rbecker

> intent to download copyrighted music

Even that intent would be protected as fair use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

That's a good point, and the distinction is subtle. I think it lies in using "their data" to describe both what pages they choose to look at, and what ads Facebook decides to show them. These two types of data should really be treated separately.

Of course, one could argue that Facebook has a right to communicate with their users confidentially. But it's a bit of a stretch to treat ads as private communication.

Once you download a video, you don't need their service anymore to watch it again. But they want you to remain dependent on them.

Twitter labeled the pictures as "potentially sensitive content", despite it being just screenshots of the Google Translate text boxes. How on Earth does Twitter make these decisions?

> On other occasions, Sunstein has suggested that it is “disturbing” that academia does not have more Republicans for “viewpoint diversity” (just as chemistry departments need a few more phlogiston theorists).

From https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-disappea... :

> In [1969], about one in four professors were at least moderately conservative, according to survey data collected by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.

> Abrams estimated that the ratio of liberal to conservative professors has increased by about 350% since 1984, even though there was no equivalent change among the American public or college students.

> Notably, the decline of conservative professors has not occurred across all institutions. Conservative professors, for example, do not seem to be less common at elite research universities today than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as shown in Table 2 below.

So the Current Affairs article would have us believe elite research institutions are the most likely to peddle outdated misconceptions like phlogiston? And that in 1969, 1 in 4 professors were peddling the equivalent of phlogiston?

The author preferred to fabricate a reason for the conservative deficit in academia, one that affirmed their prejudices, instead of bothering to check research on the topic:

> In Compromising Scholarship, a 2011 book by sociologist George Yancey, some 30% of sociologists acknowledged that they would be less likely to hire a job applicant if they knew he was a Republican. [..] Professors are even less tolerant of evangelicals, whom they associate with social conservatism. Nearly 60% of anthropologists, 50% of literature professors, 39% of political scientists and sociologists, 34% of philosophy professors, and 29% of historians say they would be less inclined to hire evangelicals.

> Other research suggests that liberal professors sometimes act on these biases. Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter found in 2009's The Politically Correct University that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower-ranked institutions than their publication records would suggest.

> A 1985 study in the American Psychologist, for example, assessed the outcomes of research proposals submitted to human subject committees. Some of the proposals were aimed at studying job discrimination against racial minorities, women, short people, and those who are obese. Other proposals set out to study "reverse discrimination" against whites. All of the proposals, however, offered identical research designs. The study found that the proposals on reverse discrimination were the hardest to get approved, often because their research designs were scrutinized more thoroughly. In some cases, though, the reviewers raised explicitly political concerns; as one reviewer argued, "The findings could set affirmative action back 20 years if it came out that women were asked to interview more often for managerial positions than men with a stronger vitae."

So you can exhaust your monthly data in 2 hours and 14 minutes of fully using your connection?

Is it lying? Do we have so much faith in Discord that we'd let them judge that even for private communities? For example, would they have labeled claims that the harms of fat are exaggerated due to a conspiracy by the sugar industry [1], as misinformation before 2016?

Oh but that was four long years ago. Surely by now all that we think is true, is true, and all that we think is false is false. And surely they will censor with only the best intentions, regardless of their personal politics, or external financial influence.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

That's a misconception worth clearing up, but the article is about taxes on wealth (i.e. assets), not profit.

> The purpose of this restraining order is simply to prevent the sharing of confidential information.

How can information gathered from examining a publicly available product possibly be confidential?

> Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer, while the conservative site the Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit.

Implicit is the assumption that the baseline, before these adjustments were made, was "correct", and that the adjustments unfairly altered it. But from what we know, the baseline was just as arbitrary as the adjustments.

Why was the original algorithm okay, but changing it is "manipulation"?

That's conflating disclosing what evidence Google used to determine the offense, and what the offense even was.

If someone was gaming the system, they'd already know which parts of the ToS they were breaking, so they'd gain no advantage from being informed of that again by Google.

It's more than just not ideal - it measures the wrong thing entirely. Yet finding a better measurement is difficult. This 2015 survey claims conservatives are less likely to share their unpopular views on Facebook [1], and this 2020 report claims Facebook News leans left-center [2]. But neither measure the traffic of conservative vs. liberal news stories on Facebook, so it's risky to draw any conclusions on that. On the other hand, they ban white nationalism entirely [3]. I'm not sure it counts as conservative today, but it was official US policy until 1965.

[1] https://civicscience.com/is-facebook-changing-the-political-...

[2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/facebook-news/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/27/facebook-...

A top 10 list is not an good measure, because it's vulnerable to something like "splitting the vote". E.g. how Muhammad is the most popular baby name in the UK, despite Arabs not dominating UK society: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-rea...

> consumers

What about the companies that Google killed with underhanded tactics?

Actually, what about the consumers whose choice in smartphones was reduced because Google contractually forced phone manufacturers to include certain features, and prevented them from developing alternatives [1,2]?

But I'm sure Google would like to focus all our attention on short-term, individual-level effects, so they can continue to pretend a single company dominating ever more markets doesn't, and won't, have any bad consequences.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-s-confidentia...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/google-will-stop-bundling-it...

> 2. we're turning off our apps in California

In places where Uber/Lyft are absent, other apps quickly fill their place. All they have is network effects - they're not nearly as irreplaceable as they'd like you to think.

Uber probably saw the backlash to Coinbase trying to remain politically neutral, and decided they had to do this to avoid being seen as unethical. Since there's no such thing as politically neutral.

I get the impression that the semiconductor industry is slowly disappearing from the US, and even from the West as a whole. It'll be a lot harder to regain that expertise than it is to lose it.

> All of the mainstream "left-wing" publications are more centrist and neoliberal than anything.

Depends on the topic. Ask them about mass immigration, and they'll be falling over each-other to tell you how great it is, while many European countries with much more limited immigration also have many policies considered left-wing in the US, such as state-funded universities and healthcare, strong social safety net, shorter prison sentences and better environmental and consumer protections.

Or look at Thailand, where they have universal healthcare, but "amnesty" for illegal immigrants means they can leave without being punished: https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/10744

The article doesn't claim that what Facebook and Twitter did was illegal. You're conflating whether they had the legal right to censor, with if they should have used it.

Net neutrality means it's not fine for the ISP to do the filtering - that's all it does.

It says nothing on whether it's fine if Facebook or Twitter do it.

Top 10 lists can be misleading. If there are fewer popular right-leaning news sources, then all the right-leaning audience will be concentrated there, pushing them into the top 10, while the left's audience is diluted.

Like splitting the vote, or how Muhammed (and alternative spellings) is the most popular baby name in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-rea...

You would have to look at the total story popularity, not just the top 10, to make any kind of conclusion.

> a customer fell for a common scam

No, the bank fell for the scam. They cleared the fraudulent check. But their TOS says their customers are on the hook for mistakes made (and hidden - there's no way to tell if a transaction really cleared) by the bank.

That's a good idea, but not nearly enough. I haven't bought a single smart TV, but despite this, non-smart options have nearly disappeared from the consumer market. The only way to win this battle is through collective action in the form of legislation.

> If you don't buy products with these conditions you never once face these problems.

Until they're the only kind of products left. See smart TVs.

> I happen to absolutely love copyrights, I just don’t believe in taking the rights of the authors too far. Not to the point of screwing the consumer over. And I say this not just as a consumer, but as a producer of copyrighted material myself, both in the form of this book and of Linux itself.

Ironically, every time some law gets passed to modernize IP law, "modernize" ends up meaning "expand".

The sibling comment pointed out how that Monsanto lawsuit is mischaracterized. But focusing on that lawsuit misses the bigger point - they don't need to sue when they can drive farmers that don't buy from them to bankruptcy because their patented seeds enable slightly better margins.

Doing any other kind of farming will simply become unviable.

Lest anyone think seed patents are simply a fact of life, there are (or were) countries where they were not valid. For example Iraq, until the US occupying force issued its 100 orders, among them order 81, which prohibits the planting and saving of patented seeds without a license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders

Sounds interesting - I'd love a source on it.

I'm sure they've learned their lesson, and next time it won't be a ban, but a difficult-to-prove reduction in visibility.

And if you shop at a grocery store, your money goes to pay their expenses. One of those expenses if stocking Coca-Cola. See how easy it is to make it seem like you contribute to something if you join all capital flows into one big pool?

You have to explain how Rogan would get more money if you subscribe to Spotify, than if you didn't subscribe.