Category Archives: ethics

How to Save Twitter and Democracy

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Mark Weinstein, founder of Twitter-competitor MeWe, wrote a Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed on this subject; he suggested a number of “fixes” that Twitter owner Elon Musk should implement to save Twitter—and Weinstein’s conception of “democracy.” These are:

…immediately create an advertiser content-preference system. Allow advertisers to select the tenor and topical content that their ads are associated with….

Only if Twitter users can have access to the system and to which advertisers sign up for which censorship. That way, we can block the ads from Woke or otherwise too thin-skinned advertisers. They will have demonstrated that their products are too fragile for actual usefulness.

…[act to block] a rash of verified accounts impersonating public figures, companies, and organizations….

How does Weinstein propose that legitimate satire and ridicule be discriminated from the fraud about which he claims to worry?

…sites that allow absolute free speech are overrun with hateful posts, spam, pornography, bullying, doxing, and incitement of violence.

Yeah, and? Whose definition of any of this is to be applied? We’ve already seen how the Woke and the thin-skinned Left already cry loudly over petty hurt feelings. Weinstein is just proposing more of that. The concept of free speech is centered on being able spout the ugliest spew, with answering speech being the remedy, not naked censorship.

…oversee a Twitter with little propaganda. Marketers, politicians and governments use Twitter to target unsuspecting users and manipulate their emotions, opinions, purchasing decisions…. …the way to solve this is to stop letting users pay to boost and amplify content.

Weinstein can’t have it both ways. Either Twitter allows advertising—propaganda—and allows advertisers to use their propaganda/advertising to target unsuspecting users and manipulate their emotions, opinions, purchasing decisions and to boost their advertisements (see that content-preference bit above), or it does not.

Twitter must go an extra step: no algorithms manipulating user newsfeeds or boosting unwanted content, period.

Again, Weinstein must pick one of these. Either he allows some—e.g., his precious advertisers—to manipulate newsfeeds and boost content, or he does not.

Twitter and its leadership must remain politically neutral.

I look forward with great anticipation to Weinstein telling other communications entities—The Washington Post or The New York Times, for instance, that they must remain politically neutral.

It’s not surprising that Weinstein proposes his competition attempt such internally contradictory moves.

Merrick Garland’s Special Prosecutor, in His Own Words

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Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Prosecutor of former President Donald Trump (R). Leave aside the fact that while Smith was a lawyer in the Department of Justice a dozen years ago, he worked closely with the IRS’ then-Director Exempt Organizations, Lois Lerner, to target Conservative organizations applying for tax exempt status for slow-walking their applications or outright denial.  Never mind, either, that Smith brought a number of charges against a sitting Republican Governor and obtained convictions, thereby destroying his political career. Or that these convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court over Smith’s naked distortion, to the point of blatant unconstitutionality, of the laws under which Smith achieved his destruction.

Here is Special Counsel Jack Smith in his own words:

I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice[.]

Smith will both investigate and then prosecute. He can’t possibly—and this highly talented lawyer knows full well he can’t possibly—conduct his investigation and his prosecutions independently of each other. Sadly, though, he’s right that this is in the finest tradition of the politicized Eric Holder-, Loretta Lynch-, and Merrick Garland-run Department of Justice.

This is one more illustration of the naked political assault by President Joe Biden (D) and his Attorney General on a 2024 Presidential campaign competitor from a competing political party.

Financial Reporting

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A little bit in the weeds, here, but necessary for future understandings by some investors. The proximate matter is FTX’ collapse and bankruptcy (with possibly criminal activities associated).

In a footnote to the financial statements, the company said its “primary shareholder is also the primary shareholder of several related entities which do business with the company.” It didn’t say who the related parties were for any specific transaction it disclosed.
The standard accounting rules for disclosing related-party transactions are vague and have long been considered a weakness in the system. There is no clear-cut rule requiring companies to disclose the players in a related-party transaction. The rules do say, “If necessary to the understanding of the relationship, the name of the related party shall be disclosed.”

Some questions arise. Whose definitions of “necessary” and “understanding?” The way the rule is written, those definitions are left to the company—FTX, here—to determine, and what an investor or customer or client needs or wishes for his own understanding is unimportant.

FTX’s new CEO John Ray exposed part of the much larger problem in his FTX bankruptcy-court filing, in which he acknowledged that FTX’s financial information wasn’t trustworthy and that it was controlled by

 a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals.

That potentially compromised part is key. Compromised by whom? In what way? That would seem clearly related to who those “related parties” are.

There’s more, related to arm’s length transactions, which are statutorily required in many business arrangements. Here’s a working definition of arm’s length transactions that’s good enough for our purposes:

A transaction in which the buyer and the seller have no significant, prior relationship. In an arm’s length transaction, neither party has an incentive to act against his/her own interest. That is, the seller seeks to make the price as high as he/she can, and likewise the buyer seeks to make it as low as he/she can. The negotiations for an arm’s length transaction result in the arm’s length price, which is almost always close to the market value of the asset being sold.

That drive for each party to work toward his own interest, and especially the resulting essentially market price for the things being transacted, also is key. How can an investor or a customer or a client know that a particular transaction within an FTX is legitimate or problematic under arms’ length requirements if the investor or customer or client can’t know who the related party is that’s do[ing] business with the company? And why is the investor or customer or client being actively denied this information? What’s being hidden?

This is, as RG Associates founder and member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s Emerging Issues Task Force, Jack Ciesielski, said,

a hole that needs to be fixed. The auditors would have to know who the related party is. Why not just put that in there? How hard can it be? By keeping it purposely opaque it’s defeating the purposes of the footnote.

And so do investors, customers, and clients need to know—hence the footnote, even if carefully vague in the present case. And hence the need to plug that loophole: require the related parties to be explicitly identified. There’s no free speech question here, no political speech would be chilled by this. Documenting business arrangements in a purely investment environment has nothing to do with our 1st Amendment.

Merrick Garland’s Confession

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Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a Special Counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump’s (R) alleged involvement in both the Mar-a-Lago documents case and whether Mr. Trump or others “unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power” after the 2020 election. Here is Garland’s confession that his appointment is purely politically motivated.

Based on recent developments, including the former President’s announcement that he is a candidate for President in the next election, and the sitting President’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a Special Counsel[.]

Garland could have appointed his special counsel months ago, as he was repeatedly encouraged to do over last summer. Instead—his own words, mind you—he chose to wait until the Presidential contest was joined to do so, and he did it on the heels of the contest’s beginning: just three days after Trump’s announcement.

This is Garland’s statement that his appointment is intended to influence the coming Presidential race in favor of his boss, President Joe Biden (D).

Some Corporate Values

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Recall Major League Baseball’s, Coca Cola’s, and Delta Airlines’ reactions to Georgia’s voter integrity protection law, SB202, passed last year. That law, after all, created such nasty things as

  • signature matching
  • voter ID
  • restrictions on drop boxes
  • ban on the mass mailing of absentee ballot request forms to those who did not ask for them,
  • mandatory citizenship checks

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said baseball’s decision to pull the All Star Game out of Atlanta that year, causing the loss of upwards of $70 million of revenue to Atlanta’s small and medium businesses, was the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said Georgia’s law is unacceptable and a step backwards.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that Georgia’s law is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.

Here’s what that law, wholly unacceptable to these corporations’ values, did.

  • total turnout of early voters—both in-person and absentee—was 2,504,956, an all-time record
  • 2,288,889 total early in-person voters this year, compared to 1,890,364 early in-person voters in the 2018 midterm elections, a 17% increase
  • average wait time in [voting] lines was about two minutes in the afternoon, when a day’s voting really starts getting going
  • tracking at three minutes
  • longest on the leader board 14 minutes
  • check-in time, when you got to the front line, 47 seconds

Now we know clearly what those corporate values are: low voter turnout, great difficulty getting to a voting booth for those who are allowed to vote, voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens.

In fine, those corporations have shown their values to be suppression of citizens’ ability to vote and diminution of the value of citizens’ votes through promotion of non-citizens’ votes.

Why would any American citizen want to do business with this kind of corporation, a corporation that so blatantly disparages what it means to be an American citizen?