Linked List: August 15, 2020

Saturday, 15 August 2020

‘Screw Apple, Screw Google, and Screw Epic Games’ ★

Acerbic YouTube take from Jim Sterling:

Screw the lot of them. Yes, Apple and Google need taking down from their high towers. Yes, Epic Games has a point as it sues to keep Fortnite on mobile devices. But absolutely all of them are as bad as each other.

This isn’t my take, per se, but it’s a fair take.

NBC News: ‘QAnon Groups Have Millions of Members on Facebook’ ★

Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny, reporting for NBC News:

An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to internal company documents reviewed by NBC News. […]

Facebook and other platforms face a unique challenge in moderating QAnon communities, said Joan Donovan, director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. The platforms act both as the “base infrastructure” for networking and spreading content and a target of the conspiracy theory itself, which frames Facebook and other platforms as “oppressive regimes that seek to destroy truth,” Donovan said.

There were rightwing kook conspiracy cults before Facebook, but Facebook uniquely enables them to grow. QAnon’s existence isn’t Facebook’s fault; QAnon’s prominence is entirely Facebook’s fault.

And they know it. From the same story, italic emphasis added:

“Enforcing against QAnon on Facebook is not new: we consistently take action against accounts, Groups, and Pages tied to QAnon that break our rules. Just last week, we removed a large Group with QAnon affiliations for violating our content policies, and removed a network of accounts for violating our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the spokesperson, who asked not to be named for fear of harassment from the QAnon community, wrote in an emailed statement. “We have teams assessing our policies against QAnon and are currently exploring additional actions we can take.”

How fucked up is it that Facebook has any tolerance at all for a large subculture on their platform that their own spokespeople fear?

Just kick them all off, close every one of the groups and close the Facebook accounts of everyone prominent in the community.

‘Trump’s Attacks on the Postal Service Deserve Sustained, Red-Alert Coverage From the Media’ ★

Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post:

But what about next week and next month?

Can something as dull-sounding as the workings of the Post Office compete with former Trump attorney’s new tell-all book, whose foreword includes lines like: “From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise — I was an active and eager participant.”

Can it break into the endless political takes on Kamala D. Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate, or the next political horse-race story that’s around the corner?

Fat chance.

But if journalists don’t keep the pressure on Postal Service problems, they will be abdicating their duty. There’s very little that matters more than the Nov. 3 vote. Anything that threatens the integrity of the vote needs to be treated as one of the biggest stories out there — even if it’s not the sexiest.

Just anecdotally, our mail situation here in Philadelphia has been just jaw-droppingly atrocious the last 6 weeks or so. Important bills that just never show up, deliveries showing up weeks late. Never seen anything like it, and I’ve lived here for 30 years now.