Linked List: December 2, 2022

Friday, 2 December 2022

Friend of the show John Moltz returns to talk about Elon Musk steering Twitter into a multi-issue spat with Apple, Mastodon, and some streaming TV recommendations.

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On the Prevalence of Hate Speech on Twitter ★

Sheera Frenkel and Kate Conger, reporting today for The New York Times under the alarming headline “Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find”:

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.

Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.

And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.

These findings — from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms — provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high.

Reactions on Twitter to this story all seemingly take it at face value that Twitter now has a problem with hate speech being tweeted. I suspect my take is going to be unpopular with many of you, but I’m not seeing it. Doubling the daily average of racial and gay slurs and antisemitic posts is obviously bad. That should go without saying. But in absolute terms these numbers show just how rare hate-speech tweets are. There are over 800 million new tweets posted every day.

I included in my blockquote above the Times’s line about the numbers being “relatively small”. But the narrative that’s being embraced by those opposed to Musk’s leadership of Twitter is that Twitter is now riddled with such hate speech. The truth is something to the effect of “The recent trendline of hate speech on Twitter is alarming.” The way it’s being talked about, though, is more like “Twitter is suddenly a hellscape of hate speech.” That’s just not true. Right now it’s more like having twice as many people as usual pissing in a large pool each day. It’s not what you want, but it’s still a few drops in the proverbial bucket.

Google Moves Maps to the Root Google.com Domain ★

Garrit Franke:

Yesterday I was asked to allow the usage of location services for Google Maps seemingly out of nowhere. Of course I accepted. After all, I just wanted to check a route to a local business and I was in a hurry. Back home I opened Google Maps again, and noticed that maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps. This implies that the permissions I give to Google Maps now apply to all of Google’s services hosted under this domain. So far I only identified Google Flights to have made the same switch (google.com/flights), though I’m sure they’re just beginning to transfer their services to the main google.com domain.

Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services.

Grant location access to Google Maps now, and you grant it to all of Google.

The Onion’s Supreme Court Amicus Brief Defending Parody ★

Speaking of entertaining legal documents that address serious issues, I’ve been meaning to link to the amicus brief filed by The Onion on behalf of Anthony Novak, who is suing the police department of Parma, Ohio in a case now before the Supreme Court. Long story short, Novak created a parody Facebook account for the police department; the police arrested him and he spent four days in jail, simply for having mocked them; and when Novak subsquently attempted to sue the police department for civil damages, the Sixth Circuit court of appeals held that the police could not be held responsible under the bullshit doctrine of “qualified immunity”.

The Onion’s brief begins itself as parody:

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part-time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.

But while the brief contains many jokes, it is no joke itself and forcefully makes the point that parody is protected speech because it can be so effective:

Time and again, that’s what has occurred with The Onion’s news stories. In 2012, for example, The Onion proclaimed that Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive. China’s state-run news agency republished The Onion’s story as true alongside a slideshow of the dictator himself in all his glory. The Fars Iranian News Agency uncritically picked up and ran with The Onion’s headline “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.” Domestically, the number of elected leaders who are still incapable of parsing The Onion’s coverage as satire is daunting, but one particular example stands out: Republican Congressman John Fleming, who believed that he needed to warn his constituents of a dangerous escalation of the pro-choice movement after reading The Onion’s headline “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.”

The point of all this is not that it is funny when deluded figures of authority mistake satire for the actual news — even though that can be extremely funny. Rather, it’s that the parody allows these figures to puncture their own sense of self-importance by falling for what any reasonable person would recognize as an absurd escalation of their own views. In the political context, the effect can be particularly pronounced. See Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 53–55 (1988); see also Falwell v. Flynt, 805 F.2d 484, 487 (4th Cir. 1986) (Wilkinson, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing) (“Nothing is more thoroughly democratic than to have the high-and-mighty lampooned and spoofed.”).

Elon Musk Gets Mail ★

Akiva Cohen, an attorney representing 22 laid-off Twitter employees, in a letter to Twitter and Elon Musk (shared, of course, on Twitter):

If basic human decency and honor isn’t enough to make you want to keep your word, maybe this will:

If you don’t unequivocally confirm by Wednesday, December 7 that you intend to provide our clients with the full severance Twitter promised them, we will commence an arbitration campaign on their behalf, with each employee filing a separate individual arbitration, as required by the terms of your arbitration agreement. Under both California law and the JAMS arbitration rules, Twitter will be responsible to pay the arbitration costs for each individual arbitrator and arbitration. Consistent with the terms of Twitter’s arbitration agreement, those arbitrations will be held in jurisdictions across the country — no more than 45 miles from where each employee worked. Not only will you lose on the merits, but even if you somehow won the victory would be pyrrhic: Twitter will pay far more in attorneys’ fees and arbitration costs than it could possibly “save” in severance due our clients.

And to be clear, Elon, you will lose, and you know it.

Owning Twitter seems like a lot of fun.