OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist: lawsuits
nypost.com
nypost.com
The blacklisting process was accomplished first internally at Instagram/Facebook by automated classifiers or filters, which were then submitted to a shared industry database of “hashes,” or unique digital fingerprints.
This database was and is intended to flag and remove content produced by terrorists and related “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” to curtail the spread of terrorism and violent extremism online.
Where can one learn more about this database? Who decides what goes into this database? Is there a governance process? How about incorrectly identified items?
We are headed back into the times of "guilty, until proven innocent" versus how it should be, "innocent until proven guilty". If the scenario was the following: letting 10 criminals go free, or having 1 innocent person imprisoned, I would always choose the latter.
[1] https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
Interesting with the hashes. Seems impossible to detect such "poisoning of the hashes" i wonder if anyone with access could ... Submit a hash of a profile photo of someone, to cause him/hey troubles?
We're not heading back into anything. We love blacklists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_Screening_Database
"The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database is the U.S. government’s primary watch list, and what people usually mean when they refer to the terrorist watch list. It contains about 1 million records. About 5,000 of those records — 0.5 percent — are about Americans."
I’m not sure dictionary definitions provide the right moral compass when it comes to suspending rights.
We should discuss what such an expansive interpretation aims to achieve, and then discuss whether adopting that interpretation achieves those goals.
Overall, I'd roughly guess that 25-50% of the American public should be suspected of terroristic tendencies.
If you're saying those people who stormed the US Capitol building had "terroristic tendencies", well, I think nearly every person does. We all argue, fight, and probably even kill given the right (wrong) circumstances.
What strikes me- as an American who thinks Trump is a sociopath as well as a grifter and who suggested the "terrorist" framing earlier in this thread- what strikes me as an opportunity in the public conversation with and about Jan 6 and Trump that has not been explored in any way is the fact that the vast majority of those who came to the Capital, even those with violent intent, spoke about and believed they were acting with a patriotic duty- exactly the same duty that those of us who looked upon those actions with horror and disgust feel and experience.
I think there is an opportunity for a political actor to speak to the Trump audience and start from that place of patriotism, that place of dury- that is what all "Americans" have in common. It should be possible to tell a story that stays on the path of what is common to all patriots, and in doing so start to repair the broken views of those currently in the Big Lie faithful.
However, no political actor has actually done so. Maybe the time is not right. Maybe the visionary who can craft that story isn't yet with us.
In their absence- there IS good and evil because here there ARE sides. The world that those with violent intent came to the capital to enshrine are evil, and terrorists, from my perspective- the above notwithstanding!
Sometimes politics fails. And you have to take sides.
Best wishes to you.
DHS/CBP put me on some fucked up list and now everytime I re-enter the US I get detained, accused of crimes, tossed in holding cell. Last time it was 16 hours and they involuntarily took me to two hospitals, got a warrant to "internally search me" (anally), and drove me 60 miles to two different hospitals against my will while chained and cuffed while being accused of being a smuggler with no basis whatsoever. Later the hospitals sent me the bill, even though I never consented to anything, and there was no true medical reason for being dragged to the hospitals against my will, and despite DHS/CBP lying and saying they would pay for the hospital bills. I also filed complaints with the board for the medical professionals, and of course was told that a nurse can perform a law enforcement "search" without consent even without a warrant (the warrant was actually not served until after I went through the hospitals) and without even a court order or even being arrested (I wasn't arrested).
Yes that's right, the Arizona nursing board says nurses can act as sworn law enforcement and can search you without even a warrant or probable cause and even if you never consent to any medical care or even being touched, and that they can provide medical care against your consent even if it's not an emergency and without a court order or warrant and without you even having been arrested. DHS has taken profit off of this opinion and now uses nurses to search people on their list without having to get their own hands dirty and minimize their own constitutional limitations.
Let me count a few other occasions. Another time I was told I would never be allowed to re-enter the US; yes that as a US citizen I could not enter the United States. On yet another occasion I was told my passport would be cancelled, even though there's no real legal mechanism for them to do that. You can imagine what it's like to smile and nod your head while being told these wild lies by officers who may even be poorly trained enough to believe this themselves. It's always 4+ hours of detainment to cross a border along with intense attempted interrogation by DHS/HSI detectives. Ah yes, I've been fingerprinted and "booked" by DHS as well, on what basis I don't understand, even without being arrested.
I have never been charged of any crimes, I have no criminal record, and in fact the only thing I did "wrong" was help protect people from actual terrorists.
So yeah, if you want to find out. Jus cross the border, turn around and come back. You'll find out quite agressively.
I would say the banning of recording at the border is something DHS/CBP counts on in order to enable their pattern of abuse. And when they lie in their warrant, it helps them greatly as it's purely your word against theirs.
This story makes my blood boil.
Were you deployed or did you go there on your own? Joining with a militia and fighting in a war zone full of terrorists is the sort of activity that should trip all the red flags. US-backing doesn't necessarily mean the group is without their own controversies and if you weren't deployed how the hell do they actually know what your goals were while you were there?
I get it, your situation sucks ass and you shouldn't be subject to abuse but you're absolutely not a normal case and 'fighting with a foreign militia' is exactly the sort of activity customs is going to want to know the story behind.
not customs, border patrol. I mean, I'm sure what he's carrying would be scrutinized, but that's not the source of this list
Have you ever crossed a US border by land or sea or flown into the US? Customs agents handle ports of entry, border patrol handles the border between ports. Both are under CBP under homeland security but wear different uniforms, different job activities. They mentioned crossings and most citizens not wanting a headache use the legal crossings.
There's a lot to unpack in their post, the situation sucks for them and I'm not defending the treatment they received, I am pointing out that they aren't a normal citizen if they go to high risk areas and fight with foreign militias.
>I would think at this point the security police would already know the "story behind" it
Cross enough times and a citizen with a boring enough life will probably receive some scrutiny over why they cross so much. I dated a foreigner for many years and at some point her country started to get suspicious of me wanting to overstay. The Americans just wanted to know if I was a smuggler moving drugs or cash back, that's it. The country I was going to was not an active warzone, though when I first crossed as I was younger to 'meet friends I met online' this triggered some extra scrutiny.
> Do you think it is making the country safer?
Vetting citizens returning from fighting with foreign combatants probably does fit the exact scenario of making the country safer. There is no way possible for US government to know (nor should they know) what a citizen is doing every second of their life. Having to go through a secondary and receive questioning about what they've been up to in a high-risk area is not unreasonable.
If you have some time I encourage you to read the experience of Ms. Cervantes, a woman "legally" finger raped by border patrol / physicians.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
It's clear to me these lists are as much about extra-judicial punishment as "finding out." I do not think a place exists in our society for these lists that impose against the freedom of citizens to travel without some sort of due process to petition a court for removal and/or some way to "drop off" the list after X years of living as a free peaceful citizen in harmony with others. Law enforcement officers should be tasked with enforcing the law, not with harassing people about things that are non-criminal, like fighting against ISIS (believe it or not there is no law that prevents you from fighting in a foreign militia, and in fact I do not believe any American has ever been charged for fighting with YPG.)
I mean, sure programs like TSA TRIP exists to mitigate this, but in practice no-one outside of TSA readily honors or knows them (and certainly not Equifax, which considering credit scores are widely utilized, would definitely impact their day-to-day life).
That's kinda the whole problem with it
And it's kinda nonsense, isn't the point of the nutty airport security to catch people in a terrorizing act?
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/06/class-action-suit-target...
I’d guess every one of those people is on a domestic terrorism watchlist as “potential terrorists”. They’re all good guys and haven’t done anything illegal, but the feds don’t know that.
And how do these people's preparations help in the event of a civil war?
>And how do these people's preparations help in the event of a civil war?
(scratching my head how they would not)
There are more guns in America than people. 99.99999% of guns will never be used in a crime. An American who buys a car is far more likely to hurt someone with their car than someone who buys a gun is to hurt someone with that gun.
Most gun owners use them to target shoot as a hobby, or hunt deer. Some people also consider them a supplement to locks on their doors as home protection.
I am way more likely to be hurt by a car - you’re right. The presence of cars in an environment puts me at an elevated threat level. When I’m standing waiting for a light I often try to make sure there is a pole between me and traffic.
But with very few exceptions, it’s hard for someone to bring a car into environments where I am not expecting them. Guns, not so much.
If you own a lockpicking set, i believe you when you say it’s for fun and learning - but to pretend owning it does nothing to the risk that you might unlock my front door is just denial.
> I hang out in libertarian circles
> They’re all good guys and haven’t done anything illegal
That said - raising the one single isolated case of a person with a gun helping to stop a mass shooting, while conveniently forgetting the hundreds of such attacks that have occurred in past couple of years is IMO pretty disgusting. If I were making the argument that gun ownership was not a cause for suspicion I'd be giving mass shootings an extremely wide berth.
https://cis.org/Bensman/US-Government-Now-Publishing-Terrori...
British Border Agent Fired for Putting Wife on Terrorist Watch List https://www.wired.com/2011/02/uk-border-fired/
Really? It seems like you meant the former.
If anyone else is interested, here is the actual vote: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
> She "warned her colleagues to be 'careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target'". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Lee#AUMF_opposition
The Radiolab podcast episode is IMO the best way to hear the telling. The link is to their re-release, which has a bit extra at the end IIRC. https://radiolab.org/episodes/60-words-20-years
If Twitter truly cared about their rules and acted with integrity they would've kicked him way sooner, but they didn't because he generated them tons of "growth & engagement" while he was President.
This story is obviously an abuse of the system, but if this stopped natural born citizens who were planning to lock the doors of a busy nightclub and set it on fire it would be doing its job.
But even the system is only partially to blame here. It's really the corrupt employee and lack of oversight that is to blame. The system did allow the corruption to spread to other companies, but even if it was confined to Meta that would still be a lot of damage.
Has it ever? Is there a terrorist watchlist at the doors of nightclubs now? It would also be great if it cured cancer or replaced crumbling infrastructure, but why talk about nonsense?
Are you saying that legitimate dissenters are being illegitimately accused of terrorism? Or that terrorists are legitimate dissenters (despite the fact that terrorism is by definition using violence and not working within the legal framework? Or did you mean to say something else?
Really? Have you seen every single threat being made, either public or private? I don’t believe it.
When I worked at a large social media website, users would scream bloody murder about unfair moderation. But when I asked customer support, they always had good evidence that the user had terrible behavior in private but pretend to be virtuous in public to gather sympathy.
This is an asymmetric information space. The DOJ/FBI won’t release the actual evidence they have which triggered the opening of an investigation. The people who show up at board meetings are humans and had lives before they showed up. They posted on social media. They met with other people. They have political affiliations. I am fairly certain we will find out that these people made legit threats outside of the public forum that earned further investigation.
However, I wonder whether this is organized or organic. Is it an emergent property of population density, or is it determined by culture?
- 1 inhabitant/km2 = witch trials, tribe judgements, - 10 hab/km2 = beginnings of court justice, - 100 hab/km2 = politically-knee-jerk justice, - 1000 hab/km2 = Chinese or Japanese-style justice
Or perhaps it is related to the age of the current country?
If terrorism was being stopped, would you even know it? Said differently, maybe it is working. If it was, what would be the way that you would know that it is working?
Yes, because the feds brag about it nonstop on the rare occasions they actually nab somebody.
Probably a decrease in successful terrorism attempts or an increase in thwarted terrorism attempts (with neither being attributed to something else instead). I don't think there's any value to this question though, since it can be used to justify literally anything. If a policy needs to prove its own value, then it should be constructed in a way that allows its value to be tracked.
Shouting successful secret missions just doesn't seem like something they would be doing as it could lead to the "enemy" learning ways and methods and what not. The only people they have to convince are the Gang of Eight.
Plenty of ways to take credit without revealing sensitive info.
If individual acts of terror are being prevented, but none of the people planning them are put in prison, and are free to walk the streets and try another plot, would you say those laws are effective? I wouldn't.
Maybe on a longer time horizon it won't work as well, but it's already been 20 years since 9/11.
As of 2011, the number was 40.
Is that high? Low? How many is that versus successful terrorist attacks?
They aren't minor plans either - they include carbombings, bombing buildings, targeted assassinations.
There is one where someone was sending money to al-Qaeda in Kashmir. That seems the least serious (as in it wasn't a planned attack on US soil).
Read this and contemplate using the Heritage Foundation as a source of truth in the future. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/limo-crash-ny-fbi-in...
There’s no way the security authorities are going to reveal sources and methods for actual plots.
My beef with the Heritage foundation is they present this as clear cut factual evidence while any thinking person, including federal judges overseeing the cases, is almost compelled to call out the nonsensical nature of the cases.
You’re not going to get any type of accounting for this stuff for 20-30 years when the decision makers are dead or retired and actual information gets declassified.
From 2001 until 2011. Where is the number now? Also those are all public...where are the ones the CIA knows about?
All aspects of security (policing, counter-terrorism, cybersecurity, etc) are all fundamentally impossible to prove how effective measures taken are. Usually the best we can do is use a proxy measure or test pre/post.
The government would never pass up an opportunity for good PR. They openly cheer when they assassinate foreign enemies don't forget, even when they're government officials.
When, instead, you see a school shooter's search history includes "I'm going to shoot up X school" and the FBI claims that they couldn't have foreseen it happening, then it starts to seem as if the results aren't as exceptional as they claim.
This is incorrect. September is a hearing on defendants' motions to dismiss.
Not especially relevant, but of mild interest: this case is with Judge Alsup (of Oracle v Google).
According to OP, Meta is now also a defendant.
She alleged that her account kept getting shadow banned and she couldn't get it resolved so she started stalking Facebook/Insta mods and sleeping with them to get unbanned.
Good stuff... monopolies are bad.
I think the takeaway from both of these stories is that Meta employees are easily bribed and perhaps some more internal controls are needed to prevent abuse of these platform features.
Because their track record says otherwise.
Frankly I think it's a bit naive to imply that big government organizations aren't just as evil and terrible and self serving as big corporate ones. Their error bars of evil overlap a lot.
There’s a big, big loophole that people overlook here. FAANG etc have whole departments of people dedicated to voluntarily turning your data over to the state.
It is important to self-publish and not be a sharecropper for billionaires by donating your content for free to their walled gardens.
>> They claim the bribes were routed from OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix International, through a secret Hong Kong subsidiary into offshore Philippines bank accounts set up by the crooked Meta employees, potentially including at least one unnamed senior executive.
If that's true, how would they know? And if not, why would they think they know it?
kickbacks to big tech employees isn't new or novel, just curious about why the omission of details
Someone ratted them out?
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
Note that "on information and belief" is lawyeresse for "we don't know this is true, we only have suspicion". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 (as well as a lot of the complaint) are so hedged. The claims they're not hedging are more limited: basically "Meta employees were paid to update a database of dangerous individuals and organizations, and Meta shared this database with others (75)" and "OnlyFans' parent company Fenix has a presence in Hong Kong and other countries (78-81)". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 must be true... because the alternative would be devastating to their case /s.
There is very little of substance in the complaint. In all seriousness, I think plaintiffs have read public sentiment against tech companies, and I imagine their strategy here is to throw as much mud as they can, bamboozle some credulous journalists, and hope Meta et al settle to avoid bad PR.
In about 1903, O'Donnell accepted a position in government employment as a deputy to the Pennsylvania state factory inspector.[13] This job placed O'Donnell in crowded Pennsylvania tenements and poorly ventilated factories on a regular basis, and he subsequently contracted tuberculosis as a result.[14] Stricken seriously ill by the disease, in November 1905 O'Donnell left the Northeast for the warmer and drier climate of the Southwest, accompanied by relatives, in an effort to regain his health.[14] Newspaper accounts from December of that year place O'Donnell in the city of El Paso, Texas.[15]"
[--emph added--]
Beatings are unlikely though. It's not something you can do with a datacenter.
Something Must Be Done.
How are people so utterly naive as to think Facebook would not be awash in terrorism, calls for death etc. if it were not censored?
People are rightly upset Facebook is being used to forment ethnic wars in other countries, if you think things are 'bad' now, imagine what FB would be like unfettered?
'Here I am cutting off the heads of XYZ group, please send money!'
All systems will be abused, and the systems to censor them will be abused ... so we have to do our best with all of that.
It's a bit ridiculous all of this is happening, that OnlyFans guy should probably be in jail.
Unless you've never used this phrase or equivalent, you don't get to complain about cancel culture. My generation (well, the one following mine rather) is just applying the advice.
I grind my teeth everytime I hear middle/upper class people complaining at boycotts and 'cancel '. What do you want from them? They can't protest, because of violences against statues and McDonald's, They can't strike without getting teared down by most MSM(and because they need to live and nobody's donating to them anymore, except me and a couple people who remember where they came from), and they don't have representative who look like them and actually did the same job. And always, the patronizing 'haha, they can vote with their wallets'.
Well, now they do, do you want to prevent that too?
Like the resilient adults they should be.
> I grind my teeth everytime I hear middle/upper class people complaining at boycotts and 'cancel '. What do you want from them?
I want them to present their views, and attempt to convince others of the merits of those views.
I don’t want them to use bullying, intimidation, authoritarianism, or violence to force others to adopt (or pretend to adopt) their viewpoint.
> They can't protest, because of violences against statues and McDonald's
Why do you treat “protest” and “riot” as synonyms? They’re not.
> They can't strike without getting teared down by most MSM
So what? You’re not owed agreement from anyone.
If they want their strikes to be supported by others, they first need to convince others that they should be supported.
> I want them to present their views, and attempt to convince others of the merits of those views.
> I don’t want them to use bullying, intimidation, authoritarianism, or violence to force others to adopt (or pretend to adopt) their viewpoint.
Are you really equating "not choosing to buy stuff" and "not choosing to watch/attend stuff" with violence? Listen, I get it - you think you're entitled to a revenue stream, that whatever nonsense you build deserves money. Here's the deal though, the free market is also about the spender getting to choose what they spend money and time on. If you don't like it, too bad - no one owes you agreement nor money just because.
> Are you really equating "not choosing to buy stuff" and "not choosing to watch/attend stuff" with violence?
No, and I’m genuinely confused as to how you arrived at that interpretation of my statement.
> Listen, I get it - you think you're entitled to a revenue stream, that whatever nonsense you build deserves money.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? It has no relation whatsoever to what I wrote.
Well you quoted a bit about boycotts that included a question about alternatives. This type of quoting is often a technique to declare "the text after this before the next quote is a response". So when you then responded with a point about wanting them to make arguments instead, and emphasized it with "not ... violence", you sure seem to have equivocated them. If that wasn't your intent, my bad and I have no idea what you were intending to say.
The second conclusion assumes you made the violence point of course and is basically substitution:
boycotts = violence = not spending money
People are generally entitled to not have violence directed at them.
(becomes)
People are generally entitled to not have not spending money directed at them.
(can simplify as)
People are generally entitled a revenue stream.
By the way, they did convince other they should be supported. Most strikes in my country start with 40 to 60% support (because we actually have political education), and after a day of CNN-like 24h hours news, by billionnaire-owned medias, you see a 10% drop in support. Easy to convince for some more than for others, right?
But anyway.
----------------
>> I grind my teeth everytime I hear middle/upper class people complaining at boycotts and 'cancel '. What do you want from them?
>I want them to present their views, and attempt to convince others of the merits of those views.
>I don’t want them to use bullying, intimidation, authoritarianism, or violence to force others to adopt (or pretend to adopt) their viewpoint.
Yes, so convincing 1 to 5 percent of the population on social media and ask them to boycott a product or a brand is fine then? Exactly my point. Or do you think this is bullying (that would be rich tbh).
Like i said, if you actually said once "vote with your wallet", you don't get to whine about boycotts. I know hundreds of people who boycotted Total (or shell, i was a kid and doens't remember) after one supertanker shipwreck that polluted hundred of miles of coast, were you against this boycott too? Once everybody, including children spend hours cleaning beaches and trying to save birds, once the protests didn't even make national news anymore, and blocking the refinery was met with police force, what do you think they could have done? burn everything? Or boycott one of the dozen companies who who do the same thing anyway, no matter how inefficient that is? What were their options as "resilient adults"?
You see, i know most people complaining about cancel culture agree with boycotting when this doesn't really affect them or their political views. I have uncles who are so hypocritical about it, it mades me laugh to ask them "what should you do" because i love to make them sweat a little.
I want people to think more critically about cause and effect rather than spend all their effort on "raising awareness", which encompasses several behaviors, but the worst of which is spreading exaggerated anger.
> told their generation controlled every vote target,
Boomers control the vote because they're the ones that bother to show up, especially for elections that don't appear on people's social media feed. Seniors are 15x more likely to vote for mayors than those between 18-35 [1]. Fewer than 20% of people know the names of their state legislatures [2]. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of outrage on social media on issues that state legislatures vote for like gerrymandering and now abortion. Rather than research which state representatives are pro-choice, activists would rather yell loudly at the Supreme Court to resign and whine about being disenfranchised when that doesn't work.
> vote with your wallets
Voting with your wallet in this context would be to stop watching Youtube videos. However, they don't want to do that, and instead would rather making exaggerated claims of Youtube supporting ISIS. So social media companies reacted with their half-assed solutions that lead to situations like what is described in the article. Now, you're seeing people making exaggerated claims about Facebook wanting to be censors. I seriously doubt that people actually give a damn about ISIS videos with a few dozen views or the well-being of pornstars. Rather, they really just trying to raise awareness about evil corporations, which is the case with most of the comments here. However, none of this actually contributes to our collective intelligence of how to actually regulate tech or enact anti-trusts. At best, this anger may cause Facebook to do a little more due diligence about adding people to their terrorist watchlist, but the real problem people care about isn't solved.
[1] http://whovotesformayor.org/ [2] https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/12/14/americans-dont-understand-sta...
Lizard brain just knows that it likes it when the number in the top right goes up. Lizard brain knows that vapid comments and over the top calls to action make it go up faster.
You get what you incentivize.
And voting with your wallet is boycotting. If you boycott, you have to explain to the company why. I'm boycotting Lactalys and Nestle dairy products since 20 years, are you against that too? Or is only the demonstrative boycotts with social media reach you're agaisnt? And in this case, isn't it disingenuous? "I'm pro boycott only if the company doesn't know why you're boycotting them".
There is no justification imho. Like i said, if you ever use the phrase "you should vote with your wallet" or similar, you don't get to whine about boycotts and cacnel culture, this state is your own doing.
As there should be - it’s one of the most abhorrent things that legislatures of all stripes have attempted, and those responsible should be held accountable. They have removed any ability to do so via electoral means, and should probably be reasonably happy that people complain on social media instead of something more physical.
1. https://www.propublica.org/article/sheryl-sandberg-and-top-f...
If Facebook is shoving things in my face that I do not like, then I stop using Facebook. I haven't logged-in for over two years because of that.
If a company I buy products from is spending that money on things I vehemently disapprove of, then I am well within my rights to stop being their customer.
This isn't "cancel culture", this is me choosing how I spend my time and money. What I find onerous are all the people telling me that I'm a bad person for exercising these liberties.
I guess they probably didn't want to use the term "blacklist" but I'm not sure what the correct term should now be.
Watchlist evokes the meaning "this person is being watched by [authorities]"
Edit: The BBC article (linked here in comments) did in fact use the term "blacklist". GIFCT calls it a "hash-sharing database". The use of "terror watchlist" by NY Post seems to be more clickbait rather than accuracy driven. (Not that this issue isn't pretty terrible).
It's highly likely that corporations and high networth individuals have realized the power of astroturfing to skew public opinions, especially when most of those audiences do not read past the sensationalized titles.
Listen, I don't like censorship as much as the next guy. But in the real world, lists and platforms without some sort of moderation become of cesspool of the worst that society has to offer.
So long as there is only one chokepoint for widespread automated censorship, the state will illegally censor things it doesn't like.
There are bad people who do bad things, and to say let’s just ignore this because things I don’t want to happen are is ignoring the realities and difficulties of the world. It’s not black and white, and bad things will be done in the name of action.
If ISIS propaganda can be decentralized and widely available, that means western propaganda (as well as western hard facts and reporting) are decentralized and widely available as well.
Unless you think that all ideologies are equally desirable to end users, this results in a net win for "your side".
People will find what suits them in the moment and go with that. We know that ISIS used the internet incredibly well to recruit with their propaganda, and it was exactly through things like YouTube that they build a large and international audience. So it’s not theory, it’s already happened. You can rely on just drowning out ideas, because the internet allows amplification for bad ideas to get more exposure than they naturally would otherwise.
There’s a difference between broadcasting and 1-1 communication. Phone calls and mail can already be monitored, btw.
>and to say let’s just ignore this because things I don’t want to happen are is ignoring the realities and difficulties of the world.
Right. Better then to make it so we can't ever hear, record, or react to the realities of a difficult world. Terrorists stop being terrorists when they can't talk to each other on your platform.
SESTA and FOSTA writ large. I strongly disagree.
And presumably you don't pay the bribes directly - you hire a 'reputation management consultant' who takes care of all the dirty work. Then if the news comes out, you can claim you thought they were improving your reputation by sponsoring orphanages or something.
False accusations, possibly also made-up charges.
We can't expect our corporate overlords to behave ethically, now even expecting them to behave legally is too much to ask, I guess
Also, if you're not getting 'engagement' it's 99.999% chance that something other than 'bribery' is happening.
Shenanigans are common, but this specific kind is not very common. I'm doubtful people at META are going in on some schemes like this.
How could anyone know that? No government cares to investigate this sort of thing, and those individuals who could become aware would mostly be subject to NDA.
Only those who work in the right positions within Meta or one of these other horrible companies would have a good view into this, and they have no incentive to set things right.
2018 was the year of the SESTA/FOSTA law, which was ruinous to many sex workers. The sudden increase in adult entertainers being banned by Instagram and others is correct, but can entirely be explained by SESTA/FOSTA. You can read about it on Hacker News – here's a link to a Hacker News search about it[2]. The top result has 715 points, linking to an Electronic Freedom Frontier column about it, which begins: "The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users."
The lawsuit doesn't mention SESTA/FOSTA. It includes no evidence that OnlyFans or MyFreeCams users weren't affected by the SESTA/FOSTA crackdown, and I'm pretty sure they were. A friend of mine is successful on OnlyFans, and if I recall correctly her Instagram was banned and restated at least once. It's a standard occupational hazard for online adult entertainers.
The lawsuit only speculates that terrorist watchlists were used, just noting that they'd have been "ideal" for this: "One or more [Dangerous Individual and Organization] lists, combined with the GIFCT Shared Hash Database and URL sharing program, would have served as the ideal training data for a classifier/filtering tool to create this blacklisting effect, particularly in 2018 and 2019."
The talk of bribery is entirely speculative. After noting that OnlyFans has a Hong Kong office, and "The law of Hong Kong makes it very difficult to obtain discovery for a proceeding in a foreign court", they speculate "Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments."
I don't read a lot of lawsuits so I don't know what's normal, but this all seems really off to me. Maybe the lawsuit only exists to cause bad press, so journalists can write pageview-harvesting lines like "OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist" and "OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist", and then append "lawsuits" or "according to a group of explosive lawsuits".
[1] https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Sounds like evil to me
I call this "next level" evil.
Regular evil is, where I live, a small developer (housing) went bankrupt and wasted life savings of hundreds of people. They did a lot of absolutely mind boggling stupid stuff and they knew they are running out of cash and still accepted payments from more people. Given history of these cases here, they are unlikely to ever spend even a day in jail and the most it ever gets is couple of mentions in local news.
If you want a proper "Facebook is evil" point, there's always the Rohingya genocide[1] -- "Facebook has admitted that it played a role in inciting violence during the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar"
[1] https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/r...
Then someone bribed Meta…
> The GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a “hash” is shared across all its members
In effect, that means a bikini pic wrongly flagged as jihadist propaganda on Instagram can also be quickly censored on Twitter or YouTube, all without the poster or public knowing that it was placed on the list — much less how or why
Laws are made and signed by the ruling class (not saying all laws are bad, we need them), and they (hopefully) reflect which values the people wants their justice system to protect.
Order can be interpreted in two ways; keeping society stable, but also keeping the order (the status quo) of the social classes as they are.
Every time I post it people hate the idea "it's a private service you can't tell them what to do".
And the alternative is what exactly?
(And yes, I know there are some details to work out, what is "large", what about Spam, what about offtopic messages. But those are details, my post is about the main idea of banning someone. Hate speech and harassment are already illegal.)
Should your private club be able to expel neo-Nazis? Absolutely.
Should the telephone company be allowed to disconnect neo-Nazis? That's more iffy. What if they are a monopoly? What if there is an oligopoly, and all the oligopoly firms make the same decision? Neo-Nazis are terrible people, but if we set the precedent that one is allowed to deny them telephone services, will less obviously terrible groups be next?
Maybe we should also let the telephone company disconnect the Islamist violent jihad sympathisers, they are obviously terrible people too. But what happens when some Islamophobe starts stretching the definition of "Islamist violent jihad sympathiser" so that Muslims who have zero sympathy for that get labelled with it anyway? (Yes, the classic "slippery slope argument" – but some slopes really are slippery.)
Some websites, such as "Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents", are like a private club. But facebook.com, google.com, etc, they are like the telephone company, not like a private club. Different rules should apply to different kinds of websites.
At what point did they become utilities? How do we define such?
Obviously, a website with a few hundred or few thousand regular users is more like a private club. A website with tens or hundreds of millions of users is more like the telephone company.
There is no clearcut boundary, but there doesn't need to be. Competition regulators frequently impose limits on market-dominant firms which they don't impose on small players – yet there is no clearcut boundary between a market-dominant firm and a small player. In practice, many individual cases will be obvious, and in the non-obvious cases, all we need is someone with the authority to make a decision–and if someone else thinks they've made the wrong call, there are the usual judicial and political processes to address that.
This information sharing should be investigated as a potential breach of competition law. For example, are Snap or TikTok disadvantaged because Facebook, Microsoft and Google are sharing information [1]?
While I think it's ridiculous entities like Meta have taken it up on themselves to have their own "watch lists", in this instant I'd say absolutely not. Indeed I would argue one of the significant reasons Tik Tok is continuing to explode in popularity is they aren't participating in the overt censorship going on in the rest of big tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_on_TikTok#Political...
In this case this isn't only a violation of the users' freedom of expression - it is also a clear anti-trust violation as they are abusing their monopoly position for illegal anti-competitive tactics.
>it is also a clear anti-trust violation as they are abusing their monopoly position for illegal anti-competitive tactics.
It doesn't look anticompetitive to me considering you can ask to join the group.
The reality of the world is that social media is a completely separate medium from social media. A monopoly on social media is not relevant to the ability to create your own URL.
Exactly, it demonstrates once again that digital pimps are just like the regular pimps. But hey "it's just an app"...
Absolutely evil.
Reminder that the suit alleges, and does not prove that OnlyFans did this. Wait until the result of the suit to throw down criticism of the system.