Making Choices
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Whither speech online: “What GoDaddy, Google and Cloudfare did here was dangerous.” So write Jeremy Malcolm, Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arguing forcefully that such internet intermediaries with the power to remove domain names from the net or defend sites from massive DDOS attacks should not be making content decisions about what they host or protect online. Calling them the “weak links” in the open Internet, they write:
The firmest, most consistent, defense these potential weak links can take is to simply decline all attempts to use them as a control point. They can act to defend their role as a conduit, rather than a publisher. And just as law and custom developed a norm that we might sue a publisher for defamation, but not the owner of a printing press, or newspaper vendor, we are slowly developing norms about who should take responsibility for content online. Companies that manage domain names, including GoDaddy and Google, should draw a hard line: they should not suspend or impair domain names based on the expressive content of websites or services.
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Rather than just acting based on public opinion and ad hoc interpretations of their terms of service, tech companies should “make human rights law a core consideration when evaluating whether to boot hate groups,” Deji Olukotun, Peter
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Micek and Drew Mitnick of the Internet rights group Access Now write. When a CEO like the head of Cloudflare makes an arbitrary decision to drop a group because they are, in his view, “assholes,” without due process or fairness, the same arbitrary approach could be wielded against vulnerable groups for their speech, they point out.
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Related: Gab.ai, a social networking platform that is a blend of Twitter and Reddit and which has marketed itself heavily as a rightwing alternative, has raised more than $1 million in an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, half in the last five days, Chris O’Brien reports for VentureBeat. Gab is billing itself as “alt-tech” and is using James Damore’s firing from Google for questioning its diversity efforts as a rallying cry.
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Bar-a-Lago: In the wake of President Trump’s Charlottesville remarks, three big fundraising groups, the American Cancer Society, the Cleveland Clinic, and the American Friends of Magen David Adom (Israel’s Red Cross), have decided to cancel plans to host events at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Drew Harwell and David Farenthold report for The Washington Post. More than 1600 health professionals had signed a letter to the Cleveland Clinic urging it to pull out of Mar-a-Lago because it symbolically and financially supports a politician actively working to “decrease access to health care.”
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Wanna see what the little Twitler sees on his Twitter feed? The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has build a twitter account, @trumps_feed, that gives you a front row seat.
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Crypto-wars, continued: In the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks turned down a cache of documents related to the Russian government, Jenna McLaughlin reports for Foreign Policy.
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Money talks: David Callahan of InsidePhilanthropy.com takes a close look at the Open Society Foundations, which collectively give away more per year, about $930 million, than the Ford Foundation.
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Tech and politics: BuzzFeed Germany is asking Facebook users there to share what political ads they are seeing (article in German). This is the only way to counter hidden micro-targeting.
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Apply: If you are an activist, leader, advocate or change maker, check out the inaugural Roddenberry Fellowships. Twenty winners will each get $50,000 for a year of work and mentorship. The deadline to apply is August 22.
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Your weekend long-read: James Surowiecki in Wired on why the robots aren’t going to take away everyone’s jobs.
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Your weekend short-read: Yours truly on big money in politics from well-meaning billionaires, and how we are aren’t taking it seriously.
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And with that, First Post will be eclipsed for the next week. Enjoy the breather and don’t worry, the sun will come back…
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