Mediaboss Marketing

Even convicted felons have more rights than university allowed its students

Do you think Ohio taxpayers are tired of subsidizing the lawless, aloof administrators who run their public universities?

Ohio University has evidently learned nothing from its unconstitutional suppression of the First Amendment rights of students who did absolutely nothing wrong, by its own admission.

Practically daring students to file a lawsuit, administrators suspended the organizational activities of all 15 fraternities in its Interfraternity Council earlier this fall, based on hazing allegations against nine of them, according to The Athens News.

What do these activities include? Not only hosting gatherings but communication with and amongthe group via any social media platform or application, according to an administrators letter to fraternities obtained by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Taylor Tackett, assistant dean of students and director of community standards and student responsibility (left), literally told fraternities that any communications among members had to be pre-approved by me.

Following FIREs legal warning letter Nov. 12 and pressure campaign against the taxpayer-funded university, interim General Counsel Barbara Nalazek sent back a condescending one-page letter.

She complimented FIREs Zachary Greenberg, a Syracuse Law graduate who previously defended indigent Syracuse residents on misdemeanor charges, for the obvious effort put into the Nov. 12 letter. Nalazek did not respond to the voluminous case law against Ohio University that Greenberg cited.

MORE: Want to see fascism in action? Look what Syracuse did to fraternity members

Instead, she justified the unconstitutional restrictions on students rights by citing the unprecedented number of hazing allegations allegations! the university received this fall. They were only temporary so that the situation could be assessed. A few weeks later, restrictions for most punished organizations had been lifted or significantly modified.

It also removed a frequently asked questions document elaborating on the restrictions, which FIRE had faulted, and clarified with all the organizations that the restrictions on communications had been lifted. Nalazek claimed these restrictions on all social media communications among members were limited.

Showing her amazing skills in half-assing a legal response, the interim general counsel said OU disagrees that the original directives were constitutionally infirm. She failed to explain why, in any level of detail.

Its worth reading Greenbergs Nov. 12 letter in full to see just how much case law Nalazek had to ignore to portray the universitys draconian response to hazing allegations against some fraternities as perfectly acceptable. Willful ignorance of the law may be whats required to become the permanent general counsel.

Out of compliance with its own federal appeals court

It is not a close call that OU has exceeded the lawful scope of its authority under the First Amendment, as Greenberg wrote.

The FAQ document, which purported to clarify the restrictions on associational and speech rights, limited fraternity members to 1:1 conversations between friends on personal topics. It refused to define what the university considers a prohibited chapter event, telling students there was no magic number [if] people could associate it with your organization, fraternities should avoid it.

In other words, OU will arbitrarily decide how many people talking are too many people talking, Greenberg wrote in a Nov. 13 blog post. Its unclear whether they were even allowed to discuss their organizations punishment.

MORE: Syracuse fires prof for disagreeing with punishment of frat members

The justification by Nalazek (right) for the draconian punishments hazing allegations have no bearing on the legal analysis, Greenberg told the university in his Nov. 12 letter. OU effectively bans any communication whatsoever among Group members and thereby threatens their existence as viable student organizations, he wrote: Courts have correctly viewed less onerous restrictions as impermissibly burdening associational freedoms.

The public university is out of compliance with its own federal appeals court, the 6th Circuit, which struck down a Cincinnati ordinance excluding convicted drug dealers from drug-exclusion zones.

If thats an impermissible restriction on associational freedoms, as Greenberg notes, what chance does OU have in court if the fraternities decided to sue for restricting communications that have nothing to do with hazing?

It is difficult to imagine how prohibiting all unofficial meetingsregardless of how brief, innocuous, or unrelated to pledging or university affairsis at all tailored, much less narrowly tailored, to address the universitys cognizable interests. Such wide-ranging restrictions cover a virtually unlimited array of student activity bearing no reasonable relationship to maintaining a safe educational community.

Willfully violating Supreme Court precedent

The university and its interim legal counsel also appear to be contemptuous of Supreme Court precedent.

Greenberg cites the high courts 2016 rejection of a North Carolina law that bans registered sex offenders not just drug dealers! from using websites that allow children to become members orto create or maintain personal Web pages, such as social media.

Such a restriction still violates the First Amendment because social media are integral to the fabric of modern society and culture, the rulings summary says:

Even convicted criminalsand in some instances especially convicted criminalsmight receive legitimate benefits from these means [social media] for access to the world of ideas, particularly if they seek to reform and to pursue lawful and rewarding lives.

Greenberg elaborates on this ruling, known as Packingham, in a footnote:

Considering that OUs blanket ban on social media platforms to communicate is arguably more restrictive than the law in Packingham, and the universitys interests in policing student expression is markedly diminished in contrast to the important interests in warding against convicted sex offenders use of the internet to contact children, OUs restrictions stand on significantly weaker constitutional footing than the law struck down by the Packingham Court.

MORE: Syracuse admits it doesnt protect free speech to get out of lawsuit

The idiotic prior-approval requirement laid down by Tackett, the assistant dean of students, is also plainly unconstitutional. Not only does it encourage self-censorship but fails to set forth any objective criteria for approval, Greenberg wrote leading to a situation where students need permission from the university to criticize the university.

Greenberg portrayed the universitys alleged end to unconstitutional restrictions as a victory for students, even though OU has suffered no consequences for actions it never bothered to defend and will likely repeat.

FIRE and these students sent OU a clear message: administrators cant muzzle student speech and get away with it, he said in a blog post last week. (Except administrators did get away with it.) FIREs reputation and history of successful action no doubt got Ohio Universitys attention and helped restore constitutional rights, said a lawyer for the students, Timothy Burke. (How long will they remain restored?)

FIREs action may have gotten this pitiful, one-page response from the university. But its clear that nothing short of litigation and ruinous damages against individual administrators will ever stop them from willfully and repeatedly violating students rights.

MORE: Frat pledges sue UT for punishing them after flimsy investigation

IMAGES: jorgen mcleman/Shutterstock, Ohio University

Read More

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

Read the original:
Ohio University refuses to apologize for unconstitutional censorship of innocent students - The College Fix

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg containing yet another complaint about misinformation on the platform.

In the letter, obtained by Reuters, DNC CEO Seema Nanda wrote that we have significant remaining concerns about Facebook policies that allow the platform to be used to spread misinformation and undermine our democracy.

Democrats have been pressuring Facebook and its CEO, Zuckerberg, over its refusal to censor political ads in general, and Donald Trumps ads in particular. The DNC, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and the left-wing media have all campaigned for Facebook to censor Trump ads.

In her letter, Nanda asks Facebook to dedicate additional capacity to enforce your terms of service against these types of malicious actors.

Current Facebook policy allows politicians to place demonstrable lies in front of voters via paid ads. This type of elite disinformation, from politicians many voters trust, is one of the most insidious and damaging forms of disinformation. Facebooks advanced analytics and targeting capabilities, furthermore, allow candidates to direct disinformation at the populations most susceptible to it, she continued.

However, the DNC CEO stopped short of calling for a Twitter-style blanket ban on political ads.

Banning political ads or severely inhibiting targeting capabilities on Facebook would not be in our partys best interest nor in the best interest of promoting voter participation, she wrote.

Nanda also claimed that the DNC has uncoveredat least nine foreign, inauthentic account networks targeting Americans with anti-Democratic false news content.

Its concerning that were able to uncover these terms-of-service-violating operations on a fairly regular basis, with a team far smaller than Facebooks, wrote Nanda.

The letter does not appear to have specified what methodology the DNC used to uncover these allegedly inauthentic accounts, why the DNC considered them inauthentic, or what country (or countries) they are from.

Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email addressallumbokhari@protonmail.com.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

Read the original:
DNC Demands More Censorship by Facebook of Misinformation - Breitbart

There's not really any dispute that the UK Liberal Democrats party sold voter data for 100,000 to the Remain campaign in 2016, though the Information Commissioner's Office tried to suppress that revelation until after the coming election; the Libdems say they did nothing wrong, but when Opendemocracy's Jim Cusick approached the party for a statement ahead of an article, he got no reply.

What happened next is...weird.

After Cusick's article went live, an aggrieved Libdem "senior official" wrote to Opendemocracy, demanding to know why their statement hadn't been included in the article. Cusick said it was because he'd never received a statement, but if they'd furnish one, he'd include it. But instead of a statement, Cusick got a legal threat from an expensive firm of solicitors, Goodman Derrick, demanding that the article be censored, either by removing "all derogatory and disparaging statements" (having read the article, I couldn't find any statements that qualified), or removal of the article altogether.

Given that the Libdems style themselves "the party of liberty," that is indeed weird.

But what happened next is weirder.

Opendemocracy asked the lawyers to provide a statement from the Libdems to include in their article, pointing out that they'd made three such requests without a response. In the absence of any statement from the Libdems (apart from the legal threat conveyed by their lawyers), Opendemocracy made a "surmise" about what the Libdems didn't like about their coverage and amended the article.

Then they heard from the lawyers again, stating that the Libdems had provided an "on the record" response to Cusick's article, on Nov 12, and they attached that email as proof.

Here's where the really weird stuff comes in.

Cusick didn't ask the Libdems for comment until Nov 13, which meant that the email the lawyers had attached as evidence had apparently been sent a full day before Opendemocracy wrote to the party seeking comment.

Opendemocracy wrote back to the lawyers, asking how this was possible.

When the lawyers did not reply, Opendemocracy wrote again, saying that they were about to publish a story about this and seeking comment. This time, someone from the Libdem press office called Opendemocracy and said a "mistake had been made" and said there was an investigation ongoing. So Opendemocracy generously gave the Libdems even more time to reply before publishing.

The party finally wrote back with a statement saying that "we have been made aware that the information openDemocracy subsequently received from the Liberal Democrats was incorrect. We have suspended a member of staff involved and are following due process."

But in addition to this, the Libdems' lawyers wrote back to Opendemocracy, repeating the threats over their coverage of the Libdems' data sale, and insisting that neither the lawyers nor the party had known about the fake email (Opendemocracy called it a "crude forgery"), despite the fact that Opendemocracy had painstakingly detailed their multiple attempts to solicit a comment from the party without a reply.

This is an embarrassment: as Opendemocracy points out, it doesn't rise to the level of open fraud committed by the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson, but the Tories don't style themselves "the party of liberty." Speaking as a former Libdem party member and campaigner (I'm a member of the Labour Party now), I don't believe the party should have flogged off voter data, but even moreso, I don't think that any party can be said to stand for "liberty" when its response to negative press coverage is to threaten to rain down expensive, punitive legal action from fancy lawyers.

First, why was the Lib Dem press office so desperate to discredit our story? In Jim Cusicks initial communications with them, he told them we had seen internal documents about the Lib Dems lucrative 2016 data sale. If, as they strongly maintain, the party had acted in accordance with the law at all times and had done nothing wrong, why did someone think it was important enough to repeatedly make false claims, including a faked document, via expensive lawyers?

What did our story reveal that prompted this level of duplicity?

Second, the replies from Goodman Derrick were issued on behalf of the party and of its leader, Jo Swinson. This assumes that senior figures were involved. Who sanctioned and signed off this aggressive legal pursuit, including the letter with the forged email? And how might Lib Dem supporters and donors feel about this appalling use of party funds?

Perhaps most importantly, though, what does this whole episode say about the so-called Liberal Democrats regard for fact-checking, accuracy and press freedom? We at openDemocracy are a small team. The distraction has cost us valuable staff time and legal bills, which could otherwise have been spent on doing actual journalism during the final weeks before the most important election in a generation.

What are Jo Swinsons Liberal Democrats so desperate to hide? [Mary Fitzgerald/Opendemocracy]

For many years, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a newspaper columnist for the Telegraph, where he espoused some of the most reactionary, disqualifying garbage ever published by a mainstream UK publication, a trend that continued after he began his political career. Business Insider has rounded up a "greatest hits" reel of Bojo's most disgusting []

For more than a decade, Britons have relied on Mysociety's Theyworkforyou to find out who represents them in Parliament (as well as the regional assemblies), find out what those people are doing and saying, and to get in touch with their lawmakers and their fellow constituents to hold them to account.

The UK is having an election in less than a month, and last night, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn debated Tory archclown Boris Johnson for a televised debate in which Johnson had to defend his record as a lying, racist, philandering, cowardly failure of a human being, and of a leader to his party and the []

In the early days of the web, everyone wanted a .com domain for their site. As a result, all the good ones got snapped up. But .com no longer has the cachet it once did. In fact, many new businesses and individuals are opting for other top-level domain extensions. One of the most memorable is []

When the SNES launched back in the early 1990s, it changed gaming forever. One of the innovations was a gamepad with four action buttons something that has remained a constant on controllers ever since. The 8BitDo SN30 Bluetooth Gamepad brings that iconic design up to date, with Bluetooth connectivity and support for multiple platforms. []

After a long day at work, cooking a meal from scratch can seem like too much trouble. Unfortunately, the alternative is usually something unhealthy. Enter the Mellow Sous Vide Precision Cooker. This compact water bath uses cutting-edge technology to cook meat and veggies at the perfect temperature for exactly the right amount of time. It []

Original post:
Opendemocracy: the Libdems tried to censor our article about their sale of voter data, then used a forged email to intimidate us - Boing Boing

A recent Reddit post details the danger of using a popular built-in tool in the iOS image editing menu. The tool, commonly referred to as the highlighter (its actually a chisel-shaped marker, dont @ me) is often used to cover sensitive information in screenshots or photographs such as credit card numbers or the address on a drivers license.

The problem is in the default opacity of the tool. Its meant to be used as a highlighter, not a tool to censor sensitive details, and as such its set with an opacity value under 100. That is to say, its semi-transparent. The lower the opacity value, the more see-through the markings become.

But even with an opacity near 100, a few quick photo editing tricks will reveal the information underneath.

Redditor u/M1ghty_boy, the threads original poster, first colored over the text using the highlight tool from the default toolset a pen, pencil, and marker/highlighter. After a few passes, it appears that the text is properly censored and unreadable. The user then opens the image in the default iOS photo editor and adjust settings like exposure, highlights, shadows, and contrast until the image again comes into view.

Here is why you shouldnt censor sensitive info with the black highlighter on iOS, this video shows just how easy it is to reveal sensitive info censored with the black highlighter from r/ios

If youre looking for a better way to censor information, weve got you covered. The easiest way would be just to use the same highlighter tool, but to turn the opacity to 100, meaning its fully opaque and no longer see-through.

Or, if you want a more foolproof method (in case you forget to adjust the opacity before covering the information), use a color-filled shape the rectangle tool, for example (found in the + menu) instead.

Read next: Study: Our universe may be part of a giant quantum computer

Read the original here:
This is why you shouldn't use Apple's highlighter tool to censor sensitive info - The Next Web

Beijing (AFP)

The Chinese billionaire behind teen phenomenon TikTok is a 36-year-old tech guru whose eye for youth trends and pioneering use of AI has blasted the app to global success -- while working hand-in-glove with censors to control content within China.

Zhang Yiming's Beijing-based startup Bytedance owns TikTok, whose kaleidoscopic feeds of 15 to 60-second clips feature everything from hair-dye tutorials to dance routines and jokes about daily life.

Since launching in 2017, TikTok has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times, according to US-based research agency Sensor Tower. It has huge followings in India, the US, Indonesia and elsewhere.

But its rise has raised security fears and last month two senior US senators called for a government review of the app, saying it could leave users vulnerable to spying by Beijing.

Bytedance, which Zhang founded in 2012, prides itself on using artificial intelligence to personalise newsfeeds according to users' interests.

The company has had "huge and immediate success" because it pays close attention to its young users, said Bo Ji, assistant dean for the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.

"The new generation... want to share their real feelings, whether good or bad. They are more direct and expressive," he said.

TikTok is Bytedance's most popular overseas app, while its other products in China and abroad include news aggregators and productivity tools.

Together they have taken Zhang -- a programmer before he became a businessman -- to the highest echelons of China's billionaire club.

In 2019, he was listed in the top 20 of the Hurun China Rich List with $13.5 billion in wealth, surpassing more established tech tycoons, such as the founder of search giant Baidu.

Zhang's fortunes were given a huge boost with Bytedance's 2017 acquisition of lip-syncing video app Musical.ly -- later merged with TikTok -- in a deal reportedly worth as much as $1 billion.

"Mr Zhang is unusual Chinese entrepreneur," said Bo.

"He built something for the world; he understands the young people and their psychology."

- Disruptive technology -

Liu Xingliang, dean of the DCCI research centre, told AFP that Zhang represents a new wave of entrepreneurs and a different breed to China's most famous tycoon, Alibaba's Jack Ma.

He is "more like a young Pony Ma," Liu said, comparing Zhang to the 48-year-old co-founder of Chinese internet giant Tencent.

This is because Zhang "used to be a programmer, paid more attention to products, and knew technology well", he said.

Bytedance also operates a Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin. It is the top short video app in China, with over 400 million monthly active users, according to iResearch.

Douyin, launched in 2016, attracted users by bringing on board top celebrities like Chinese actor and singer Kris Wu.

But Bytedance's first flagship product was the immensely popular Chinese news aggregation app Jinri Toutiao, or "today's headlines".

"(Toutiao) has changed Chinese reading habits... they will know what you like to watch, and you will have the things you like to see recommended to you,' said Liu.

Aside from TikTok, Bytedance also runs TopBuzz in the US, an English-language news aggregation app that the company was reportedly trying to sell in September.

In 2016 it became a controlling stakeholder of BaBe, an Indonesian news app with more than 30 million downloads since its launch in October 2013.

Productivity app and Slack-competitor Lark is Bytedance's latest product, which features cloud storage, chat and calendar functions.

And according to recent reports, the company is also planning to launch its own music streaming service to compete with subscription models like Spotify and Apple.

- Chinese censorship -

In mainland China Bytedance employs thousands of censors to scrub out inappropriate content in its domestic platforms -- at a significant cost to the company.

It reportedly hired 2,000 censors in January 2018 after Beijing accused its news aggregation app of "spreading pornographic and vulgar information".

It then promised to increase its internal censorship staff to 10,000 after being temporarily banned by the government in a widening content crackdown.

Censorship is common in China where the internet is tightly controlled.

But going global has brought its own censorship challenges for TikTok, which is blocked in Bangladesh and was briefly banned by an Indian court over claims it was promoting pornography among children.

It was also hit with an enormous fine in the US for illegally collecting information from children.

One TikTok video that went viral this week contained criticism -- hidden within a clip that appeared to offer tips on eyelash curling -- of China's mass detention of Muslims in its Xinjiang region.

A Twitter account apparently belonging to the same teenager who posted the video said she had been suspended "for trying to spread awareness" -- a claim disputed by the app. The video was readily available on TikTok Wednesday.

TikTok has sought to distance itself from China, saying in October that it is "not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government."

But US senators have warned in a letter that TikTok's owner ByteDance could be forced to share user information with Chinese intelligence, and could also be used to influence upcoming US elections.

2019 AFP

See the original post:
Bytedance: The Chinese company behind global TikTok craze - FRANCE 24