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      Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias

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      The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook took the stand on Tuesday to testify, again, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on their platforms.
      Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were subpoenaed in October to appear at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in order to “review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election”.
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      Republican lawmakers frequently allege – without evidence – censorship of conservative views, but this particular hearing was called in response to the companies’ handling of a New York Post article about Joe Biden.
      When the story was published in October, Twitter took unprecedented steps to limit its circulation, blocking users from posting links or photos of the report. At the time, Twitter said the measures were taken due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which were allegedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.
      The company later walked back on its response, tweeting that the communication around the actions on the article “was not great”. It also changed its hacked materials policies in response to the outcry. Facebook took a less aggressive stance, placing some limitations on the article due to questions about its validity.
      In his opening statement, Dorsey explained again the company took action against the New York Post tweet due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article and said that Twitter upon further review decided that action was wrong. “I hope this illustrates the rationale behind our actions and demonstrates our ability to take feedback,” Dorsey said. “Mistakes and changes were all transparent to the public.” More

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      in World Politics

      Facial Recognition and the Convenience of Injustice

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      Some people are concerned that the latest generation of powerful technology tools now being developed and deployed may undermine important features of civilized societies and human life itself. Notably, Elon Musk is so worried about the danger of artificial intelligence (AI) that he invested in accelerating its development.

      Musk has voiced his concern while simultaneously expressing the hope that if good, stable and responsible people such as Elon himself develop AI before the evil people out there get their hands on it, his company SpaceX will succeed in moving the human race to Mars before AI’s quest to enslave humanity is complete. Fearing people may not make it to Mars in time, Musk launched Neuralink, a company that promises to turn people into cyborgs. Its technology, implanted in people’s brains, will presumably put a transformed race on the same level as AI and therefore allow it to resist AI’s conquistadors.

      Although this story of the race to the future by opposing forces of good and evil may sound like the plot of a sci-fi comic book, Musk has on various occasions said things that actually do resemble that scenario. In the meantime, AI is being put to use in numerous domains, theoretically with the idea of solving specific problems but, more realistically, according to the time-honored laws of consumer society as a response to the perennial pursuit of convenience.

      In the quest for convenience, one of the tasks people have assigned to AI is facial recognition. Apparently, it has now become very good at using the image of a face to identify individuals. It may even perform better than Lady Gaga in the knotty problem of distinguishing Isla Fisher from Amy Adams.

      Facial Recognition Technology and the Future of Policing

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      Law enforcement in the US has demonstrated its interest in the added productivity facial recognition promises. Like everyone else, the police like to know who they are talking to as well as who they should go out and arrest. The problem is that they sometimes arrest and incarcerate people that AI’s facial recognition has mistakenly identified. The accuracy of the existing tools diminishes radically with non-Caucasian faces. That means more wrongful arrests and indictments for black suspects.

      The New York Times makes a timid attempt to delve into this ethical issue in an article that bears the somewhat tendentious title, “A Case for Facial Recognition.” The article sums up the case in the following terms: “The balancing act that Detroit and other U.S. cities have struggled with is whether and how to use facial recognition technology that many law enforcement officials say is critical for ensuring public safety, but that tends to have few accuracy requirements and is prone to misuse.”

      Here is today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Critical (for):

      A deliberately imprecise term used to evaluate the importance of an act that exists on a sliding scale between absolutely essential and probably useful, making it a convenient way of creating the belief that something is more important than it really is.

      Contextual Note

      The adjective “critical” derives from the Latin word “criticus” and relates to the idea of “crisis.” It came into the English language in the mid-16th century with the meaning “relating to the crisis of a disease.” When The Times article tells us that “many law enforcement officers” say facial recognition “is critical for ensuring public safety,” we need to realize that those officers are not referring to a crisis but to their own convenience. Facial recognition can, of course, produce a crisis when it misidentifies a suspect. But the crisis is for the suspect, not for the police.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The expression “critical for” has come to signify “really important in my view,” a very subjective appreciation in contrast to the far more factual sounding “crucial,” which comes from the idea of the “crux” or the core of a problem. The article underlines this question of subjectivity when it reports that a black officer it quotes “still believed that, with oversight, law enforcement would be better off using facial recognition software than not.” “Better off” is not quite the same thing as “critical.”

      But let’s take a closer look at the claim that “law enforcement would be better off.” How do we parse the subject, “law enforcement,” in this sentence? The term “law enforcement” can be an abstract noun meaning the official function of monitoring behavior in a community to ensure optimal compliance with laws. This appears in sentences such as “one of government’s responsibilities is to provide the community with the means of law enforcement.”

      But law enforcement can also refer to the police themselves, the officials who are empowered to apprehend and deliver to the judicial system those who are suspected of infringing the laws. Which one is “better off” thanks to facial recognition? In the first case, abstract law enforcement — we are speaking of the safety of the community. “Better off” would then mean more optimally and more fairly conducted. In the second it is the men and women doing the job. For them “better off” basically means improved convenience.

      So which one is the article’s author, Shira Ovide, referring to? Clearly, the following explanation indicates that for her, law enforcement refers to the police and not to the needs of the community. “That’s the position of facial recognition proponents: That the technology’s success in helping to solve cases makes up for its flaws, and that appropriate guardrails can make a difference.” It’s all about the job of “helping to solve cases.” Ovide is a technology specialist at The Times, which might explain her focus on convenience rather than the ethics of policing.

      What Ovide says is superficially true, but the same logic could be applied to slaveholding. If we admit the argument that slavery helped to boost agricultural production — which of course it did — we could point out that the boost it provides makes up for its flaws. That was how slaveholders reasoned. The crucial difference — rather than critical — lies in examining the nature and the impact of those flaws. After all, slaveowners also thought about “appropriate guardrails.” They simply called them “slave patrols.”

      This is where, for Ovide, bureaucracy comes to the rescue of the logic of convenience and reveals the underlying logic of modern law enforcement: “The new guidelines limited the Police Department’s use of facial recognition software to more serious crimes, required multiple approvals to use the software and mandated reports to a civilian oversight board on how often facial recognition software was used.”

      The article ends on a slightly ambiguous note but fails to go into any depth on the moral question and its civic consequences. It seems to endorse the idea that with the right procedures, the gain in efficiency is worth the random damage it will produce.

      Historical Note

      The above reference to slave patrols may sound exaggerated, but it is not trivial. As Chelsea Hansen at the Law Enforcement Museum points out, slave patrols were “an early form of American policing.” The strategies and organizational principles that grew out of slave patrols influenced the evolution of policing in the United States. Race has always been a major, but usually unacknowledged feature of American law enforcement culture.

      The late anthropologist David Graeber put it brutally when he noted that the criminal justice system in the US “perceives a large part of that city’s population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could.” Mass incarceration has, among other things, enabled a modern form of slave labor.

      In other words, there is a vast historical and cultural problem the US needs to solve. That is precisely what’s behind the idea formulated as “defund the police.” The slogan itself is misleading. What it really means is “rethink the police.” But asking Americans to rethink any problem appears to be beyond their capacity. It’s always easier just to point to one simple practical task, like defunding.

      The debate about face recognition in policing should not focus on the tasks of police officers and the convenience it affords them but on the relationship between law enforcement and the community. But that would ultimately require weaning the consumer culture of its addiction to the idea of convenience.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Top US cybersecurity official reportedly says he expects to be fired

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      Top US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs has told associates he expects to be fired by the White House, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
      Krebs is the government’s point person on securing voting technology and is widely respected among local election officials. His agency has also been aggressively pushing back on rumors that something went wrong with the 2020 election, as Donald Trump, who refuses to concede to the president-elect, Joe Biden, contests.
      Krebs, who heads the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), did not return messages from the Reuters news agency seeking comment. And the Cisa and the White House declined comment.
      Separately, Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at Cisa, confirmed to Reuters that he had handed in his resignation on Thursday.
      Krebs has drawn praise from both Democrats and Republicans for his handling of the US election, which generally ran smoothly despite persistent fears in the run-up that foreign hackers might try to undermine the vote or that there might be chaos with mail-in voting during a pandemic or intimidation of voters going to the polls to cast their ballots in person.
      But he drew the ire of the Trump White House over a website run by Cisa dubbed Rumor Control which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
      White House officials have asked for content to be edited or removed from the website, which has disputed numerous false claims about the election, including that Democrats are behind a mass election fraud scheme, for which no evidence has been presented. In response, Cisa officials have refused to delete accurate information.
      In particular, one person said, the White House was angry about a Cisa post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claims an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former US officials.
      Meanwhile Ware is one of several officials who have left national security-related posts since Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. Trump has yet to concede.
      Ware did not provide details, but a US official familiar with his matter said the White House asked for Ware’s resignation earlier this week.
      The churn is being closely watched amid concern for the integrity of the transition from Trump to Biden. More

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      Uber bought itself a law. Here's why that's dangerous for struggling drivers like me | Cherri Murphy

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      Last week, Uber bought itself a law.Along with Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates, app companies spent more than $200m – the most spent on any ballot campaign in US history – to bankroll Proposition 22 in California. With its passage, the law will now exempt drivers like me from basic protections afforded to most other workers in the state.And in the aftermath of their bought-and-paid-for victory, these companies are promising to roll out this model nationwide, foretelling a grim future for gig workers across the US.But let’s be absolutely clear: Prop 22 is a dangerous law. Voters in California, inundated with ads promising drivers a “living wage”, flexibility and greater benefits, believed they were ensuring drivers a better future in the middle of a pandemic and recession.But voters were hoodwinked. Drivers are now neither employees, guaranteed rights and benefits such as healthcare, nor true independent contractors, since we can’t set our own rates, choose our own clients, or build wealth on the apps.Instead, Prop 22 promises substandard healthcare, a death sentence to many in the middle of a pandemic. We’re promised a sub-minimum wage in the middle of a recession that an independent study showed would be as low as $5.64 an hour – not the eventual $15 state minimum. We’re given no family leave, no paid sick days and no access to state unemployment compensation. Most importantly, while we’re already prevented from unionizing under federal law, the measure also makes it nearly impossible for California to pass laws protecting drivers who organize collectively, a fundamental right that companies undermine to silence worker power. More

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      in US Politics

      TikTok asks US court to intervene after Trump administration leaves app in limbo

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      [embedded content]
      The popular video-sharing app TikTok says its future has been in limbo since Donald Trump tried to shut it down earlier this fall and is asking a federal court to intervene.
      Trump in August signed an executive order to ban TikTok if it did not sell its US operations in 45 days. The move forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to consider deals with several American companies before ultimately settling on a proposal to place TikTok under the oversight of the American companies Oracle and Walmart, each of which would also have a financial stake in the company.
      But TikTok said this week it’s received “no clarity” from the US government about whether that proposal has been accepted.
      The deal has been under a national-security review by the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is led by the treasury department. The department didn’t return emailed requests for comment this week.
      “With the November 12 CFIUS deadline imminent and without an extension in hand, we have no choice but to file a petition in court to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the US,” TikTok said in a written statement Tuesday.
      Trump has cited concerns that the Chinese government could spy on TikTok users if the app remains under Chinese ownership. TikTok has denied it is a security threat but said it is still trying to work with the administration to resolve its concerns.
      The legal challenge is “a protection to ensure these discussions can take place”, the company said.
      The Trump administration had earlier sought to ban the app from smartphone app stores and deprive it of vital technical services. To do this, the US could have internet service providers block TikTok usage from US IP addresses, as India did when it banned TikTok, effectively making TikTok unusable.
      Such actions were set to take place on 20 September but federal judges have so far granted TikTok extensions.
      TikTok is now looking to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit to review Trump’s divestment order and the government’s national-security review. The company filed a 49-page petition asking the court to review the decision, saying the forced divestment from TikTok violates the constitution.
      “The government has taken virtually all of the ‘sticks’ in the ‘bundle’ of property rights ByteDance possesses in its TikTok US platform, leaving it with no more than the twig of potentially being allowed to make a rushed, compelled sale, under shifting and unrealistic conditions, and subject to governmental approval,” the filing says.
      The US attorney general office did not immediately respond to request for comment. More

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      Big tech and corporate tax cuts: the targets of Joe Biden's urgent economic plans

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      When Joe Biden enters the White House on 20 January, he will face arguably the biggest set of challenges a president has had to tackle since the end of the second world war. The coronavirus is raging through the US, millions of Americans are still losing their jobs each month, and the climate crisis – ignored by the Trump administration – is deepening.
      Biden has set out his economic and policy plans, but without control of the Senate he may struggle to realise them. Official GDP figures for the third quarter showed the size of the economy was still almost 4% below its previous peak, despite a 7.4% recovery from the spring lockdown.
      At present it looks certain that the Democrats will control the House of Representatives, but we will have to wait for the results of special elections in Georgia before we know who controls the Senate. A Republican majority would block many of his proposals.
      Like Donald Trump, Biden can use executive orders – basically presidential decrees – to circumnavigate political roadblocks. While those orders would have major consequences, Biden is likely to struggle to pass significant legislation without Democratic control of both branches of Congress.
      But here are the some of the key elements of Bidenomics.
      Stimulus package More

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      Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

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      Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      “Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
      “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
      There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
      Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
      The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
      One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
      The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
      [embedded content]
      Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
      “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
      “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More

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      Facebook and Twitter take emergency steps against Trump false victory claims

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      Facebook and Twitter have deployed emergency measures to counter Donald Trump’s false claims of victory on their social networks, bringing them more directly into conflict with the US president than ever before.The two tech platforms had announced plans in the run-up to the election to counter misinformation about the vote, as well as premature claims of victory, and on the night of and day after, both companies mostly stuck to the plan.Facebook notably dropped the euphemistic phrasing that had previously accompanied its announcements, which discussed the risk that “candidates” may falsely claim a win. It also walked back a previous policy that would have allowed candidates to claim state-level victories before they were called, despite barring the premature announcement of a national win. On Wednesday it started to flag posts from Trump and affiliates claiming the president had won Pennsylvania and other battleground states, even as ballots continued to be counted and official results had yet to be announced.A company spokesperson cited Trump by name in explaining its decision, saying: “Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected. We’re also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information.”When it came to reacting to individual posts, both platforms faced criticism for their responses. In late-night posts cross-posted to both Twitter and Facebook, Trump declared: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” That post was followed by a second that read: “I will be making a statement tonight. A big WIN!”Misinformation experts say because such posts are able to achieve widespread circulation before being addressed, more comprehensive policies to correct the effects of the misleading posts should be put in place, calling it a “democratic emergency”.“False claims of voter fraud, early victory and election-stealing are helping plunge the country further into chaos and confusion, creating alternate realities for Americans,” said Fadi Quran, the campaign director at Avvaz, an online activist network and non-profit. “Platforms must immediately adopt more effective policies such as retroactively sending corrections to all users who see misinformation and downgrading the reach of repeat misinformers.”Facebook initially labelled the first post with a simple box advising readers to “see the latest updates on the 2020 US election”. More than 30 minutes after it was posted, the company updated its warning to note that “final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks”. By that time the post had well over 100,000 reactions.Twitter restricted distribution on the first post from Trump on Tuesday night, blocking it from being retweeted or replied to, and appended a note saying the content “is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process”. A spokesperson said the warning was “for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our civic integrity policy.”Neither platform took specific action against the second post claiming “a big WIN!”. Twitter said the lack of action was because it was unclear what, specifically, was being referenced. While the post could have constituted a premature claim of victory in the national race, it could just as easily be construed as a legitimate expression of pleasure at winning a state such as Florida, which had declared several hours earlier. More