NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo Signs Law Banning Sale Of Confederate Flags That Will Absolutely Get Nullified
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Let's be clear: that fact that there are people all over America that for any reason would want to display the Confederate battle flag is monumentally stupid. For starters, the flag is the symbol of a rebellion launched over southern states' desire to own other people. Don't give me the "states rights" argument; it's entirely invalid, unless the states right you're talking about is slavery. On top of that, the Confederacy, you know... lost. Proudly displaying the symbol of loserdom is both hilarious and befuddling.Now that that's out of the way, entirely too often the folks who abhor the Confederate flag participate in a massive over-reaction to it. We saw this after Dylann Roof proved just how evil humanity can be in shooting up a historical African American church, with far too many people and companies focusing on displays of the flag, as though that were the real issue.And now, in a move far more disappointing, Andrew Cuomo has signed into law a ban in New York State on the sale of the Confederate flag and other "symbols of hate" on public property."This country faces a pervasive, growing attitude of intolerance and hate—what I have referred to in the body politic as an American cancer," he wrote. "By limiting the display and sale of the confederate flag, Nazi swastika and other symbols of hatred from being displayed or sold on state property, including the state fairgrounds, this will help safeguard New Yorkers from the fear-installing effects of these abhorrent symbols."Cuomo noted that "certain technical changes are necessary" to make sure the ban is compliant with the First Amendment, which protects free expression—including the expression of hateful ideas. Should it not be obvious, it would be hard to state how performative and stupid this all is. This law will not survive a First Amendment challenge. There is no ground on which free speech is compatible with a law banning private persons from selling expressive symbols on public land. A whole lot of people are pointing to Germany's prohibition on Nazi imagery and symbols, as though that country's protection of free speech means that such prohibitions are compatible with free speech. They aren't. At all. We might want to say that Germany by and large has free speech, but that law is an exception to the rule, not evidence of it.And Cuomo, who reportedly has his eyes on being Biden's Attorney General, most definitely knows better than this. And even beyond that, it's worth noting that this bill is a complete mess, somehow managing to be too broad and too ineffectual to have the desired effect.It prohibits the sale of "symbols of hate," which it defines as "including, but not limited, to symbols of white supremacy, neo-Nazi ideology, or the battle flag of the Confederacy." Keep in mind that we live in a world where some people think the OK hand gesture is a white supremacist signal, and the New York Human Rights Commission has been particularly inclined to over-interpret the government's mandate to ban things. This is not a recipe for restraint.The bill also exempts museums, books, and "educational purposes" in general, which provides wild interpretive leeway. And the aforementioned fairgrounds provision applies to private actors on public property, which is almost certainly unconstitutional. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that a notorious hate group, the Westboro Baptist Church, could stand on public property and shout obscenities near the funerals of military service members. There's little question that the First Amendment broadly protects hateful speech on public property. And, to reiterate, Cuomo absolutely knows this law is going to get struck down one way or another. This is all pure theater for the cameras, the kind of performative woke-ism that is the exact opposite of small-L liberalism.So why bother doing this at all?
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posted at: 12:00am on 17-Dec-2020
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Content Moderation Case Study: Vimeo Moderates Uploads Of 'Commercial-Use' Videos Using Unclear Guidelines (2009)
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Summary: Vimeo, the video-hosting website created by CollegeHumor's parent company in 2004, has always presented itself as a destination for creators who wished to free themselves from YouTube's limitations and aggressive monetization. Vimeo remains ad-free, supporting itself with subscription fees.Other efforts were made to distance Vimeo from YouTube. Its fairly aggressive content policy forbade plenty of things that were acceptable on Google's platform, including videos promoting commercial services.The terms of service didn't explicitly forbid content that related to commercial services but were not attempts to sell services directly to other Vimeo users, but user experience consultant Paul Boag found his videos targeted by Vimeo and given a week to move them to another hosting service. While some videos of Boag's rode the edge of the terms of service ban on commercial videos, others provided nothing more than marketing advice or reviews of browser plugins.At that point, Vimeo also banned the embedding of hosted content on sites that also served up ads. Unfortunately for Boag, his own site contained ads, making it a violation of the terms of service to embed his own videos on his own site. And this rule wasn't set in stone: Vimeo rather unhelpfully clarified it did allow embedding on some sites with ads, but it was a decision only Vimeo could make.Vimeo players cannot appear on domains running ads, its a decision we made in the beginning and have been going back and forth with allowing or disallowing it, but so far we cannot allow it unless it is with one of our partners. Decisions to be made by Vimeo:- Does distinguishing the service from YouTube with more onerous restrictions on content ultimately lower moderation costs by attracting a user base that self-selects?
- Is the risk of losing paid users an acceptable tradeoff for preventing Vimeo from "devolving" into just another YouTube-like service?
- Is making judgment calls on "commercial-use content" possible to do fairly when it appears to mainly be based on subjective calls by moderators?
- Is Vimeo large enough to comfortably absorb any damage to its reputation or user goodwill when its moderation decisions affect content that doesn't actually violate its policies?
Questions and policy implications to consider:- Would allowing users to pay to upload commercial-use videos move the platform closer to the competitors Vimeo has tried to distance itself from?
- Would a transparent and open challenge process help Vimeo avoid losing paying users?
Resolution: Paul Boag's videos were removed and Boag chose to use a different platform to host his content, rather than continue to struggle with Vimeo's unclear content policies.A few years later, Vimeo changed course and began allowing Pro users to upload content that was considered a violation of its terms of service in 2009. The restrictions on commercial-use content have since been rolled back even further, forbidding users from posting only certain kinds of commercial-use content:We do not allow content that promotes:
- Illegal schemes (like Pyramid/Ponzi schemes)
- Businesses that promise wealth with little or no effort
- Unregistered securities offerings (absent a legal basis)
- Illegal products or services
- Products or services (even if legal) using deceptive marketing practices
- In addition, users may not use Vimeo.com's messaging capabilities for unsolicited direct marketing purposes.
Originally posted on the Trust & Safety Foundation website.
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posted at: 12:00am on 17-Dec-2020
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