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Facebook's oversight board's first judgments overturn four moderation decisions

Daniel Cooper
engadget
Thu, 28 Jan 2021 14:47 UTC
facebook oversight board
It overturned three decisions related to hate speech and one on nudity.

Facebook's Oversight Board has issued its first five judgments on cases it selected to rule upon on December 1st. The topics cover hate speech, misinformation around COVID-19, and the right of uses to post non-sexual images of breasts without falling foul of moderation. The board has, in its initial findings, overturned four of Facebook's moderation decisions, upheld one, and issued nine policy recommendations.

The board overturned four decisions where Facebook had taken down a post for contravening its policies. That included case 2020-002-FB-UA, where a statement made by a Myanmar-based user asking about a lack of outrage about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims was taken down. Moderators said that the post contained language that had been interpreted as contravening the site's policies on hate speech. The board, however, said that taken in context, while "pejorative or offensive," did not "advocate hatred" or otherwise cause a direct incitement to violence.

Comment: See also:

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Magnify

Suspicious package disrupts AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine production in Wales

Nicola Bryan
BBC
Thu, 28 Jan 2021 16:15 UTC
vaccine suspicious
© Mark Evans
The Army sent a bomb disposal unit to Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine producer Wockhardt's unit
Production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine has resumed at a plant after it was suspended when a suspicious package was received.

The Wockhardt UK plant on Wrexham Industrial Estate was evacuated and the Army sent a bomb disposal unit.

Police said the package had been made safe and its contents would be "taken away for analysis".

Comment: Is it paranoia or is there something else going on? Fire breaks out at world's biggest vaccine maker, India's Serum Institute

See also: The Inanity of RNA Vaccines For COVID-19

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Cow

PETA declares meat-eaters 'human supremacists', Twitter cringes & bombs it with mockery


RT
Thu, 28 Jan 2021 09:19 UTC
PETA meat is murder
© REUTERS / Mike Blake
The animal rights group PETA, famous for its shock-tactics publicity stunts, has implied that all non-vegans have something Klanish in them, denouncing meat-eaters as "human supremacists." It certainly caught attention.

"Eating animals is speciesist," People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said on its Twitter account on Wednesday, adding that "Speciesism is the human-supremacist belief that one species is more important than another."

If the US-based advocacy was angling for some hype, the proclamation certainly worked. PETA's name soon trended on Twitter, as dozens of people rushed to describe themselves as proudly speciesist and shared images showing their favored way of consuming animal flesh.

Comment: As much as they try, PETA simply can't win. Trying to make an extremist position mainstream by publicizing the most extremist of those extremist positions is a truly losing strategy.

See also:

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Headphones

Video game retailer GameStop stock doubles again with no let-up in amateur interest - UPDATES: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets outright, RobinHood bans buying more stock


Reuters
Wed, 27 Jan 2021 12:00 UTC
gamestop
© REUTERS/Jim Young/File Photo
A sign is seen outside a GameStop store in Niles, Illinois, U.S. May 23, 2016.
Shares of videogame retailer GameStop Corp surged another 130% on Wednesday in pre-market trading as amateur investors continued to pile into the stock that has skyrocketed nearly 700% over the past two weeks.

The share spikes in GameStop and others including BlackBerry Ltd, headphone maker Koss Corp and Nokia Oyj, have sent short-sellers scrambling to cover losing bets, while raising questions about potential regulatory clampdowns.

The top securities regulator in Massachusetts thinks trading in GameStop stock, which has jumped to $148 a share from $19.95 since Jan. 12, suggests there is something "systemically wrong" with the options trading surrounding the stock, Barron's reported on Tuesday.

Comment: While it's kind of funny that a Reddit thread could be affecting the market in such a dramatic way, investing in video games would seem to be a rather safe bet in the age of lockdowns.

UPDATE: Here's Saagar Enjeti of The Hill explaining the larger story here:

Wall Street Elites DESTROYED, Beaten By Redditors At Their Own RIGGED Game:



UPDATE: It seems the Wall Street elites are not happy and are attempting to take down the Reddit r/WallStreetBets community in an attempt to fight back. From CNet:
Reddit's WallStreetBets is back, taking on GameStop stock after intentional lockdown
Ian Sherr Jan. 28, 2021 12:40 a.m.

For the past week, Reddit's r/WallStreetBets community has been the center of an epic war between large Wall Street investors and small-scale social media betters. On Wednesday evening, the community reeled from seeing the subreddit locked and hidden, only to be made public again about an hour later. Meanwhile, chat app Discord has banned WallStreetBets outright.

Around the same time, spooked investors appeared to dump GameStop and AMC shares the community had been buying up to take on people betting against the company's futures.

Then, as suddenly as everything began, the subreddit came back, a new Discord community was formed, and others bought in to the stocks, sending AMC and GameStop prices back up.

OK.

If all this is confusing, don't feel bad. These fast and dramatic moves are happening amid one of the most dramatic weeks on Wall Street in years. At stake are millions of dollars that small-time investors working together on social media have made while taking on Wall Street investors who bet GameStop and AMC stock would plummet. Instead, as the two company's stocks have soared, the Wall Street investors have reportedly hemorrhaged billions of dollars.

As the drama unfolded from the Discord ban and the Reddit community going on lockdown, GameStop shares fell 32% in after-hours trading late Wednesday, to $218.32 per share, down from $347.51 at their close. During the day, they'd more than doubled. AMC shares also fell, dropping more than 40%, to $11.90 per share, after closing at $19.90. That stock had risen more than 301% during the day.

Both stocks have recovered somewhat, and the r/WallStreetBets community is back. If you'd taken an hour and a half to watch Pixar's new movie, Soul, you'd have missed it.

Though GameStop shares have been jumping in recent days, analysts and experts say they're doing so because of quirks in the market and not because of actual increased value for the struggling video game retailer. The same is true for the movie theater chain AMC, which had warned it was near bankruptcy late last year.

All this wasn't the only bad news for the WallStreetBets community. Its worst community members, who repeatedly broke Discord's rules, caused the group to be banned from the platform, the chat app company said in a statement. "Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings," Discord said. It added that the ban had nothing to do with any talk of finances or stock that happened among WallStreetBets users.


Yeah, right! It just so happens that now, coinciding exactly with what's happening on the stock market, the hateful content has suddenly become unacceptable. No one in their right mind would believe that for a second!


Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla who's helped to drive attention to the GameStop stock madness, tweeted his disappointment with Discord Wednesday.

UPDATE: The trading app Robinhood has banned users from buying GameStop, AMC, Blackberry and Nokia stock, citing "market volatility." Users are rightfully infuriated (more than half of Robinhood users have GameStop stock), with many accusing it of blatant market manipulation. They received over 100,000 1-star reviews in one hour on the app star, and a class-action lawsuit has already been filed in New York. House Financial Services allegedly is getting flooded with calls about the issue.




There is some chatter about shady dealings between Citadel and Robinhood. And calls to Robinhood from the White House and Sequoia Capital:


Here's Tucker Carlson's take:


Wokal Distance on Twitter has a useful summary and analysis here.

UPDATE: RobinHood is selling off people's GME shares without their permission.


The red pills are flying...


UPDATE: Wallstreetbets is back up on Discord after a brief ban. From Bloomberg:
WallStreetBets, the investment group famous for fueling rallies at GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., is back on Discord's service after getting banned for allowing hate speech.

The group is now up and running on a new server -- a digital room where people can gather to chat -- according to Discord, a communications platform that's popular among gamers.

Discord said Wednesday that it had barred the group for not doing enough to stem hateful speech. The company cited multiple violations of its community guidelines and said it had issued warnings to the administrator of its server. The move wasn't tied to the group's efforts to promote stocks such as GameStop.

"We will welcome the group back so long as they improve their moderation practices and follow our community guidelines," Discord said in a statement Thursday. "We have reached out to the moderators to provide them with support and advice, like we do for many of our large communities."


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Stock Up

Furious Robinhood users suing over trade limits may face high legal bar

Chris Dolmetsch , Christopher Yasiejko , and Christian Berthelsen
Bloomberg
Fri, 29 Jan 2021 04:02 UTC
robinhood logo
Frustrated investors who sued after getting locked out of trading in frenzied shares like GameStop Corp. aren't likely to have much luck in court either.

Online brokerage Robinhood Markets was named as a defendant Thursday in several federal suits demanding it reinstate trading of shares including GameStop, BlackBerry Ltd., Nokia Oyj and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Just hours earlier, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers and others took steps to curtail activity in the high-flying stocks after several dizzying days of trading on their platforms whipped up volatility.

While users of the trading platforms claim in court filings that they suffered losses from the restrictions, legal experts say brokerages have broad powers to block or restrict transactions -- all of which is spelled out as part of customer agreements everyone signs to gain access to the services.

Comment: Regardless of whether or not the litigation against Robinhood is successful, it seems quite likely the app is finished. From Dave Portnoy:



But as Tim Pool points out, the costs of litigation, or even the dissolving of Robinhood altogether, pales in comparison to the billions lost in the inflation of GameStop's stock:



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Attention

Silicon Valley and WEF-backed foundation announce global initiative for COVID-19 vaccine records

Whitney Webb
Unlimited Hangout
Fri, 15 Jan 2021 08:47 UTC
digital health passport
© The Commons Project
Multiple airlines are now testing a digital health passport, called CommonPass, that will store health information needed for travel on a secure, easy-to-update app.
On Thursday, tech giants with deep ties to the US national-security state — Microsoft, Oracle, and the MITRE Corporation — announced that they had partnered with several health-care companies to create the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) to advance the implementation of digital COVID-19 vaccination records.

According to a Reuters report, the VCI "aims to help people get encrypted digital copies of their immunization records stored in a digital wallet of their choice" because the "current system [of vaccination records] does not readily support convenient access and sharing of verifiable vaccination records."

The initiative, on its website, notes that the VCI is a public-private partnership "committed to empowering individuals with digital vaccination records" so that participants can "protect and improve their health" and "demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy." The initiative is essentially built on a common framework of digital vaccination "wallets" called SMART Health Cards that are meant to "work across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries" as part of a new global vaccination-record infrastructure.

The host of the VCI website and one the initiative's key backers is the Commons Project Foundation. That foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), runs the Common Trust Network, which has three goals that are analogous to those of VCI. As listed on the WEF website, the network's goals are (1) to empower individuals by providing digital access to their health information; (2) to make it easier for individuals to understand and comply with each destination's requirements; and (3) to help ensure that only verifiable lab results and vaccination records from trusted sources are presented for the purposes of cross-border travel and commerce.

Comment: See also:

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V

Dozens injured in lockdown protests in Lebanon's Tripoli — Red Cross


The Jordan Times
Wed, 27 Jan 2021 09:36 UTC
Lebanese protesters
© AFP photo
Lebanese protesters run from tear gas canisters fired by security forces during ongoing demonstrations in Lebanon's northern port city of Tripoli on Wednesday
BEIRUT — Overnight clashes in northern Lebanon between security forces and demonstrators angered by a coronavirus lockdown injured at least 45 people, the Lebanese Red Cross said on Wednesday.

At least nine of the injured were treated in hospital following rolling scuffles in the main northern city of Tripoli, the Red Cross said.

Protesters lobbed molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones at security forces who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, an AFP correspondent reported.

Comment: Country after country is seeing major rioting because tyrannical measures and lockdowns caused a significant economic decline. Lockdowns can't stop any virus, but they surely can stop any economy.

The poor countries like Lebanon are the first ones who felt the terrible economic consequences of the lockdowns. The illogical and inhuman measures have brought many people on the verge of existence, and we still can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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Stock Down

'Meme stocks' have Wall Street vultures worried! The complete moron's guide to GameStop's stock roller coaster

Kyle Orland
ars Technica
Wed, 27 Jan 2021 00:00 UTC
How does this epic rally end? And can it be repeated?
Game Stop
© Aurich Lowson/Getty Images
Pop goes the bubble...
Last week, an epic short squeeze had driven GameStop stock up to $40 a share, a roughly 1,500 percent increase from its low point nine months ago. Little did anyone know at the time that this would only be the beginning of the story.

As I write this, GameStop's stock price is hovering around $350, up another 775 percent or so since I wrote about this situation eight days ago. By the time you read this, that number may be horribly outdated, as the stock continues to bounce up and down with extreme volatility hour by hour (it dipped down as low as $61 and peaked as high as $159 on Friday).

The current stock price now gives the company a market cap of about $26 billion.

Comment:


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Stock Down

GameStop Roller Coaster: Clown World Finance

Kristoffer Mousten Hansen
Mises Institute
Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00 UTC
GameStop clownworld
The recent blowup of GameStop shares has revealed, if anyone was still doubting, that the center of clown world is not Washington, DC, nor Silicon Valley — but Wall Street. To be clear, this is not meant to refer to the gallant band of redditors from r/wallstreetbets — those few, those happy few, that band of brothers who, as of this writing, may very well be poised to force several hedge funds into bankruptcy. Rather, the clowns are those hedge funds and all those other institutional investors who have been propped up by central bank intervention for decades while congratulating themselves that their seven-figure earnings were all due to their own financial brilliance.

What Happened?

The story of what happened (so far) is briefly told. It was revealed that GameStop was one of the most shorted shares in Wall Street, with the fund Melvin Capital taking the lead in shorting it. While this may or may not be a sound position based on market fundamentals — I have not investigated and think it's a mug's game to waste time on fundamentals these days — people did not take kindly to the revelation. Specifically, redditors at the subreddit Wallstreetbets saw that the short sellers were vulnerable, and they organized a campaign to drive them into the ground. Suddenly, retail investors flooded the market, bought up shares and drove GameStop shares, which had been trading below $20, into the stratosphere, topping $365 Wednesday morning (January 27). Melvin Capital suffered huge losses, up to 30 percent, and had to be saved by an infusion of $2.75 billion Tuesday afternoon.

Comment:



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Handcuffs

The meme is more powerful than the sword: Delray Beach man accused of using social media accounts to intimidate voters during 2016 election

Andrew Boryga
South Florida Sun Sentinel
Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:13 UTC
Douglass Mackey
© @RapinBill via Twitter
The former profile photo of Douglass Mackey, who operated under the Twitter handle @TheRickyVaughn. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday and charged with using his social media accounts to attempt to influence the 2016 election. The image used for his account is actually actor Charlie Sheen playing his role as pitcher Ricky Vaughn in the 1989 movie "Major League."
In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, a Delray Beach man is accused of using his popular social-media accounts to intimidate and mislead voters in an effort to help former President Donald Trump win, according to a federal complaint.

Douglass Mackey, 31, conspired with others to use Twitter and Facebook accounts operating under the alias "Ricky Vaughn" to spread disinformation in the form of memes, messages and hashtags that he developed for the goal of influencing voters, according to the complaint. One of the images he shared included a claim that people could vote for Hillary Clinton in a text message.

Mackey is accused of violating a U.S. statute that makes it illegal for people to threaten or intimidate others from exercising any right secured to them by the Constitution, such as the right to vote.

Gerald Greenberg, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, said speech that threatens or seeks to halt those rights is not protected by the First Amendment.

"You're allowed to lie to convince someone not to vote for Hillary Clinton," he said. "But you're not allowed to lie to block someone from voting for Hillary Clinton."

Mackey's charges stem from New York, where he previously lived before moving to Delray Beach in 2018, according to public records. Mackey was arrested in his home on Wednesday and later released on $50,000 bond.

His Twitter handle and alias is a reference to the character Ricky Vaughn played by Charlie Sheen in the 1989 film "Major League." One of Mackey's popular Twitter profile pictures featured a modified image of Sheen wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

Comment: It's just beginning.





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