Bad news today for those who love to chat on Facebook about cars, especially when you need to your horn.
Even worse news for those country music fans who can’t get enough Blank-y tonk music. And if you’re an old school WWF fan, you may no longer be able to reference your favorite wrestler, the Blank-y Tonk Man.
Yes, that’s right: just when you thought the censorship from social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter had hit a fever pitch, its now being reported that Facebook is removing the word “honk” from its platform.
As we drift further into an amalgam of Idiocracy mixed with A Brave New World, the banning of the word “honk” – attributed to the “clown world” meme, a nihilistic joke that many are adopting to protest the last few years of liberal censorship – has been the next inevitable step toward total overreach by our new silicon valley overlords.
Social media companies continue to enforce their radical left ideologies across their platforms at a frightening pace. For instance, Facebook banned Natural News over the weekend, a site that had 2.5 million followers, just hours after liberal website The Daily Beast published a negative article on its owner, Mike Adams.
And last month, Facebook banned conservative commentators like Paul Joseph Watson for unknown reasons. Its constant censorship ambitions have commentators like Watson continuing to argue that the site is “clearly operating as a publisher, not a platform, in violation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and is engaging in flagrant election meddling.”
The “honk” ban is the latest action in a long line of increasingly idiotic censorship lunacy. Recall,, last month we pointed out that a Chicago school had spent $54,0000 to re-print its entire yearbook because some kids had made “OK” symbols – falsely attributed to white supremacy – in some photographs.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wv78Wq Tyler Durden
Exhausted by the wild swings in markets? By tweets, daily newsflashes, central banks speeches, etc, all of which cause markets to move up and down on a dime leaving wide open gaps to the upside and downside?
Welcome to 2019. And 2018. It’s been a wild ride over the past 2 couple of years and it doesn’t look to change anytime soon. So one best have a stoic approach to markets or psychology can get the best of you.
Hence I thought it might be best to go through a little mental exercise for everyone to consider.
I posted 2 mystery charts as I called them on twitter and asked whether they would be considered bullish or bearish.
To me it’s an interesting exercise because there’s no bias associated with them as not enough information is provided as to context or time, but I wanted to get a sense of perception and I very much appreciate everyone’s responses.
This was not meant to be an exercise for people to be right or wrong, but rather highlight a couple of key lessons to be mindful of.
What’s that chart show us? Wild price swings up and down. It’s a daily chart and the chop is brutal, especially that rally at the end there. Massive. And relentless. Bullish or bearish?
This chart too is a daily chart, also wild price swings and making new highs. Bullish or bearish?
The most striking aspect of all the responses I received on both charts is that there was zero consensus. Some are bullish, some are bearish, some want more information and are on the fence. Fair enough.
Ok, enough already of the gibbering what are the charts?
Well, both are the $DJIA, just from different periods of the past.
Mystery chart 1 is the $DJIA from May 1999 through May 2001, 2 years:
Right through the tech bubble which peaked in March of 2000. Awe-inspiring rallies and scary drops and 2 years of chop sprinkled in between. Everybody’s opinion didn’t matter as the chart went nowhere for 2 years.
But then it did matter. That last rally? It was the end, and $DJIA dropped nearly 40% from there, but with more sharp rallies in-between:
By now you probably guessed mystery chart #2, yes $DJIA in 2007:
Massive moves up and down and a new high in October. Was it bullish? Of course not, hindsight is wonderful, but if you’re in thick of things rallies can be deceiving:
The point of all this? Wild price swings and massive rallies at the end of a cycle can be massively deceiving.
Now, nobody can call a top in advance and in our current period there are many arguments that can be made for new highs to come still despite slowing macros.
Who knows, the Fed alone may blow these markets to kingdom come:
The Fed, by its catering to markets, has 2 choices now:
1. Disappoint markets and risk a major sell-off
2. Blow the biggest bubble known to man
Nobody can be certain of anything in such an environment, but observe what’s happening with price.
And here we can observe wild price swings, massive gyrations up and down with a lot of chop in between.
No market is alike, but we can note similarities one of which is particularly aggressive rallies at the end either making new highs or not.
What did buyers know that chased the final rallies in May 2001 and October 2007? The hindsight answer is: Nothing. Just because they chase them doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. Aggressive rallies at the end of a cycle can produce new highs, but on their own they have no predictive value as to where stocks are going.
None of these final rallies in 2001 and 2007 ended with a sudden bang. They just got overbought and then produced a few down days, nothing dramatic at all. But know these final rallies came in context of exuberant investor behavior amid slowing macro and a Fed keen to keep any recession talk at bay, yet having stopped their rate hike cycle. Sound familiar?
Are there signs of exuberant investor behavior? You tell me:
Beyond me(at) why people chase into stocks like this other than a short massacre, but then this happens during every bubble.
As to the Fed now expected to cut rates aggressively at 50 year lows in unemployment with $SPX hitting 1.8% off of all time highs today?
Rate cuts here are a risky proposition. While investors have chased into stocks on Jay Powell’s comments last week consider the historicity here:
At the beginning of 2000 the Fed Funds rate was at 6.5%, they then were forced to cut by 525 basis points. From the recession low of 2002 the Fed raised interest rates by 400 basis points before being forced to cut by 500 basis points to zero. In this cycle they barely managed to raise rates by 225 basis points before now being forced to cut again with rates still below 1993 rates. Which also implies they only have 225 basis points to play with here unless they go to negative. Less than half of the ammunition they had during the last 2 recessions implying the Fed needs to be judicious and strategic with any rate cuts.
As for investors chasing jubilantly into coming rate cuts:
CREDIT SUISSE: “Many investors believe that disappointing data is a positive for stocks as it gives the Fed cover to cut rates. Our work refutes this argument. Weak readings and lower yields should be a headwind regardless of Fed action.” pic.twitter.com/6hindoon2m
Bottom line: We are at a unique point in history here, one marked by wild price gyrations in the face of a slowing macro environment. Investors are again believing the Fed will make all troubles go away and perhaps they will again. At the same time, price, in context of declining macro, is acting in ways not inconsistent with previous topping patterns during which the most aggressive rallies were the ones to be most cautious of.
That’s at least what the mystery charts strongly suggest.
* * *
For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2I8ImYm Tyler Durden
In United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 745 (1987), this Court held that to maintain a facial challenge, a plaintiff must establish that “no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” The federal courts of appeals are starkly split on the question of whether this rule was relaxed by the Court in the context of vagueness cases in Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), and Sessions v. Dimaya, 138 S. Ct. 1204 (2018).
The Fourth and Eighth Circuits have answered in the affirmative. See Kolbe v. Hogan, 849 F.3d 114, 148 fn.19 (4th Cir. 2017); United States v. Bramer, 832 F.3d 908 (8th Cir. 2016). By contrast, the Second Circuit expressly insisted below that no such relaxation has taken place. Copeland v. Vance, 893 F.3d 101, 113 fn.3 (2d Cir. 2018).
The question presented is: Whether a plaintiff need show that a law is vague in all of its applications to succeed in a facial vagueness challenge.
You can read the government’s response, the reply, and the amicus briefs here. (I signed one, though did not write it.) You can also see the debate about whether the case is moot—10 days ago, the New York Legislature repealed the underlying statute, but people could still be prosecuted for their pre-repeal conduct (yes, that’s the legal rule in most jurisdictions with regard to statutory repeals), and gravity knives (defined using the same definition that is being challenged as vague) remain forbidden on New York City subways and buses. Very interesting stuff.
The Court will be considering the case at its conference Thursday.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IykSe3
via IFTTT
We kick off Episode 267 with Gus Hurwitz reading the runes to see whether the 50-year Chicago winter for antitrust plaintiffs is finally thawing in Silicon Valley. Gus thinks the predictions of global antitrust warming are overhyped. But he recognizes we’re seeing an awful lot of robins on the lawn: The rise of Margrethe Vestager in the EU, the enthusiasm of state AGs for suing Big Tech, and the piling on of Dem presidential candidates and the House of Representatives. Judge Koh’s Qualcomm decision is another straw in the wind, triggering criticism from Gus (“an undue extension of Aspen Skiing”) and me (“the FTC needs a national security minder when it ventures into privacy and competition law”). But Matthew Heiman thinks I’m on the wrong page when I suggest that Silicon Valley’s suppression of conservative speech is the kind of detriment to consumer welfare that the antitrust laws should take into account, even in a Borkian world.
I mock Austrian Greens for suing to censor those who called it a “fascist party” – stopping their mouths not just in Austria but around the world. Yeah, guys, that’ll show ’em who the fascists are. Less funny is the European Court of Justice’s advocate general, who more or less buys the Greens’ argument. And thereby reminds us why we miss Tom Wolfe, who famously said, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”
Nate Jones answers the question, “Were the Russians much better at social media than we thought?” All the adjustments to that story, he notes, have increased our assessment of the sophistication in Russia’s social media attacks. And in This Week in Host Self-Promotion, I take advantage of Nate’s remarks to urge my own solution to the utterly unsolved problem of hack-and-dox attacks by foreign governments on US candidates they don’t like: Ban the distribution of data troves stolen from candidates and officials. Nate agrees that First Amendment doctrine here is a lot friendlier to my proposal than most people think, but he cautions that the details get messy fast.
Matthew comments on Baltimore’s tragedy of errors in handling its ransomware attack. The New York Times’ effort to pin the blame on NSA’s EternalBlue, which always looked tendentious and agenda-driven, now has another problem: It’s almost certainly dead wrong. EternalBlue doesn’t seem to have been used in the ransomware attack. Baltimore’s best case now is that its cybersecurity sucked so bad that other, completely unrelated hackers were using EternalBlue to wander through the city’s system at the same time as the ransom bandits.
Speaking of cybersecurity, Matthew reminds us of two increasingly common and dangerous hacker tactics: (1) putting the “P” in APT by hanging around the system so long that you’ve downloaded all the manuals, taken all the online training, and know exactly when and how to scam the system; and (2) finding someone with lousy network security who’s connected to a harder target and breaking in through the third party.
Finally, Gary Goldsholle helps us make sense of the litigation between the SEC and Kik, which first launched a cryptotoken that it insisted wasn’t a security offering and then crowdfunded a lawsuit to that effect against the SEC. So, finally: good news for lawyers if nothing else, and perhaps for future Initial Popcorn Offerings.
As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2I5E4Rj
via IFTTT
In United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 745 (1987), this Court held that to maintain a facial challenge, a plaintiff must establish that “no set of circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” The federal courts of appeals are starkly split on the question of whether this rule was relaxed by the Court in the context of vagueness cases in Johnson v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 2551 (2015), and Sessions v. Dimaya, 138 S. Ct. 1204 (2018).
The Fourth and Eighth Circuits have answered in the affirmative. See Kolbe v. Hogan, 849 F.3d 114, 148 fn.19 (4th Cir. 2017); United States v. Bramer, 832 F.3d 908 (8th Cir. 2016). By contrast, the Second Circuit expressly insisted below that no such relaxation has taken place. Copeland v. Vance, 893 F.3d 101, 113 fn.3 (2d Cir. 2018).
The question presented is: Whether a plaintiff need show that a law is vague in all of its applications to succeed in a facial vagueness challenge.
You can read the government’s response, the reply, and the amicus briefs here. (I signed one, though did not write it.) You can also see the debate about whether the case is moot—10 days ago, the New York Legislature repealed the underlying statute, but people could still be prosecuted for their pre-repeal conduct (yes, that’s the legal rule in most jurisdictions with regard to statutory repeals), and gravity knives (defined using the same definition that is being challenged as vague) remain forbidden on New York City subways and buses. Very interesting stuff.
The Court will be considering the case at its conference Thursday.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IykSe3
via IFTTT
We kick off Episode 267 with Gus Hurwitz reading the runes to see whether the 50-year Chicago winter for antitrust plaintiffs is finally thawing in Silicon Valley. Gus thinks the predictions of global antitrust warming are overhyped. But he recognizes we’re seeing an awful lot of robins on the lawn: The rise of Margrethe Vestager in the EU, the enthusiasm of state AGs for suing Big Tech, and the piling on of Dem presidential candidates and the House of Representatives. Judge Koh’s Qualcomm decision is another straw in the wind, triggering criticism from Gus (“an undue extension of Aspen Skiing”) and me (“the FTC needs a national security minder when it ventures into privacy and competition law”). But Matthew Heiman thinks I’m on the wrong page when I suggest that Silicon Valley’s suppression of conservative speech is the kind of detriment to consumer welfare that the antitrust laws should take into account, even in a Borkian world.
I mock Austrian Greens for suing to censor those who called it a “fascist party” – stopping their mouths not just in Austria but around the world. Yeah, guys, that’ll show ’em who the fascists are. Less funny is the European Court of Justice’s advocate general, who more or less buys the Greens’ argument. And thereby reminds us why we miss Tom Wolfe, who famously said, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”
Nate Jones answers the question, “Were the Russians much better at social media than we thought?” All the adjustments to that story, he notes, have increased our assessment of the sophistication in Russia’s social media attacks. And in This Week in Host Self-Promotion, I take advantage of Nate’s remarks to urge my own solution to the utterly unsolved problem of hack-and-dox attacks by foreign governments on US candidates they don’t like: Ban the distribution of data troves stolen from candidates and officials. Nate agrees that First Amendment doctrine here is a lot friendlier to my proposal than most people think, but he cautions that the details get messy fast.
Matthew comments on Baltimore’s tragedy of errors in handling its ransomware attack. The New York Times’ effort to pin the blame on NSA’s EternalBlue, which always looked tendentious and agenda-driven, now has another problem: It’s almost certainly dead wrong. EternalBlue doesn’t seem to have been used in the ransomware attack. Baltimore’s best case now is that its cybersecurity sucked so bad that other, completely unrelated hackers were using EternalBlue to wander through the city’s system at the same time as the ransom bandits.
Speaking of cybersecurity, Matthew reminds us of two increasingly common and dangerous hacker tactics: (1) putting the “P” in APT by hanging around the system so long that you’ve downloaded all the manuals, taken all the online training, and know exactly when and how to scam the system; and (2) finding someone with lousy network security who’s connected to a harder target and breaking in through the third party.
Finally, Gary Goldsholle helps us make sense of the litigation between the SEC and Kik, which first launched a cryptotoken that it insisted wasn’t a security offering and then crowdfunded a lawsuit to that effect against the SEC. So, finally: good news for lawyers if nothing else, and perhaps for future Initial Popcorn Offerings.
As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2I5E4Rj
via IFTTT
By now, you probably know that YouTube is pure evil. Or maybe just dumber than a box of rocks. Either way, get ready for major political and regulatory action against Google, which has owned the video platform since 2006, and is now the target of a Department of Justice antitrust investigation and a congressional investigation along the same lines. Earlier today in an interview with CNBC, President Donald Trump praised the more-than-$9-billion in fines levied against the internet giant by the European Union since 2017 and declared, “Obviously, there’s something going on in terms of monopoly.”
These days, whether you’re a right-wing free-marketer or a left-wing democratic socialist, whether you’re Tucker Carlson or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), you probably worry more about Big Tech than Islamic terrorism and agree that all or most of the so-called FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) need to be broken up, hemmed in, or regulated as public utilities. Hell, even the leaders of those companies are calling for regulation. A month ago, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to plead with Congress to pass “comprehensive privacy legislation” similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that would cover all online businesses. Ironically—or maybe strategically—Pichai didn’t mention that a year after the GDPR’s implementation, Google’s marketshare had grown.
Last week, in a truly inspired set of self-owns, YouTube managed to piss off conservatives—by apparently demonetizing the videos of right-wing comedian Steven Crowder—and to enrage progressives by not actually banning him for jokes directed at a gay Vox reporter.
When YouTube’s not using its supposedly all-powerful, super-spooky algorithm to recommend videos that will turn you into a pedophile or a marathon runner, it’s turning decent, red-blooded, red-state American boys into alt-right monsters. The theory here is that, in a bid to extend the amount of time viewers stay on the site, YouTube keeps recommending slightly more extreme, provocative videos of the sort you just watched. You go from watching old Milton Friedman clips to Ben Shapiro disquisitions to Stefan Molyneux rants on “race realism” and, well, it was nice knowing you. It goes without saying that viewers are largely unable to exercise any meaningful volition when faced with such modern-day magic. Back in the 1990s, it was supposedly ultra-violent and hyper-sexual cable TV that was programming us into slobbering fools. Today, it’s PewDiePie, Logan Paul, et al.
“Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube,” reads the ominous subtitle to a widely read New York Times about a 26-year-old West Virginia resident who started watching a bunch of alt-right videos and came to identify with that movement of Trump-friendly, quasi-racists, traditionalists, and nativists. Until, that is, he watched yet more YouTube videos and changed his mind:
Nearly four years after Mr. Cain had begun watching right-wing YouTube videos, a new kind of video began appearing in his recommendations.
These videos were made by left-wing creators, but they mimicked the aesthetics of right-wing YouTube, down to the combative titles and the mocking use of words like “triggered” and “snowflake.”…
When Mr. Cain first saw these videos, he dismissed them as left-wing propaganda. But he watched more, and he started to wonder if people like Ms. [Nathalie] Wynn had a point. Her videos persuasively used research and citations to rebut the right-wing talking points he had absorbed. “I just kept watching more and more of that content, sympathizing and empathizing with her and also seeing that, wow, she really knows what she’s talking about,” Mr. Cain said.
Cain is now a critic of the alt-right, but he presumably is still in thrall to YouTube because he “still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.”
This sort of narrative—in which social media is effectively turning its users into pliant, virtually addicted content consumers—is as ubiquitous as it is unconvincing. It follows the tried-and-true template of branding new forms of media (novels, film, radio, comic books, rock music, video games) as inherently toxic, uniquely irresistible and leading to social collapse. The World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared that “gaming disorder” is a type of “behavioral addiction” and it’s only a matter of time before people discussing social media addiction in figurative terms produce laws based on a literal equivalence between opioids and Instagram.
In the immediate moment, though, Google and YouTube’s time in the barrel will probably deal less with questions about social-media addiction and the mind-warping nature of super-secret search algorithms, and more with old-fashioned economic complaints from established interests that want Google to pay them a bigger cut of ad revenues. Tomorrow brings congressional hearings about The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill co-sponsored by Reps. David Cicilline (D–R.I.) and Doug Collins (R–Ga.) that would exempt newspapers from antitrust rules so they can collectively bargain with Google and Facebook, the two companies that dominate online advertising (Google accounts for about 37 percent of online ad revenue and Facebook for about 22 percent).
Legacy media companies are saying that there is no way to survive without relying on Google, which is ripping them off by including them in search results and pushing them to post versions of their stories on pages technically controlled by Google. A new study from the News Media Alliance, a nonprofit representing the interests of newspapers, claims that Google is making $4.7 billion a year from Google News, an ad-free aggregation site that displays snippets of articles and links to sites. “The findings clearly point to Google responding to an increase in consumers searching for news, creating and tailoring products that keep users within its ecosystem. This means more money goes back to Google and not the publishers producing the content,” said David Chavern, the head of the News Media Alliance, in a press release that accompanies the study (download the full report here). Chavern will be among the people testifying tomorrow. He will be joined by a long list of people who say their specific businesses or industry sectors are being screwed by Google in all sorts of ways. The head of the review service Yelp!, for instance, claims that Google favors its own companies or services in search, even when competitors offer better products.
Where any of this ends is not at all clear, but given the sour mood toward tech companies, the bipartisanship brewing in Congress, and the wide array of other business interests arrayed against the FAANGs, a regulatory crackdown is almost inevitable. My prediction: If you think Google, YouTube, and the other big players are awful now, just wait until they get to navigate a regulatory system that they will get to help create.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2X0IzF1
via IFTTT
An 85-year-old South Carolina-based outdoor equipment company that stocked up on guns in anticipation of Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 US election has gone bankrupt, according to Bloomberg.
United Sporting Companies filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday after blaming the miscalculation for their financial woes. Speaking in a Delaware courtroom, CEO Bradley P. Johnson explained that the company posted lower-than-expected sales and incurred high costs of carrying inventory after the blunder.
United, which sells an array of outdoor equipment, is seeking protection from creditors while it sorts out more than $270 million of debt secured by liens on its assets, court papers show. The company, whose subsidiaries include Ellett Brothers LLC and Jerry’s Sports Inc., reported Ebitda of $4 million on net sales of $557 million last year — well below its average of $885.3 million in sales from 2012 to 2016. –Bloomberg
Deep price cuts to reduce their bloated inventory didn’t help, according to court documents. The company also lost volume-based discounts and rebates from top vendors as its heavy debt burden put enormous pressure on the company’s balance sheet. Perhaps buying bankrupt competitors AcuSport Corp and outdoor gear gian Gander Mountain Co. didn’t help either.
As Bloomberg notes, United is far from the first firearms-linked company to face the firing squad in recent yeras. Last year, Remington Outdoor Co. filed for bankruptcy after sales declined sharply.
Founded in 1933 as Ellett Brothers, the company had about 321 employees when it filed for bankruptcy. Wellspring Capital Management, Prospect Capital Corp. and Summit Partners together own more than 90% of the equity of SportCo Holdings Inc., the parent company of South Carolina-based United. –Bloomberg
Earlier in the year, United desperately scambled to sell itself, hiring Houlihan Lokey in January in the hopes of attracting a buyer, court papers reveal. While multiple parties expressed interest, the offers were too low to consider.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XIhAvi Tyler Durden
By now, you probably know that YouTube is pure evil. Or maybe just dumber than a box of rocks. Either way, get ready for major political and regulatory action against Google, which has owned the video platform since 2006, and is now the target of a Department of Justice antitrust investigation and a congressional investigation along the same lines. Earlier today in an interview with CNBC, President Donald Trump praised the more-than-$9-billion in fines levied against the internet giant by the European Union since 2017 and declared, “Obviously, there’s something going on in terms of monopoly.”
These days, whether you’re a right-wing free-marketer or a left-wing democratic socialist, whether you’re Tucker Carlson or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), you probably worry more about Big Tech than Islamic terrorism and agree that all or most of the so-called FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) need to be broken up, hemmed in, or regulated as public utilities. Hell, even the leaders of those companies are calling for regulation. A month ago, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to plead with Congress to pass “comprehensive privacy legislation” similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that would cover all online businesses. Ironically—or maybe strategically—Pichai didn’t mention that a year after the GDPR’s implementation, Google’s marketshare had grown.
Last week, in a truly inspired set of self-owns, YouTube managed to piss off conservatives—by apparently demonetizing the videos of right-wing comedian Steven Crowder—and to enrage progressives by not actually banning him for jokes directed at a gay Vox reporter.
When YouTube’s not using its supposedly all-powerful, super-spooky algorithm to recommend videos that will turn you into a pedophile or a marathon runner, it’s turning decent, red-blooded, red-state American boys into alt-right monsters. The theory here is that, in a bid to extend the amount of time viewers stay on the site, YouTube keeps recommending slightly more extreme, provocative videos of the sort you just watched. You go from watching old Milton Friedman clips to Ben Shapiro disquisitions to Stefan Molyneux rants on “race realism” and, well, it was nice knowing you. It goes without saying that viewers are largely unable to exercise any meaningful volition when faced with such modern-day magic. Back in the 1990s, it was supposedly ultra-violent and hyper-sexual cable TV that was programming us into slobbering fools. Today, it’s PewDiePie, Logan Paul, et al.
“Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube,” reads the ominous subtitle to a widely read New York Times about a 26-year-old West Virginia resident who started watching a bunch of alt-right videos and came to identify with that movement of Trump-friendly, quasi-racists, traditionalists, and nativists. Until, that is, he watched yet more YouTube videos and changed his mind:
Nearly four years after Mr. Cain had begun watching right-wing YouTube videos, a new kind of video began appearing in his recommendations.
These videos were made by left-wing creators, but they mimicked the aesthetics of right-wing YouTube, down to the combative titles and the mocking use of words like “triggered” and “snowflake.”…
When Mr. Cain first saw these videos, he dismissed them as left-wing propaganda. But he watched more, and he started to wonder if people like Ms. [Nathalie] Wynn had a point. Her videos persuasively used research and citations to rebut the right-wing talking points he had absorbed. “I just kept watching more and more of that content, sympathizing and empathizing with her and also seeing that, wow, she really knows what she’s talking about,” Mr. Cain said.
Cain is now a critic of the alt-right, but he presumably is still in thrall to YouTube because he “still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.”
This sort of narrative—in which social media is effectively turning its users into pliant, virtually addicted content consumers—is as ubiquitous as it is unconvincing. It follows the tried-and-true template of branding new forms of media (novels, film, radio, comic books, rock music, video games) as inherently toxic, uniquely irresistible and leading to social collapse. The World Health Organization (WHO) has already declared that “gaming disorder” is a type of “behavioral addiction” and it’s only a matter of time before people discussing social media addiction in figurative terms produce laws based on a literal equivalence between opioids and Instagram.
In the immediate moment, though, Google and YouTube’s time in the barrel will probably deal less with questions about social-media addiction and the mind-warping nature of super-secret search algorithms, and more with old-fashioned economic complaints from established interests that want Google to pay them a bigger cut of ad revenues. Tomorrow brings congressional hearings about The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a bill co-sponsored by Reps. David Cicilline (D–R.I.) and Doug Collins (R–Ga.) that would exempt newspapers from antitrust rules so they can collectively bargain with Google and Facebook, the two companies that dominate online advertising (Google accounts for about 37 percent of online ad revenue and Facebook for about 22 percent).
Legacy media companies are saying that there is no way to survive without relying on Google, which is ripping them off by including them in search results and pushing them to post versions of their stories on pages technically controlled by Google. A new study from the News Media Alliance, a nonprofit representing the interests of newspapers, claims that Google is making $4.7 billion a year from Google News, an ad-free aggregation site that displays snippets of articles and links to sites. “The findings clearly point to Google responding to an increase in consumers searching for news, creating and tailoring products that keep users within its ecosystem. This means more money goes back to Google and not the publishers producing the content,” said David Chavern, the head of the News Media Alliance, in a press release that accompanies the study (download the full report here). Chavern will be among the people testifying tomorrow. He will be joined by a long list of people who say their specific businesses or industry sectors are being screwed by Google in all sorts of ways. The head of the review service Yelp!, for instance, claims that Google favors its own companies or services in search, even when competitors offer better products.
Where any of this ends is not at all clear, but given the sour mood toward tech companies, the bipartisanship brewing in Congress, and the wide array of other business interests arrayed against the FAANGs, a regulatory crackdown is almost inevitable. My prediction: If you think Google, YouTube, and the other big players are awful now, just wait until they get to navigate a regulatory system that they will get to help create.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2X0IzF1
via IFTTT
The movement to ban straws is starting to swallow up whole countries. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Monday that his Liberal government would ban plastic straws and other harmful single-use plastics as early as 2021.
“Canadians know first-hand the impacts of plastic pollution, and are tired of seeing their beaches, parks, streets, and shorelines littered with plastic waste,” Trudeau said in a press release. “We owe it to our kids to keep the environment clean and safe for generations to come.”
Few policy specifics were offered Monday. The government’s press release mentions its intention to ban plastic straws, cutlery, and plastic bags, and to work with provincial and territorial governments to develop waste-reducing standards for plastic manufacturers.
Whatever specific action Trudeau’s government does take, we’re assured, “will be grounded in scientific evidence.” But one statistic cited in Monday’s press release is less than sound.
In a bullet-pointed list of “quick facts,” there’s a claim that Canadians throw away close to 57 million plastic straws a day. The same figure popped up in Vancouver, British Columbia’s “Single-Use Item Reduction Strategy,” published in May 2018. The city banned straws the same month.
A footnote in that report explains that this particular straw stat is derived from U.S. recycling company Ecocycle’s estimate of American straw usage, which Ecocycle puts at 500 million straws a day. Assume the same per capita usage among Canadians and adjust for the country’s smaller population, and you get 57 million straws a day.
That seems reasonable on the surface. The trouble is that the underlying 500 million figure was the product of a 2011 phone survey of straw manufacturers conducted by Milo Cress, who was then 9 years old.
Professional estimates of American straw usage vary, but they all put the number lower than 500 million straws a day.
The English-speaking world is particularly bad at straw math. Governments in the U.K. and Australia have relied on inaccurate and unsourced statistics on straw usage to justify bans. One could argue that one bad stat or two doesn’t actually undermine the broader environmental change Trudeau and company are trying to achieve. But other numbers do.
According to a 2015 study, the U.S. is responsible for about 1 percent of annual marine plastic waste; the vast majority of such waste comes from East Asian countries. Canada’s contribution to this admittedly serious problem is smaller still.
Banning plastic straws and plastic bags in the U.S. and particularly Canada will have a negligible effect on the world’s oceans. Efforts to combat localized plastic litter, meanwhile, are best left to local governments, who hopefully can find less coercive means of cleaning up beaches and river banks.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2XDt6rt
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