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Of 8 Tech Companies, Only Twitter Says It Would Refuse To Help Build Muslim Registry For Trump (theintercept.com)
On the campaign trail last year, President-elect Donald Trump said he would consider requiring Muslim-Americans to register with a government database. While he has back-stepped on a number of campaign promises after being elected president, Trump and his transition team have recently resurfaced the idea to create a national Muslim registry. In response, The Intercept contacted nine of the "most prominent" technology companies in the United States "to ask if they would sell their services to help create a national Muslim registry." Twitter was the only company that responded with "No." The Intercept reports: Even on a purely hypothetical basis, such a project would provide American technology companies an easy line to draw in the sand -- pushing back against any effort to track individuals purely (or essentially) on the basis of their religious beliefs doesn't take much in the way of courage or conviction, even by the thin standards of corporate America. We'd also be remiss in assuming no company would ever tie itself to such a nakedly evil undertaking: IBM famously helped Nazi Germany computerize the Holocaust. (IBM has downplayed its logistical role in the Holocaust, claiming in a 2001 statement that "most [relevant] documents were destroyed or lost during the war.") With all this in mind, we contacted nine different American firms in the business of technology, broadly defined, with the following question: "Would [name of company], if solicited by the Trump administration, sell any goods, services, information, or consulting of any kind to help facilitate the creation of a national Muslim registry, a project which has been floated tentatively by the president-elect's transition team?" After two weeks of calls and emails, only three companies provided an answer, and only one said it would not participate in such a project. A complete tally is below.
Facebook: No answer. Twitter: "No," and a link to this blog post, which states as company policy a prohibition against the use, by outside developers, of "Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period." Microsoft: "We're not going to talk about hypotheticals at this point," and a link to a company blog post that states that "we're committed to promoting not just diversity among all the men and women who work here, but [...] inclusive culture" and that "it will remain important for those in government and the tech sector to continue to work together to strike a balance that protects privacy and public safety in what remains a dangerous time." Google: No answer. Apple: No answer. IBM: No answer. Booz Allen Hamilton: Declined to comment. SRA International: No answer.
Facebook: No answer. Twitter: "No," and a link to this blog post, which states as company policy a prohibition against the use, by outside developers, of "Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period." Microsoft: "We're not going to talk about hypotheticals at this point," and a link to a company blog post that states that "we're committed to promoting not just diversity among all the men and women who work here, but [...] inclusive culture" and that "it will remain important for those in government and the tech sector to continue to work together to strike a balance that protects privacy and public safety in what remains a dangerous time." Google: No answer. Apple: No answer. IBM: No answer. Booz Allen Hamilton: Declined to comment. SRA International: No answer.
I think I speak for anyone who's read a history book when I say this is an absolutely awful idea. I know Twitter gets a lot of stick but well done them. If you're in favour of this then you're a fascist or you're an idiot. There's literally no middle ground. This is how it starts.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Dear Twitter: would you censor anyone on your platform who has different political opinions from you? "Absolutely!"
Trump never said he wanted to make a muslim registry or ban all muslims or throw them in camps or anything else. All he said was we should stop taking in migrants from syria and other islamic terror zones until we can actually vet these people and find out who they are. I don't understand how that can be a bad thing?
Of course that goes against the narrative of racist identity politics and lies the media continues to push. When will you learn this is the kind of stuff that got trump elected to begin with?
It doesn't matter what Trump said as long as we can be offended by what the media and far left says he said.
More to the point, the lawyers of 7 out of 8 companies advised their clients to STFU and hope the issue goes away.
I need to agree. The news loves to take "no comment" as an admission of guilt.
Trump is very anti-journalism I can see things going two ways.
1. Expansion of fake news and more emotional profit driven journalism.
2. A renewed effort into making journalism a trusted source to get information free of trying to push a political bias.
I would love to see #2 but I get the feeling we are just going to get more crap stories trying to get an emotional response vs forcing us to look at what is really said and in context.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Microsoft answered correctly and said the same thing I would. I don't deal with a bunch of what ifs questions like that. When the time comes to make a decision I'd answer then. All the other companies can easily change their minds depending on what the official requirements are. To flat out say no for a hypothetical question is nothing more than catering to the political correct crowd.
The requirements are right there in the question: would you support creating a database to track people of a given religion? There's no tweak to the requirements that could make that a palatable task.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
He's not anti journalism. He's anti shit-journalism, which this story clearly is.
Out of 8 tech companies, not one says it would help build Muslim registry for Trump.
If the facts from the journalism puts him in a bad light then it is "shit-journalism".
If the info about him is positive no matter how incorrect it is it is good journalism.
That is scary.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So a random email from a journalist landed in some PR drone's inbox. There were likely hundreds of other emails to deal with, and he or she spent 10 seconds writing a quick response while finishing a cup of stale coffee. You make it sound like this was an official statement of policy from Microsoft's Board of Directors, with BG himself consulted to help craft the appropriate response.
This is just amateur ambush journalism being use to provoke outrage from idiots.
They were also the only one to give *any* answer.
This, exactly. Look, Trump's Muslim tracking plan (and most everything else about Trump) is batshit crazy and not-even-trying-to-hide-it evil.
BUT the fact that most huge companies don't wring their hands over responding to every question posed to them by random strangers is... common sense and completely unsurprising?
I could just as easily send a flurry of questionnaires to the mail room of every Forbes 50 company asking whether they support genocide and puppy punting. Get one of them to write back "No, we think that's awful" and all of a sudden "Only 1 of 50 Top Companies is Opposed to Genocide and Puppy Punting."
It's not even "gotcha" journalism--no one was gotten. MS said $formResponseToDiversityQuestion, and Twitter said "No." Everyone else didn't feel obligated to give these folks an answer.
Nothing posted to
This isn't shit journalism because it puts Trump in a bad light. It's shit journalism because it asks a loaded question, and attempts to make a story out of the landslide-majority of polled companies that didn't take the bait. It fits into a broader narrative in which Trump represents the second coming of Hitler, and everyone who does not unconditionally reject him is a neo-nazi.
For decades, we were warned about the dangers of increasing media consolidation. And since the rise of online journalism, we've been warned that this new model does not support the kind of journalistic integrity we came to expect in our news. A decade ago, Fox News showed us that facts and integrity are not necessary to win viewers. Now the major outlets are controlled by a handful of entities, and they do not practice journalism as we once understood it. Those entities are in turn controlled by the ultra-wealthy. The ultra-wealthy have political agendas based on their wishes and needs. Because they live very different lives from everyone else, their agendas are unlikely to match the wishes and needs of the broader population. So the institution we relied upon to inform us in our democratic decision making is now in the business of pushing agendas that are unlikely to match the wishes and needs of the broader population.
That's scary.
Trump's Muslim tracking plan
You can bitch all you want on this piece of garbage-journalism, they still got into your head making you believe there is such a plan. This is classic persuasion. Make people think about what should be their reaction *if* something would happen. You start thinking about your reaction and before you know it you've taken the something for granted.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Nice post. It seem that modern journalism, instead of informing the public, is selling our biases back to us in a mad rush to produce page clicks. The result is an echo chamber effect on a national scale that balkanizes the electorate into self-selecting political entities, blind to the overall facts and hopelessly spun in the direction of their original predilections. See also the rise of Facebook as an adjunct to the news media, where users control what news they see by blocking uncomfortable or non-congruent sources.
Not only does this create division, but the inherent bias that draws in the targeted groups serves as a mental barrier to entry for non-aligned groups. As long as there is a safe harbor for intellectually and politically similar ideas from one news source, and other sources violate the entrenched norms and standards with biased reporting designed for another group, mobility from one ideological clade to another is limited. Plainly stated, when news outlets produce content which is canted towards a politically limited audience the underlying facts are presented in a way that prevents consumption by individuals with non-aligned ideals. This produces extremely polarized individuals, not only blind to any other interpretations of the issues, but also belligerent to representatives and outlets that contradict their viewpoints.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.