In February 2016 we wrote about four trends that are destroying our freedom:
1.The end of anonymous communication on the internet
2.Privatization of censorship
3.Discrimination in employment and education for expressing unpopular opinions or revealing lifestyle choices
4.The strengthening of barriers to decision-maker accountability
The Privatization of Internet Censorship
The privatization of internet censorship received increased recognition as an issue in the mainstream press due to an incident involving Korryn Gaines. This case raises essential questions about the practice of government asking social media outlets to remove content. Governments demanding that internet content be censored has happened many times in repressive nations, but few know that it is increasingly happening in the USA also. The new wrinkle is government officials requesting that online sites remove content and the site's owners promptly complying voluntarily.
The Guardian reported that:
"In the middle of a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County police department to take her social media accounts offline, police have said...Gaines was using social media to broadcast the standoff, which began when officers showed up on Monday morning to serve a warrant. Police officials asked Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to suspend Gaines’ accounts through what police called a “law enforcement portal”, a part of the site open to certified law enforcement agencies. At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her..."
The
Register reported another incident that occurred before the Gaines shooting:
"Multiple sources have told The Register that police removed video footage of Castile's death from Facebook, potentially tampering with evidence.
Castile, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter were pulled over by police in the Falcon Heights suburb of Minneapolis for a broken tail light. Using her cellphone and Facebook Live, Reynolds web-streamed footage of her dying boyfriend after he was shot by a police officer as he reached for his ID in his wallet. The video was mysteriously removed from her Facebook profile as it went viral across the internet.
On Thursday, Facebook said a “technical glitch" caused the recording to be pulled from its social network. However, Reynolds claimed officers seized her phone and took over her Facebook account to delete the evidence.
Multiple sources with knowledge of the event have tonight confirmed to The Register that someone – highly suspected to be the city's police – used her phone to remove her recording from public view shortly after the shooting. This was no technical glitch..."
The Guardian compared the Korryn Gaines incident to one that happened in 2012:
"In 2012, when most social media sites were still in their infancy, James MacArthur, a black Baltimore activist and blogger who produces an internet radio show under the name Baltimore Spectator, livestreamed a standoff with police on his show. Like Gaines, MacArthur was publicly critical of police and was legally armed. When officers attempted to serve a failure-to-appear warrant at his home – the same thing that led to Gaines’ barricade – MacArthur would not come out and the incident ended in a lengthy standoff with police.
MacArthur broadcast the entire situation, including his negotiations with police, drawing a large audience. He believes that that online audience is one of the only reasons he is alive today. “I knew that was my only chance,” MacArthur said. “What’s most noteworthy about my incident was my use of social media and you see that they went immediately after that in this case.”"
Discrimination in employment and education for expressing unpopular opinions or revealing lifestyle choices
Discrimination in employment and education for expressing unpopular opinions or revealing lifestyle choices is discussed in The University of Texas at Austin's College of Education document Social Media Professionalism for Teachers.
A few excerpts from this training manual for educators makes clear that some government employees lose their first amendment and other rights once they begin employment.
"...Email, Facebook messages, and text messages can always be forwarded, hacked, or shown to others, and a great number of teachers who have gotten into trouble for how they use electronic media were only posting things that they thought were "private"...So, could an angry ex-girlfriend/boyfriend share that private message that you sent them? Possibly. Could that co-worker that you chatted on Facebook when you needed to vent about a group of kids forward the chat contents to your boss? Again, possibly. These things have happened, and when they do, the teacher who creates the content to begin with is the one who comes under fire...." Not only does it not matter whether the teacher intended to go public with their opinion or behavior, there are no clear guidelines on which opinions or behaviors constitute "moral turpitude" by a teacher.
"... teacher contracts have traditionally included what are generally called "moral turpitude" clauses. A "moral turpitude" clause basically means that "anything else that you might do that the community thinks is wrong," like coming to work in a bathrobe and penny loafers, "is probably wrong, and the district can punish you accordingly."
The thing about moral turpitude is that it's not clearly defined, and what is or isn't okay may vary based upon your community, school board, and so forth, but you have no way of knowing this unless you understand the culture of the school and community.... Moral turpitude can apply to just about everything in a teacher's life, including electronic media. Doing it in a public area online is the exact same as doing it in a public area in real life, and if you do something online that someone associated with the school can see (e.g. students, parents, administrators, etc.), then your behavior might be deemed as inappropriate if it violates moral turpitude, or what the community or school board thinks is appropriate.... ...One thing that you should notice...is that no two cases are identical, and few of these teachers broke the law. What they have in common is that the district believed each teacher's behavior to be immoral or inappropriate, and the district had the power to enforce its interpretation of morality and professionalism upon its teachers. Some involve alcohol, some involve crude language, some involve risqué photos or behavior, etc., and most teachers didn't think they were doing anything wrong, thought they were posting content "privately," or "accidentally" shared something that they otherwise wouldn't have shown to students. None of that really matters, though, because they were disciplined all the same.
Someone might think: "Wait a minute, I'm over 21, so it's legal for me to use alcohol/tobacco/etc, right? It's also legal for me to make out with my boyfriend/girlfriend, to go to the beach, to write racy fiction, to critique my boss behind her back, to cuss about the lunch menu, to vent about parents, and to pose as a model in a risqué video. So why should I need to be careful about posting those things online?" In short, you need to realize that you are in a position of power with the children that you teach, and parents and school boards expect you to be a role model for those children. As a result, if parents or the school board believe that you are not being a positive role model in terms of their interpretation of the morality of the things that you do, then they can cite "moral turpitude" as grounds for disciplinary action. So, you might not explicitly tell your students "alcohol is cool, you should all drink with me," but if you post a picture of yourself partying at the bar, then parents or administrators might interpret that this is your message, and teachers have been fired or otherwise disciplined for posting things that they believed were completely harmless....
The problem with giving clear answers about what's okay and what's not okay to post in online spaces is that it depends on the community, school board, administrators, students, and parents that you work with, because they are the ones that make judgements on moral turpitude and appropriateness. Especially since you are a new teacher, you don't know how these different people will interpret your actions. Before posting anything online, however, you should carefully consider the risks of posting the content against the benefits. If the benefits don't outweigh the risks, then don't do it..."
In other words, if you are a teacher, keep your mouth shut and don't do anything in public or online that the most nosy, judgmental or conservative person in your region might find objectionable.
Note that similar requirements are also applied to police officers and other government employees. For example:
"An Albany [GA] Police Department Officer resigned after high school students he works with saw two sexually explicit pictures of himself that he posted on social media...An Internal Investigation found that one week earlier, a Dougherty High School teacher saw students looking at the pictures on a phone...Ausby told Internal Affairs that he posted the pictures on his Vine account, not knowing it would spread on the internet." WALB News 10
Algorithms
The issues spotlighted by the article How Algorithms Rule our Working Lives by Cathy O'Neil probably need to be added to our list of Trends That are Destroying Our Freedom.
"Automatic systems based on complicated mathematical formulas... are becoming more common across the developed world. And given their scale and importance, combined with their secrecy, these algorithms have the potential to create an underclass of people who will find themselves increasingly and inexplicably shut out from normal life...Most of these algorithmic applications were created with good intentions. The goal was to replace subjective judgments with objective measurements in any number of fields – whether it was a way to locate the worst-performing teachers in a school or to estimate the chances that a prisoner would return to jail.
These algorithmic “solutions” are targeted at genuine problems. School principals cannot be relied upon to consistently flag problematic teachers, because those teachers are also often their friends. And judges are only human, and being human they have prejudices that prevent them from being entirely fair – their rulings have been shown to be harsher right before lunch, when they’re hungry, for example – so it’s a worthy goal to increase consistency, especially if you can rest assured that the newer system is also scientifically sound.
The difficulty is that last part. Few of the algorithms and scoring systems have been vetted with scientific rigour, and there are good reasons to suspect they wouldn’t pass such tests...the algorithms encode human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into automatic systems that increasingly manage our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models are opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal. And they tend to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer...."
Full Circle
This article from Business Insider connects the privatization of internet censorship to the use of algorithms:
"...First, there was the report by Gizmodo that the section of Facebook curated by an editorial team had a liberal-leaning slant. That resulted in a reprimand from Congress and Zuck having to make nice with Conservative leaders.
When Facebook fired the staff that ran Trending Topics and revamped the section last week, there was another gaffe pretty much immediately: a top trending topic all weekend was (false) news that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was being fired. Because Trending Topics was left to algorithms without any editorial oversight, no one was there to shut down the mass spread of false information before it happened...."
Not only is the internet becoming more censored and controlled by the handful of large corporations controlling search engines and social media sites, they are increasingly using robots instead of humans to do the job.
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