Twitter Exec Defends Restoring Account That Shared Child Sex Abuse Material

Matt Novak

Forbes Magazine

Originally published 9 AUG 23

Executives at X, the company formerly known as Twitter, testified in front of an Australian Parliament hearing late Wednesday, and defended the restoration of an X account after it shared child sexual abuse material in late July. The incident attracted widespread attention because X owner Elon Musk personally intervened to reinstate the account after a violation that would normally result in a permanent ban from the social media platform.

Nick Pickles, the head of global government affairs at X, was asked about the incident by an Australian senator late Wednesday ET, early Thursday Australian local time, after Pickles first suggested there was a zero tolerance policy for child sex abuse material before seeming to contradict himself. Pickles said the offending account in question may have been sharing the content “out of outrage.”

“One of the challenges we see is, for example, people sharing this content out of outrage because they want to raise awareness of an issue and see something in the media,” Pickles testified, according to an audio livestream.

“So if there are circumstances where someone shares content but, under review, we decide the appropriate remediation is to remove the content but not the user,” Pickles continued.

There’s nothing in the X terms of service that says it’s okay to share child sexual abuse material if a user is doing it because they’re outraged over the images or looking to “raise awareness.” It’s generally understood that sharing child sex abuse materials, regardless of intent, is not only a federal crime in the U.S. and Australia, but re-victimizes the child.

The information is here.

The article highlights how this decision contradicts ethical principles and moral standards, as sharing such harmful content not only violates the law but also goes against the norms of safeguarding vulnerable individuals, especially children, from harm. Twitter's move to restore the account in question raises concerns about their commitment to combatting online exploitation and maintaining a safe platform for users.

By reinstating an account associated with child sexual abuse material, Twitter appears to have disregarded the severity of the content and its implications. This decision not only undermines trust in the platform but also reflects poorly on the company's dedication to maintaining a responsible and accountable online environment. Critics argue that Twitter's actions in this case highlight a lack of proper content moderation and an insufficient understanding of the gravity of such unethical behavior.

The article sheds light on the potential consequences of platforms not taking immediate and decisive action against users who engage in illegal and immoral activities. This situation serves as a reminder of the broader challenges social media platforms face in balancing issues of free expression with the responsibility to prevent harm and protect users, particularly those who are most vulnerable.

This article points out the company's total and complete failure to uphold ethical and moral standards.

‘What if Yale finds out?’

William Wan

The Washington Post

Originally posted November 11, 2022

Suicidal students are pressured to withdraw from Yale, then have to apply to get back into the university

Here are two excerpt:

‘Getting rid of me’

Five years before the pandemic derailed so many college students’ lives, a 20-year-old math major named Luchang Wang posted this message on Facebook:

“Dear Yale, I loved being here. I only wish I could’ve had some time. I needed time to work things out and to wait for new medication to kick in, but I couldn’t do it in school, and I couldn’t bear the thought of having to leave for a full year, or of leaving and never being readmitted. Love, Luchang.”

Wang had withdrawn from Yale once before and feared that under Yale’s policies, a second readmission could be denied.

Instead, she flew to San Francisco, and, according to authorities, climbed over the railing at the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped to her death.

Her 2015 suicide sparked demands for change at Yale. Administrators convened a committee to evaluate readmission policies, but critics said the reforms they adopted were minor.

They renamed the process “reinstatement” instead of “readmission,” eliminated a $50 reapplication fee and gave students a few more days at the beginning of each semester to take a leave of absence without having to reapply.

Students who withdrew still needed to write an essay, secure letters of recommendation, interview with Yale officials and prove their academic worth by taking two courses at another four-year university. Those who left for mental health reasons also had to demonstrate to Yale that they’d addressed their problems.

In April — nearly 10 months after S. had been pressured to withdraw — Yale officials announced another round of changes to the reinstatement process. 

They eliminated the requirement that students pass two courses at another university and got rid of a mandatory interview with the reinstatement committee.

The reforms have not satisfied student activists at Yale, where the mental health problems playing out on many American campuses has been especially prominent.

(cut)

In recent years, Yale has also faced an “explosion” in demand for mental health counseling, university officials said. Last year, roughly 5,000 Yale students sought treatment — a 90 percent increase compared with 2015.

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Hoffman, the director of Yale Mental Health and Counseling. Roughly 34 percent of the 14,500 students at 

Yale seek mental health help from college counselors, compared with a national average of 11 percent at other universities.

Meeting that need has been challenging, even at a school with a $41.4 billion endowment.

Bluebelle Carroll, 20, a Yale sophomore who sought help in September 2021, said she waited six months to be assigned a therapist. She secured her first appointment only after emailing the counseling staff repeatedly.

“The appointment was 20 minutes long,” she said, “and we spent the last five minutes figuring out when he could see me again.”

Because of staffing constraints, students are often asked to choose between weekly therapy that lasts 30 minutes or 45-minute sessions every two weeks.

The info is here.

Gab users are responding to the Doug Mastriano controversy by calling for antisemitic violence

Eric Hananoki

MediaMatters.org

Originally posted 1 AUG 22

Following criticism of Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano paying Gab for campaign help, users of the far-right platform are responding by posting antisemitic death threats and calls for violence against Jewish people. Those posts included such hate speech as “exterminate all jews,” “WHERE IS ADOLPH WHEN HE IS NEEDED,” and, “Dear Lord, SMITE JOSH SHAPIRO, that weasel, lying Jew.”

Gab caters to far-right extremists, including people who have been banned from other social media platforms. Many of its users are antisemites and neo-Nazis who use the site to express their hatred toward Jewish people. Gab CEO Andrew Torba is a virulent antisemite who this year reposted praise of Gab as a place to get “differing opinions” on the Holocaust. 

Gab’s extremist history is well-known, especially to people in Pennsylvania. In 2018, a Gab user posted antisemitic and violent remarks on the site before he allegedly killed 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. 

Still, Mastriano said in a campaign filing that he paid $5,000 to Gab for “consulting” services on April 28. Shortly afterward, he did a video interview with Torba in which he praised the Gab founder for “giving us a platform for free speech” and said, “Thank God for what you’ve done.” Mastriano also made clear he followed Torba, telling him at one point that he “liked that one meme” the Gab CEO shared. 

On July 8, Media Matters unearthed Mastriano’s campaign expenditure. Shortly afterward, HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias reported that the payment seemed to be for new followers, as “every new account currently being created on Gab automatically follows Mastriano.” (Torba denied this.) 

Pittsburgh’s WESA reported on July 13 that a Gab post by Mastriano "on July 9 — a criticism of Democratic economic policies — received 157 comments. At least two dozen of those responses — the most common response by far — were antisemitic insults about state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate in the race for governor. Shapiro is Jewish.” 

The info is here.

Curator's Note: Sorry for this very Pennsylvania specific article.  This politician cannot hold any office, let alone the Governor's office of my beloved Commonwealth.  We need to vote like our rights depend on it, because they do.

Mastriano is pictured in Washington DC (on the right) on January 6.

U.S. judge tosses $4.5 B deal shielding Sacklers from opioid lawsuits

Brendan Pierson & Mike Spector, Maria Chutchian

Reuters

Originally posted 16 DEC 21

A federal judge overturned a roughly $4.5 billion settlement that legally shielded members of the Sackler family who stand accused of helping fuel the U.S. opioid epidemic, a decision that threatened to upend the bankruptcy reorganization of their company, OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said in a written opinion on Thursday the New York bankruptcy court that approved the settlement did not have authority to grant the Sacklers the legal protection from future opioid litigation that formed the linchpin of Purdue’s reorganization.

Purdue said it would appeal the decision.

"While the district court decision does not affect Purdue’s rock-solid operational stability or its ability to produce its many medications safely and effectively, it will delay, and perhaps end, the ability of creditors, communities, and individuals to receive billions in value to abate the opioid crisis," Purdue Chairman Steve Miller said in a statement.

The Sacklers had insisted on the legal shields, known as nondebtor releases because they protect parties that have not filed for bankruptcy themselves, in exchange for contributing $4.5 billion toward resolving widespread opioid litigation.

The Sacklers threatened to walk away from the settlement absent the guaranteed legal protections.

Representatives for the Sacklers did not immediately respond to a request for comment late on Thursday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement he was pleased with the ruling.

"The bankruptcy court did not have the authority to deprive victims of the opioid crisis of their right to sue the Sackler family," Garland said.

The info is here.

Note: If you have not watched Dopesick on Hulu, please do.  Excellent portrayal of the level of harm and psychopathology with members of this family.

Surprise: 56% of US Catholics Favor Legalized Abortion

Dalia Fahmy

Pew Research Center

Originally posted 20 Oct 20

Here are two excerpts:

1. More than half of U.S. Catholics (56%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while roughly four-in-ten (42%) said it should be illegal in all or most cases, according to the 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Although most Catholics generally approve of legalized abortion, the vast majority favor at least some restrictions. For example, while roughly one-third of Catholics (35%) said abortion should be legal in most cases, only around one-fifth (21%) said it should be legal in all cases. By the same token, 28% of Catholics said abortion should be illegal in most cases, while half as many (14%) said it should be illegal in all cases.

Compared with other Christian groups analyzed in the data, Catholics were about as likely as White Protestants who are not evangelical (60%) and Black Protestants (64%) to support legal abortion, and much more likely than White evangelical Protestants (20%) to do so. Among Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – those who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – the vast majority (83%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

(cut)

6. Even though most Catholics said abortion should generally be legal, a majority also said abortion is morally wrong. In fact, the share who said that abortion is morally wrong (57%), according to data from a 2017 survey, and the share who said it should be legal (56%) are almost identical. Among adults in other religious groups, there was a wide range of opinions on this question: Almost two-thirds of Protestants (64%) said abortion is morally wrong, including 77% of those who identify with evangelical Protestant denominations. Among the religiously unaffiliated, the vast majority said abortion is morally acceptable (34%) or not a moral issue (42%).

The info is here.

Trump lied about science

H. Holden Thorp
Science
Originally published 11 Sept 20

When President Donald Trump began talking to the public about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in February and March, scientists were stunned at his seeming lack of understanding of the threat. We assumed that he either refused to listen to the White House briefings that must have been occurring or that he was being deliberately sheltered from information to create plausible deniability for federal inaction. Now, because famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward recorded him, we can hear Trump’s own voice saying that he understood precisely that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was deadly and spread through the air. As he was playing down the virus to the public, Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people. These lies demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States.

Over the years, this page has commented on the scientific foibles of U.S. presidents. Inadequate action on climate change and environmental degradation during both Republican and Democratic administrations have been criticized frequently. Editorials have bemoaned endorsements by presidents on teaching intelligent design, creationism, and other antiscience in public schools. These matters are still important. But now, a U.S. president has deliberately lied about science in a way that was imminently dangerous to human health and directly led to widespread deaths of Americans.

This may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy.

In an interview with Woodward on 7 February 2020, Trump said he knew that COVID-19 was more lethal than the flu and that it spread through the air. “This is deadly stuff,” he said. But on 9 March, he tweeted that the “common flu” was worse than COVID-19, while economic advisor Larry Kudlow and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway assured the public that the virus was contained. On 19 March, Trump told Woodward that he did not want to level with the American people about the danger of the virus. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said, “I still like playing it down.” Playing it down meant lying about the fact that he knew the country was in grave danger.

The info is here.

Record-Low 54% in U.S. Say Death Penalty Morally Acceptable

Megan Brenan
gallup.com
Originally posted 23 June 20

A record-low 54% of Americans consider the death penalty to be morally acceptable, marking a six-percentage-point decrease since last year. This finding, from Gallup's May 1-13 Values and Beliefs poll, is in line with polling last fall that showed decreased public support for the death penalty and a record-high preference for life imprisonment over the death penalty as a better punishment for murder.

Gallup has measured Americans' beliefs about the moral acceptability of the death penalty and numerous other social issues each May since 2001.

This year, 40% of U.S. adults think the death penalty is morally wrong, the highest in Gallup's 20-year trend. The high point in the public's belief that the death penalty is morally acceptable, 71%, was in 2006. That year and again in 2007, it topped the list of issues rated for moral acceptability.

The latest decrease in the public's tolerance for the death penalty is largely owed to political liberals and moderates. While two-thirds of conservatives still consider it to be morally acceptable, moderates (56%) and liberals (37%) are at their lowest levels since 2001.

The info is here.

And, oddly enough, smoking marijuana is more morally acceptable (by a small percent) than gay or lesbian relationships.

Trump's Claims Are Dangerous: COVID-19 & Hydroxychloroquine

Andre Picard
Globe and Mail
Originally published 9 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

The principal argument the President has used in support of hydroxychloroquine is the rhetorical statement: “What do we have to lose?” (He repeated that phrase five times at his Saturday media briefing.) “I’m not a doctor but I have common sense,” Mr. Trump added.

“Common sense” is not evidence. And “what have we got to lose?” is certainly no way to practise medicine – or policy-making for that matter.

Physicians in China started using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients early in the pandemic. There was certainly some logic to this move. The drug has antiviral properties and showed some promise in vitro but that doesn’t mean it will work in vivo.

It remains a desperation drug, something to try when the rest of the very limited armamentarium has been exhausted.

The evidence of benefit in patients is mostly anecdotal, based on highly publicized but scientifically weak studies. Controversial microbiologist Didier Raoult has made wild claims about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine but his study, published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, is little more than anecdotal.

Similarly, Vladimir Zelenko, a small-town doctor in New York State, has gained internet fame promoting a cocktail of three drugs – hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulphate. There is no real evidence for claims that he has cured hundreds of cases of COVID-19, but that hasn’t stopped Mr. Trump from promoting the regimen.

There needs to be proper studies done, with control groups – meaning one group gets the drug(s) and the other does not, and the outcomes are compared. Like it or not, that takes time.

Impatience is not an excuse to make unsubstantiated claims.

The info is here.

French Executives Found Responsible for 35 Employees' Deaths by Suicide

Katie Way

vice.com

Originally posted 20 Dec 19

Today, in a landmark case for worker’s rights and workplace accountability, three former executives of telecommunication company Orange (formerly known as France Télécom) were charged with “collective moral harassment” after creating a work environment which was found to have directly contributed to the death by suicide of 35 employees. This included, according to NPR , 19 employees who died by suicide between 2008 and 2009, many of whom “left notes blaming the company or who killed themselves at work.”

Why would a company lead a terror campaign against its own workers? Money, of course: The plan was enacted as part of a push to get rid of 22,000 employees in order to counterbalance $50 million in debt incurred after the company privatized—it was formerly a piece of the French government’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, meaning its employees were granted special protection as civil servants that prevented their higher-ups from firing them. According to the New York Times, the executives attempted to solve this dilemma by creating an “atmosphere of fear” and purposefully stoked “severe anxiety” in order to drive workers to quit. Former CEO Didier Lombard, sentenced to four months in jail and a $16,000 fine, reportedly called the strategies part of a plan to get rid of unwanted employees “either through the window or through the door.” Way to say the quiet part loud, Monsieur!

The info is here.

Are free will believers nicer people? (Four studies suggest not)

Damien Crone and Neil Levy
Preprint
Created January 10, 2018

Abstract

Free will is widely considered a foundational component of Western moral and legal codes, and yet current conceptions of free will are widely thought to fit uncomfortably with much research in psychology and neuroscience. Recent research investigating the consequences of laypeople’s free will beliefs (FWBs) for everyday moral behavior suggest that stronger FWBs are associated with various desirable moral characteristics (e.g., greater helpfulness, less dishonesty). These findings have sparked concern regarding the potential for moral degeneration throughout society as science promotes a view of human behavior that is widely perceived to undermine the notion of free will. We report four studies (combined N =921) originally concerned with possible mediators and/or moderators of the abovementioned associations. Unexpectedly, we found no association between FWBs and moral behavior. Our findings suggest that the FWB – moral behavior association (and accompanying concerns regarding decreases in FWBs causing moral degeneration) may be overstated.

The research is here.

Facebook Woes: Data Breach, Securities Fraud, or Something Else?

Matt Levine
Bloomberg.com
Originally posted March 21, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

But the result is always "securities fraud," whatever the nature of the underlying input. An undisclosed data breach is securities fraud, but an undisclosed sexual-harassment problem or chicken-mispricing conspiracy will get you to the same place. There is an important practical benefit to a legal regime that works like this: It makes it easy to punish bad behavior, at least by public companies, because every sort of bad behavior is also securities fraud. You don't have to prove that the underlying chicken-mispricing conspiracy was illegal, or that the data breach was due to bad security procedures. All you have to prove is that it happened, and it wasn't disclosed, and the stock went down when it was. The evaluation of the badness is in a sense outsourced to the market: We know that the behavior was illegal, not because there was a clear law against it, but because the stock went down. Securities law is an all-purpose tool for punishing corporate badness, a one-size-fits-all approach that makes all badness commensurable using the metric of stock price. It has a certain efficiency.

On the other hand it sometimes makes me a little uneasy that so much of our law ends up working this way. "In a world of dysfunctional government and pervasive financial capitalism," I once wrote, "more and more of our politics is contested in the form of securities regulation." And: "Our government's duty to its citizens is mediated by their ownership of our public companies." When you punish bad stuff because it is bad for shareholders, you are making a certain judgment about what sort of stuff is bad and who is entitled to be protected from it.

Anyway Facebook Inc. wants to make it very clear that it did not suffer a data breach. When a researcher got data about millions of Facebook users without those users' explicit permission, and when the researcher turned that data over to Cambridge Analytica for political targeting in violation of Facebook's terms, none of that was a data breach. Facebook wasn't hacked. What happened was somewhere between a contractual violation and ... you know ... just how Facebook works? There is some splitting of hairs over this, and you can understand why -- consider that SEC guidance about when companies have to disclose data breaches -- but in another sense it just doesn't matter. You don't need to know whether the thing was a "data breach" to know how bad it was. You can just look at the stock price. The stock went down...

The article is here.