Category Archives: culture

Social Media Censorship

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Facebook’s management is making some moves in the name of its version of transparency.

Facebook Inc will soon require that advertisers wanting to run ads on hot-button political issues go through an authorization process first, a move the social network hopes will prevent the spread of misinformation across its platform.

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In October, Facebook unveiled a similar authorization requirement for election-related ads. The latest move will cover “issue ads”—those that don’t specifically mention a candidate but weigh in on a divisive issue, including during an election campaign.

These moves strike me as just move by Facebook management and IT types to facilitate their efforts at censoring the speech of which they personally disapprove.  These steps have nothing at all to do with separating fake from truth—which is the sole responsibility of the reader, anyway.

Identity Politics

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This time it’s via rank sexism.  Lots of women, lots more than in past campaigns, are running for office, and they’re doing it on the basis of their gender as much as, or more than, their policies.

Erin Collier, a 34-year-old economist, made a late entry into the crowded race [primary, to determine the Progressive-Democrat candidate who will run against Congressman John Faso (R, NY)] in March with an announcement video that ended: “I’m not going to let those boys beat me.”

Not because her policies are better for the district than those of her competitors.

Nor is it limited to Progressive-Democrats.

Congresswoman Martha McSally, a Senate candidate in Arizona…former fighter pilot, denounces “BS” and tells national GOP leaders to “grow a pair of ovaries” in her introductory campaign video.

Kelly Dittmar, Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics:

Women are more willingly and successfully using gender as an electoral asset instead of seeing it as a hurdle they have to overcome.  It’s going to be important for these women not to present messages that could be perceived as marginalizing men.

Dittmar’s condescension is itself sexist.  We men aren’t the precious snowflakes she assumes; we don’t feel marginalized by the sexist identity politics of these candidates.  We’re just irritated by the dishonesty of this extension of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) identity politics.

And that’s the larger point.  Running on their gender—rather than running as an American candidate and doing so on the basis of policy—is sexist bigotry no matter the claimed motive or the cuteness of their framing of the matter.

AI Surveillance

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Police forces around the nation are on the verge of getting Artificial Intelligence assistance in identifying folks of interest to them in real time on our cities’ streets.  The image below and its caption illustrate the thing.

I’m all for assisting the police, especially regarding the subject of that cynically tear-jerking caption.  But this sort of thing needs to be looked at with a very jaundiced eye.  It isn’t too far away from what the People’s Republic of China already is doing in terms of routine surveillance and tracking of everyone.

It’s not that everything the PRC does is bad, but some things are inherently dangerous, no matter who developed them or uses them extensively.  This sort of technology can very easily become a direct assault on our ability to be anonymous in public spaces.

TaeWoo Kim, chief scientist at One Smart Labs, a New York-based startup that is working on such software, said the technology is “creepy and a bit Big Brother-y,” but said it is “purely intended to fight crime, terrorism and track wanted subjects.”

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Governments can’t be trusted with such capabilities, and we don’t even need to invoke nefarious intent or “Big Brother-y” conspiracies to see that. Governments will end up misusing, even abusing, this sort of thing just in the ordinary outcome of normal bureaucratic imperatives to justify the bureaucrat’s and his bureaucracy’s existence, to grow, to expand the bureaucracy’s power and budget.

William Bratton, the former commissioner of the NYPD, says that the public was similarly worried about DNA testing when the technology first emerged. The technology has been credited in freeing wrongfully convicted people from prison.

This is a false analogy, though.  DNA testing isn’t used for routine, real-time surveillance of the population or even of small groups or of individuals, and current technology doesn’t allow such use.  AI-based image surveillance technology lends itself to exactly that real-time watching.

Democracy

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A thought on its underpinnings, from Peter Wilson at the end of his The Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire:

Democratic legitimacy derives from the openness of debate, not the practice of voting.

He’s not far wrong, as comparisons between nations like Russia on the one hand and the United States or Great Britain on the other illustrate.

Too Much Privacy?

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That’s actually a serious question.

The firestorm over Facebook Inc’s handling of personal data raises a question for those pondering a regulatory response: is there such a thing as too much privacy?

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Law-enforcement agencies rely on access to user data as an important tool for tracking criminals or preventing terrorist attacks. As such, they have long argued additional regulation may be harmful to national security.

Unfortunately, no government can be trusted with citizens’ privacy, as the Star Chamber secret FISA court, the FBI leadership (and not just the current or immediately prior crowd—recall J Edgar Hoover), prior DoJ leadership, the Robert Mueller “investigation,” and much more demonstrate.

If our government wants to learn things, it needs to get back into the HUMINT business rather than relying so much on hacking IT systems.  And get an honest warrant, not just a FISA one.