Paulding County School District Now Trying To Duck FOIA Requests

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You will recall the brief clusterfuck that occurred earlier this month in Georgia's Paulding County. The school district there, which opened back up for in-person classes while making wearing a mask completely optional, also decided to suspend two students who took and posted pictures of crowded hallways filled with maskless students. While the district dressed these suspensions up as consequences for using a smartphone on school grounds, the school's administration gave the game away by informing all students that they would be disciplined for any criticism by students on social media in general. That, as we pointed out, is a blatant First Amendment violation.Once the blow-back really got going, the school district rescinded the suspensions. In the days following, students and teachers at the school began falling ill and testing positive for COVID-19. It got bad enough that the school decided to shut down. With so much media attention, it was a matter of who was going to get the FOIA requests in for documents on what led to the suspensions first.Vice put a request in. However, because this district can't seem to stop punching itself in the gut, the school district is attempting to duck the FOIA requests entirely. Not through redactions. It just isn't going to give up any internal documents at all, even as it acknowledges it has documents in hand.

"The District is in possession of responsive documents," the response, signed by W. Thomas Cable in their role as the attorney for the Paulding County School District, reads. "However, pursuant to Georgia law, the following categories of information have not been produced, via redaction or removal, to the extent a statutory exclusion is directly applicable."The public records request response also says the records are "specifically required by the federal government to be kept confidential." School districts often attempt to reject freedom of information requests on the grounds of student privacy, but districts and individual schools should be able to produce redacted records that protect privacy while still giving information about how specific decisions were made behind the scenes.

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Content Moderation Case Study: Amazon's Attempt To Remove 'Sock Puppet' Reviews Results In The Deletion Of Legitimate Reviews (November 2012)

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Summary: As is the case on any site where consumer products are sold, there's always the chance review scores will be artificially inflated by bogus reviews using fake accounts, often described as "sock puppets."Legitimate reviews are organic, prompted by a buyer's experience with a product. "Sock puppets," on the other hand, are bogus accounts created for the purpose of inflating the number of positive (or -- in the case of a competitor -- negative) reviews for a seller's product. Often, they're created by the seller themself. Sometimes these faux reviews are purchased from third parties. "Sock puppet" activity isn't limited to product reviews. The same behavior has been detected in comment threads and on social media platforms.In 2012 -- apparently in response to "sock puppet" activity, some of it linked to a prominent author -- Amazon engaged in a mass deletion of suspected bogus activity. Unfortunately, this moderation effort also removed hundreds of legitimate book reviews written by authors and book readers.In response to authors' complaints that their legitimate reviews had been removed (along with apparently legitimate reviews of their own books), Amazon pointed to its review guidelines, claiming they forbade authors from reviewing other authors' books.

We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product. As a result, we've removed your reviews for this title. Any further violations of our posted Guidelines may result in the removal of this item from our website.

• What characteristics do sock puppet reviews have, that make them distinct from legitimate reviews?
• Do more steps need to be added to the process of verifying reviewers?
• When targeting sock puppet activity, are options considered that might reduce the chance of negatively affecting legitimate reviews?
• Would more flexibility in moderation decisions help or harm efforts targeting abusers of the review system?
• Is the loss of goodwill towards the company by sellers an acceptable tradeoff for moderation efforts that remove possibly legitimate reviews of their products?
• Can moderation efforts be handled with more human interaction to reduce the number of legitimate reviews inadvertently targeted?

• As the number of vendors and products continues to expand, how reasonable is it to expect reviewers to avoid violating the rule forbidding reviews of products by someone offering a competing product?
• How much moderation should be left to automatic mechanisms when dealing with suspected sock puppet activity?
• Does the inevitable collateral damage of these efforts raise or lower the legitimacy of the remaining reviews in the eyes of potential customers?
• Would more transparency on review moderation efforts lead to more or less abuse of the review system?
• Do mishandled moderation efforts harm buyers or sellers more? Which harm is more acceptable?

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