Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://reason.com/2024/06/20/scotus-makes-it-easier-for-victims-of-retaliatory-arrests-to-vindicate-their-first-amendment-rights/
"When someone claims to have been arrested in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech, what sort of evidence is necessary to make that case? Five years ago in Nieves v. Bartlett, the Supreme Court held that an arrest can violate the #FirstAmendment even if it was based on probable cause, provided the claimant can present "objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been." Today in Gonzalez v. Trevino, the Court said that showing does not require "very specific comparator evidence" indicating that "identifiable people" engaged in very similar conduct but were not arrested."

"Whether or not Gonzalez is ultimately successful in proving her case, today's decision will make it easier for victims of retaliatory arrests to get their day in court. Laredo, Texas, journalist Priscilla Villarreal, for example, was arrested under a dubious interpretation of an obscure state law that makes it a felony to seek nonpublic information with the intent to "obtain a benefit." Her crime, according to local police and prosecutors, was asking a cop questions about a public suicide and a fatal car accident."
#FreeSpeech

Huh, instance went down for a few minutes.

https://reason.com/2024/06/21/the-stop-comstock-act-doesnt-go-far-enough/ Congress should repeal the entire Comstock Act (even if it's already been nullified by the #FirstAmendment). #FreeSpeech #HumanRights

https://reason.com/2024/06/21/the-supreme-court-again-strengthens-the-right-to-a-jury-trial-in-criminal-sentencing/
"The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the right to a trial by jury and to due process apply to people who face a steep sentencing enhancement under federal law, in a ruling that transfers some power from the hands of judges to the public and will affect many criminal defendants' future punishments."

""Prominent among the reasons colonists cited in the Declaration of Independence for their break with Great Britain was the fact Parliament and the Crown had 'depriv[ed] [them] in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,'" he writes. "The Fifth and Sixth Amendments placed the jury at the heart of our criminal justice system" in order "to mitigate the risk of prosecutorial overreach and misconduct" and serve as a check on the government."
#FifthAmendment #SixthAmendment #HumanRights

I've made a few changes but not enough to repost this again.

As stated previously, I'm not going to draw a delineation based on "realism" but whether something depicts a real person (or is consensual adult media*), otherwise it drives discussions around arbitrary cut offs of realism, rather than actual ethics. Further discussion in that post. Also, some people like more realistic art styles, and I'm wary of unfairly stigmatizing them.

* Plenty of people would count both as consensual adult media. I'm not arguing against that here, I'm simply making use of clearer language.

A lot for me to read.

Do you believe there is one right way of doing moderation? Or that someone can "zero in" on that one right way? That is the impression I'm getting from reading some of these "Trust & Safety" takes. It is also fundamentally wrong, and encourages the wrong expectations from stakeholders.

I've seen cases where Big Tech might jump onto the same bad policy decision (typically, censorious in some weirdly specific way), and I think that is indicative of this problem.

Tricks like that are a very bad idea for them, because well, Facebook is not a hard company for a competitor to attack. Do they want to invite that? Or put away the nastiness instead?

With these two tricks out the window, maybe Facebook will have to engage in actual competition.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-meta-tiktok-targeted-victory_n_62446838e4b0742dfa59f045 Remember that Facebook tried to smear #TikTok.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-meta-tiktok-targeted-victory_n_62446838e4b0742dfa59f045
"In an increasingly desperate bid to reduce the appeal of TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival as a danger to society."
When I see a former Facebook executive rubbishing their competitors, I'm reminded of this.

We *know* Facebook has been known to do these things.

Progress is being made, but it's still fairly incomplete, more to do.

By serious, I mean, like a hypothetical "what if" scenario with a more serious response, rather than being more fantasy. Well, I'm not interested enough to look deeply into it.

Weird shows like this are actually pretty rare. It's just unusual enough that it invites me to comment on it.

https://nichegamer.com/if-my-wife-became-an-elementary-school-student-premieres-fall-2024/ rofl

It looks like it might be a more serious story but this premise is funny.

There are also people who assume that a few tech companies are using the *same technology* as they did a decade ago and that they're not adopting even less accurate technologies.

Around a decade ago, Microsoft opened up the whole can of worms of private mass surveillance. Retrospectively, it was probably a bad decision and it sold the idea of violating someone's right to privacy as a tool of convenience for chasing crime.

Then, we get takes like this, where someone reckons that the government spying on people is not surveillance at all.

So, I saw a take like this earlier:

"Scanning people's messages is not 'mass surveillance'."

Uh, how is opening up everyone's messages and checking to see if there're certain things in there not mass surveillance.

What. You mean there are sites which don't just immediately permanently ban people because of some stupid technicality. How shocking.

When Discord pitches the concept of a "warning", something which has been done in content moderation for over thirty years, as if it is some new radical thing to others.