the nuances and the ins-and-outs of specific legal proposals, and how they intersect with our legal system might not understand just how dangerous KOSA is. That’s why it’s presented in such a misleading way. It’s just disappointing that Dove got suckered into this, and, in turn, brought Lizzo in to help.
And that’s especially true given that Lizzo has been a vocal supporter of abortion rights, when this bill will allow Republican Attorneys General to make it impossible to even find out information about abortion in red states. I’m assuming no one explained that part of the law to her.
Lizzo’s participation in this event about KOSA even demonstrates how much she values social media:
Throughout Dove’s live event, panelists and participants spoke about the silver lining of social media for young people. As Lizzo points out in a press release, “Social media is supposed to be a place where people can express themselves and be a source for beauty confidence, not anxiety.” But in order to emphasize the good and minimize the harm, she noted “platforms [need] do more to make social media safe for young people.”
At the event in Santa Monica, Lizzo urged the crowd to repeat her mantra: “I control social media. Social media does not control me.”
The problem is that KOSA doesn’t make social media “safe for young people.” It makes it way more dangerous, and gives powerful tools to law enforcement to force websites to take down important information by declaring it harmful to children.
Lizzo is right that the lesson to learn is “I control social media. Social media does not control me.” But by endorsing KOSA she’s now saying “Government controls social media now, and I don’t.”
Given how ridiculous culture warrior grifters went after Lizzo for her amazing bit of history, in which she got to play James Madison’s crystal flute, it’s exceedingly disappointing that she’s supporting a bill that will give such grifters more power to silence powerful messages of empowerment that she’s been spreading for years. It literally will allow those grifters who hold elected office (of which there are too many) to effectively suppress all kinds of content I would imagine Lizzo supports by claiming it puts children at risk.
Filed Under: kosa, lizzo, moral panic, protect the children
Companies: dove
Daily Deal: Headway Premium
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
Headway is an app that will help you develop the most powerful learning habits and make sure you’re always armed with the best book ideas, bite-sized learning for fun and easy growth, and essential knowledge to crush your goals. Whether you want to build a business, improve your health, or succeed at work, we’ve got you covered. You’ll get access to every nonfiction bestseller summarized in 15-minute reads and collections of reads to solve your specific goals. Thousands of actionable insights and tips are waiting for you on the site as well. It’s on sale for $59.97.
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
Formerly Verified Users Aren’t Buying The Twitter Blue Elon Musk Is Selling
from the blue-you dept
As you likely know, Elon Musk has been shilling Twitter Blue as his plan to save Twitter since basically four hours after he took over the company. In theory, pushing Twitter Blue was a good idea. Twitter Blue was the plan to offer a premium service to loyal Twitter users by upselling them on some useful premium features. It existed pre-Musk, but the company had never done a particularly good job marketing it (you can say that about many of old Twitter’s services).
The problem was that Musk somehow mentally merged Twitter Blue (cool, useful premium services to upsell) with Twitter Verified (a trust and safety tool to protect users on the site and make more high profile accounts feel like they can trust the site). The end result then is the worst of all worlds. Rather than upselling cool, useful services… you’re upselling “not having a shit experience” on the site. That means you’re basically screaming “if you don’t pay us, you’re going to have a shit experience.”
And, sure, some people will pay, but many others will say, “wait, this is a shit experience, maybe I should go elsewhere.”
One thing that definitely doesn’t seem to be happening is getting very many people to pay. We already covered how the Twitter Blue sales numbers were basically inconsequential and barely a blip (especially when compared to all the advertisers bailing).
Of course, some thought that maybe the high profile users, the ones who already had been verified, weren’t buying because they “didn’t need to,” since apparently there’s basically no automated system for Twitter to remove the old “legacy” verified users in any systematic way. That had been rumored late last year, when Musk first launched this ridiculous plan. But I had assumed that he’d assigned some random poor sob of an engineer to write some code to fix this, and once that was done, that was why Twitter publicly announced that “legacy” verified users would lose their checks on April 1st.
This was announced in combination with a push to get people to start paying, especially organizations, which would be charged $1,000 or more per month. Many companies made it pretty damn clear that there was no way in hell they’d be paying.
April 1st came and went and… nothing. Like nearly everything Musk promises, it appears this product upgrade will be shipping late. My assumption that the timing was based on a remaining engineer having completed a task he was assigned proved incorrect. Apparently, Twitter still can’t easily remove blue checks from legacy accounts.
Removal of verification badges is a largely manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, which draws on a large internal database — similar to an Excel spreadsheet — in which verification data is stored, according to the former employees. Sometimes, an employee would try to remove a badge but the change wouldn’t take, one of the former employees said, prompting workers to explore workarounds. In the past, there was no way to reliably remove badges at a bulk scale — prompting workers tackling spam, for example, to have to remove check marks one-by-one.
“It was all held together with duct tape,” the former employee added.
Musk did remove the NY Times checkmark, but only because he’s petty and they were public in announcing their total lack of interest in paying. Seriously, the man seems incapable of not lashing out if anyone even remotely suggesting his ideas are bad. It’s pathetic. Musk has also now claimed that the legacy blue checks will be gone on April 20th, continuing his infatuation with a weed joke that was never funny.
Anyway, the only change that Twitter did make was no longer publicly distinguishing the text that showed up when you clicked on the checkmark. It used to have an oddly worded message about how people were “legacy” blue checks and “may or may not be notable” (text that apparently Elon wrote himself). But that resulted in the people who were actually gullible enough to pay Musk to constantly get mocked in the replies with this common meme.
Now, however, you can’t tell who paid and who’s a legacy, except if you’re using the API where it’s still distinguished. But regular users can’t tell, thus allowing Musk and Twitter to play ignorant and pretend that more people are actually paying. This is kind of funny, because Musk was so proud of the different language between paying blue checks and legacy blue checks because he thought it would lead to the legacy ones being mocked… but he bet wrong, so now has to merge the two to confuse people.
Also, it turns out that for all the talk of getting companies to pay upwards of $1,000 to retain their own checkmarks, Musk must have realized that this wasn’t going to fly, so they’ve quietly given the checkmark free to the 10,000 most followed companies and the top 500 advertisers.
So… all of that is hiding who is actually paying.
And the fact is, not many people who were (are?) legacy blue checks seem to have any interest in paying. According to reporter Matt Binder, it appears that it’s basically a rounding error:
Only 12,305 of roughly 420,000 legacy verified accounts have subscribed to a paid Twitter Blue plan as of Tuesday. That’s just above 3 percent of the celebrities, pro athletes, influencers, and media personalities who make up the platform’s power users.
Now, sure, it’s likely that many of the 420,000 (you’d think Musk would have liked that number…) legacy verified accounts aren’t all that special or important, but some of them clearly are, and many of them are key drivers of traffic to the site. And Musk’s plan to make them pay has completely backfired to the point that around 3% were interested in paying. That’s astoundingly bad.
As for the media accounts, Musk seems mad that they won’t pay, complaining that “It’s a small amount of money, so I don’t know what their problem is.” The world’s richest man (surprise surprise) doesn’t realize that $1,000 per month is not, at all, “a small amount of money” to pay for something with not just no clear value, but mostly negative value.
Generally, when free services put up some sort of premium offering, the bare minimum they hope to convert is 5%, with many organizations hoping for 7 to 10%. And that’s when you’re talking about just straight up charging everyone who’s using your free service. Here, we’re talking about something that Elon (falsely) believes is some sort of premium offering, targeting many of those who were already deemed relatively important on the site, meaning any estimate would have to assume a higher than normal conversion rate. And here, he’s at 3%.
That’s… pathetic.
And, because of the way this has been done, he’s making the entire platform less trustworthy and less welcoming for many of the users who make the platform worthwhile. Truly a visionary genius at work."
Filed Under: elon musk, twitter blue, verified
Companies: twitter
T-Mobile Simply Lies When Pressed About 9,000 Lost Jobs In Wake Of Sprint Merger
from the zero-accountability dept
Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal who predicted job losses, the former potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be “job positive from day one” and every day thereafter.
Yeah, about that.
Geekwire did a proper retrospective on the deal’s impact last week (something the press usually can’t be bothered to do), and found that T-Mobile now employs 9,000 fewer employees than it did before the deal. And while that’s not quite as bad as the 15,000-30,000 jobs union leaders predicted (although layoffs will likely continue), it’s still… not great.
Especially given the lengths T-Mobile went to to insist layoffs would never happen, and the hostility the company expressed against deal critics who predicted otherwise.
When Geekwire’s Todd Bishop pressed the company on its failed promise to create jobs… T-Mobile officials simply lied, falsely claiming they’d accomplished their goal:
“We’ve upheld our jobs commitment. Before we merged with Sprint we said we’d have more employees as a combined company than the two standalone companies would have had on their own without the merger — and we have done just that.”
This is patently false and disproven by the company’s own publicly-available earnings data and employee numbers, which indicate it’s clearly about 9k employees lighter.
As Geekwire notes, they gave the company another shot to answer the question, and T-Mobile simply doubled down, again falsely claiming they’d fulfilled their promises of job creation. T-Mobile can lie here because it knows federal U.S. telecom regulators are gridlocked by telecom industry lobbying, and generally too feckless to do anything about it even when they aren’t.
This is, of course, par for the course for U.S. megamergers, especially in the highly consolidated telecom space. Companies make all manner of empty promises to regulators pre-merger, knowing full well they have zero intention of following through. Thanks to federal regulatory capture and corruption, the penalty for these kinds of empty promises is usually nonexistent.
Recall, the Trump FCC approved the T-Mobile Sprint merger without even reading data on the deal’s impact. Trump DOJ “antitrust enforcer” Makan Delrahim used his personal email and phone to work closely with T-Mobile to ensure regulatory approval, resulting in a plan to try and make a new competitor out of Dish Network that’s looking increasingly doomed.
This is all extremely typical for a country that talks a lot about “job creation” and “antitrust reform,” yet routinely rubber stamps mergers and consolidation without the slightest fuck given about the employee and consumer-facing repercussions. None of the think tankers, hired economists, Senators or regulators responsible for the impact of consolidation in telecom are ever held even remotely accountable, and the band plays on to obvious effect.
Filed Under: antitrust reform, consolidation, doj, fcc, jobs, layoffs, mergers, telecom
Companies: sprint, t-mobile
EARN IT Act Is Back, And It’s Still Terribly Destructive
from the the-monster-that-never-dies dept
Some politicians never learn. Congress has been trying to shove through the EARN IT Act for the past two sessions, and thankfully it’s failed both times. But, now it’s back. Kinda. Far be it for the politicians looking to destroy the internet and encryption that keeps us safe to actually reveal the latest version of EARN IT so that the public can review it. They haven’t done that. Instead, they’ve just announced that the still unreleased bill will be marked up on Thursday (though, as I understand how the Senate Judiciary Committee works, this almost certainly means the actual markup will be next Thursday — don’t ask me why, but they seem to always announce a markup and calendar it a week early, and then “hold it over” to do the actual markup a week later).
For what it’s worth, someone slipped me a copy of the latest draft (thank you, friend) and it’s got all the same problems as the bill from last session. Specifically, it includes what appears to be nearly identical misleading language from the last EARN IT regarding encryption. It includes language that pretends that it is not an attack on encryption, because it says the use of encryption shall not be “an independent basis for liability.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t be considered with some other factor. Even worse, in the next section, it wipes away the entire preceding section anyway by saying that nothing in that paragraph “shall be construed to prohibit a court from considering evidence of actions or circumstances described in that subparagraph if the evidence is otherwise admissible.”
In other words, under EARN IT, encrypting content and messages is a liability. The only thing the bill limits is the finding of liability just for encryption alone. However, as long as anyone argues some other factor, they can then bolt on encryption and say that the use of encryption supports the argument that the service is up to no good.
I mean, it’s kinda funny that they still even include the language pretending this doesn’t touch encryption, considering that sponsor Senator Richard Blumenthal admitted in an interview last year that the point of the bill was totally to target services that use encryption.
I’m not going to go through the details of all of the many reasons this is bad and dangerous. We’ve done that before. Suffice it to say this bill is an attack on encryption and the open internet. It will actually make law enforcement’s job way harder in tracking down purveyors of CSAM by making important evidence inadmissible. The entire approach of the bill seems to misunderstand basically everything about the internet, encryption, intermediary liability law, and how CSAM reporting currently works. No matter what problem EARN IT claims it’s trying to fix, it won’t actually fix them.
The premise of the bill assumes that companies aren’t reporting the child sex abuse material (CSAM) they find, but there’s little to no evidence to support that claim, and the law already requires them to report it. The problem seems to be that law enforcement isn’t doing much with that information. But magically adding liability to websites won’t fix any of that, and just makes it more difficult to collect the necessary evidence in a constitutional manner."
Filed Under: csam, earn it, encryption, intermediary liability, lindsey graham, richard blumenthal, senate
