Willful ignorance is not a defense. Facebook COULD know if those ads were discriminatory or not, but choose not to.
Well, those ads weren't discriminatory, they were targeted. Ad targeting is not illegal under the letter of non-discrimination laws AFAIK, but you are welcome to develop a novel legal theory.
Furthermore, most forms of discrimination by private entities simply aren't illegal anyway.
Learn to read: I said "you can't do a lot more in 140 characters", allowing for the occasional (rare) pithy and smart remark. Note that there are many services that do well with short messages because they have threading; Twitter doesn't have that either.
In any case, empirically, Twitter messages are overwhelmingly "trolling", "baiting", "bragging", and "posturing". The 140 character limit, combined with the poor Twitter user interface, is a likely explanation, but you're welcome to come up with alternative explanations.
Your sentence that I quoted was 133 characters. By your own logic, it must therefore consist of "trolling", "baiting", "bragging", or "posturing".
No, only by your logic. Note how I qualified my statement with "you can't do a lot more in 140 characters"? Occasionally, people say something sensible in a short message, just not often. On Slashdot and other services with threading, short messages can also occur as part of discussion threads. But Twitter also lacks threading.
Asserting that brevity can only result in the above categories is ridiculous.
Well, luckily I didn't assert that. Learn to read.
Except Facebook's model is not transparent. You don't know what data they have on you. [...] This is a discussion about Facebook, however, and its potential liability for the way it designs its system.
So what? I simply pointed out that this wasn't "housing discrimination" in the FHA or public accommodations sense. This is about ad targeting, something that historically has not been illegal.
You're welcome to share your vast legal expertise with ProPublica and set them right on what they are actually complaining about and help them out creating a novel legal theory of why ad targeting should be illegal, but the fact is: right now it isn't.
And as someone who is a member of a couple of SJW-approved minorities, I can tell you that I want groups like ProPublica to fuck off; I like ads targeted at me.
AC said "What you can't do, is engage in commerce with a broadcaster to only communicate in certain ways to certain people." I pointed out that you can, and I stand by that.
You're shifting the goalposts now, talking about "discounts" and making up all sorts of unrelated crap. You're also equivocating with ambiguous terms like "what's not fine". You're a veritable treasure trove of logical fallacies and poor debating habits.
So was your comment sarcastic or not? I thought you were being serious - that people considered Newton's laws "settled".
Indeed, lots of people consider Newton's laws to be "settled". But the concept of "settled" is largely something politicians and journalists like; it's not a scientific concept in any form. So, yes, it was sarcasm aimed at science reporters.
That's why I pointed out that Einstein provided examples of how they were incomplete over 100 years ago.
True, but Newton's laws still are assumed to describe classical, macroscopic, non-relativistic mechanics like these EM drives. If such classical systems behave in a non-Newtonian way, then a lot of theoretical physics breaks. But something like that needs to happen because what we have simply isn't consistent.
Science is a history of amendments. There are plenty in the future that we will discover, just as there are plenty in the past we already discovered.
You don't say! Wow, that is so insightful! You must be like really smart! Do you work at a rocket brain surgery facility, like as a janitor or something?
You should probably read about science since 1905 before commenting then because there are many situations where newtons laws don't hold up. Relativity is one example. So no, they're hardly settled.
Geez, how dense are you? I referred to Newton because TFA referred to Newton and commenting on the superficial way in which reporters use science.
And your comment is also nonsense for another reason: we are talking about macroscopic, non-relativistic mechanics here. Both QM and relativity are supposed to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in that limit. Yeah, if a large metal box containing some circuitry starts moving on its own with nothing coming out of it, that is properly described as a violation of Newton's laws, even in the 21st century.
Indeed, it's not the targeting per-se that is the issue, it's that it has been used to deliberately exclude non-whites. [...] It's often quite hard to prove, but in this case it's likely that they will be able to find some incriminating emails or identify a pattern of behaviour that gives the game away.
You obviously haven't read TFA and you are just confabulating. They weren't advertising anything or excluding anybody. This is an activist group that is complaining about the existence of ethnic ad targeting.
It's a lot like the case against Trump's real estate interests that tried to exclude minorities because they thought it would increase the value of the property and keep rents high.
Again, you are confabulating. There is no evidence that they "tried to exclude minorities" for any reason; the FHA suit was brought because there was a disproportionately small percentage of minorities in Trump's housing development.
I also don't understand your compulsion to comment on US political matters; when it comes to racial discrimination, your own country is a cesspool: spend your energy on fixing that.
If your understanding of physics does not predict the Casimir effect, you probably shouldn't be commenting on the EM drive, or results from NASA rocket scientists.
The only thing that's defective here is your understanding of sarcasm.
It is therefore seen that Newton's laws become increasingly inaccurate when the scale is very large (relativity), or very small (quantum mechanics).
You don't say. It's almost like you had a year of college physics or something!
By forcing the publisher to defend itself, the lawsuit is probably hoping that Facebook will be forced to disclose which advertisers are doing the same thing. After which, the lawsuit against Facebook can stop and the advertisers in question can be sued instead.
It is perfectly legitimate for most advertisers to discriminate by race. Furthermore, the advertisers who most commonly discriminate based on race, sexual orientation, or gender are those who actually benefit minorities and women. So, you want to hurt minority businesses?
I'm not sure this distinction would hold legally, given that the "publisher" (Facebook, in this instance) is specifically including a mechanism to do discriminatory ad targeting (if indeed the ad targeting is ruled discriminatory).
There are many legitimate uses for ad targeting, so providing the mechanism isn't per se discriminatory. Furthermore, discrimination is legal in many contexts; for example, Hillary Clinton has targeted many of her ads to different racial groups.
Also, by the way, I'm assuming you would make a comparison between ad targeting and physical publishers (like magazines) that market to a specific audience. In that case, though, nobody's prohibiting a white guy from buying a copy of Ebony Magazine and viewing its ads.
The discrimination for Ebony Magazine is behavioral, just like Facebooks. That is, nobody is keeping you from behaving in a way so that these ads are targeted at you.
However, with Facebook's ad targeting, it can be like that. And that is potentially an issue, morally even if not legally. But I suppose it depends precisely on Facebook's targeting system.
Well, I don't use Facebook and I don't know how they target. On Google, however, you can see what information Google has inferred about you, and you can also turn off ad targeting.
My guess is that this is just the beginning of lawsuits to come for such a system, particularly if it can be ever shown that some "deal" was offered to one race, but never offered to another or something.
Well, Facebook and Google are big guys, and they have actively supported this SJW nonsense, so let them deal with the consequences. The rest of us can go on merrily discriminating the way we want. Personally, I am certainly going to continue to discriminate against homophobic religions, progressives, and anybody who accuses me of being a racist.
Facebook's problem is they can't just push this off onto ProPublisha because Facebook monitors postings for objectionable content.
This isn't about illegal content, it's about ad targeting. Ad targeting isn't prohibited by law: read what you quoted.
Accepting an illegal posting in itself illegal. Newspapers have the same problem once they sell an ad they are responsible if the ad is illegal not only for housing but for threats and extortions.
It's not that simple. Newspapers are potentially liable when they have real estate sections and when they knowingly accept discriminatory ads. Since Facebook advertising is automatic and there is no separate real estate section, their situation is different. Facebook's liability is likely the same as for any other content: they need to remove it once they know about it. But, again, that doesn't even apply in this situation, since ProPublica isn't complaining about content, but about targeting.
The law states you can't do this for certain kinds of advertisements, like housing, employment and some financial services. I hardly think it's "SJW"s only who feel that job advertisements shouldn't omit certain ethnicities.
You aren't paying attention. ProPublica is complaining about ad targeting. Translated into the real world, that means that if you place an ad in the East Hampton Star, you also need to place it on Black Entertainment Network. That's obviously ridiculous. Advertisers frequently target specific demographics. The law only requires that the ads themselves don't discriminate (and even that is more political posturing than effective public policy).
The much celebrated "civil rights" laws of the 60-ies have failed. It is time, they go the way of the similarly failed Prohibition.
They haven't just failed, they have been counterproductive. The effect of these various laws has largely been to keep homophobes, racists, and sexists in business and to turn overt discrimination into hidden discrimination.
What you can't do, is engage in commerce with a broadcaster to only communicate in certain ways to certain people.
That's absurd. Of course, you can target your ads to certain groups. People have done that for a century. Minority groups are some of the biggest beneficiaries of this ability.
ProPublica managed to post an ad placed in Facebook's housing categories that excluded anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people.
Note that ProPublica posted the racist ad themselves, and there was no actual discrimination.
Furthermore, this is about ad targeting by demographics, not housing discrimination; you know, like you don't want to target Hip Hop events to Norwegian bachelor farmers, or gay pride events to Black protestant church goers. And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
This is something I like to ask self proclaimed conservatives. Hilary is the most conservative candidate out there by the actual definition of the word. She's going to do a fine job maintaining the status quo. A few tax cuts here, a few tax raises here, but nothing substantial. She's your classic nixonite pro-corporate politician. A little corrupt but nothing out of the ordinary.
How do you know? Hillary's actual political program is radically different from that. I think Hillary's actual political program sucks, so if I were to vote for her, I would have to assume that she is lying through her teeth. So, which is it? Is she a pathological liar and a psychopath, or has she turned into a Sanders-style political radical over the last few years?
But you can't vote Trump and really be conservative, can you?
Well, luckily, I'm not a conservative, Republican, progressive, or Democrat. Neither are the majority of Americans. Nor do most Americans share your literal or partisan mindset. I have voted Democratic before and I may again in the future. I'm not voting for Hillary because I think she is actually a pathological liar and a psychopath, and even a loudmouth nutcase like Trump is preferable to her in the Whitehouse.
All Snowden pointed out is that you can easily check 650000 emails for duplicates; you can. But that's not the point.
Whether duplicate or not, what the new FBI probe suggests is that there were numerous classified emails sent from Clinton on yet another laptop outside Clinton's control. This is a laptop about which Human Abedin says that she didn't use it and she has no idea about how the classified emails ended up on there.
Even if you want to talk about just a review of "new" emails, the FBI has indicated that there were, in fact, new classified emails among those they found. They have refused to say how many; the logical conclusion is that if they had released the actual number, it would have looked bad for Clinton and/or their ability to review them in such a short time.
In addition, they have retreated from "did she mail classified materials" (which is a certainty at this point) to "did she intend to mail classified materials; If Hillary had been treated like other government officials, she should have been charged simply because she emailed classified materials, regardless of her intent.
At this point, it's been clearly established that Hillary used a private email server, that she used it for classified materials, that she accessed it from multiple and unsecured devices, that she lied about it repeatedly, and later lied about what the FBI found. Whether she is charged by Obama's FBI or not is irrelevant; legally, simply being the SoS might have given her the legal freedom to ignore regulations, but that doesn't make it right. It's our job as voters to judge high government officials at the ballot box. Hillary Clinton's conduct was reckless and irresponsible for a high government official. How those facts affect whether you want to vote for her or not you have to decide for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, that's what it is..
I fully accept that Germany is different from the US, which is why I like using Germany as a negative example for what the US shouldn't do.
Yeah, sure, whatever.
Well, those ads weren't discriminatory, they were targeted. Ad targeting is not illegal under the letter of non-discrimination laws AFAIK, but you are welcome to develop a novel legal theory.
Furthermore, most forms of discrimination by private entities simply aren't illegal anyway.
Learn to read: I said "you can't do a lot more in 140 characters", allowing for the occasional (rare) pithy and smart remark. Note that there are many services that do well with short messages because they have threading; Twitter doesn't have that either.
In any case, empirically, Twitter messages are overwhelmingly "trolling", "baiting", "bragging", and "posturing". The 140 character limit, combined with the poor Twitter user interface, is a likely explanation, but you're welcome to come up with alternative explanations.
No, only by your logic. Note how I qualified my statement with "you can't do a lot more in 140 characters"? Occasionally, people say something sensible in a short message, just not often. On Slashdot and other services with threading, short messages can also occur as part of discussion threads. But Twitter also lacks threading.
Well, luckily I didn't assert that. Learn to read.
So what? I simply pointed out that this wasn't "housing discrimination" in the FHA or public accommodations sense. This is about ad targeting, something that historically has not been illegal.
You're welcome to share your vast legal expertise with ProPublica and set them right on what they are actually complaining about and help them out creating a novel legal theory of why ad targeting should be illegal, but the fact is: right now it isn't.
And as someone who is a member of a couple of SJW-approved minorities, I can tell you that I want groups like ProPublica to fuck off; I like ads targeted at me.
AC said "What you can't do, is engage in commerce with a broadcaster to only communicate in certain ways to certain people." I pointed out that you can, and I stand by that.
You're shifting the goalposts now, talking about "discounts" and making up all sorts of unrelated crap. You're also equivocating with ambiguous terms like "what's not fine". You're a veritable treasure trove of logical fallacies and poor debating habits.
Indeed, lots of people consider Newton's laws to be "settled". But the concept of "settled" is largely something politicians and journalists like; it's not a scientific concept in any form. So, yes, it was sarcasm aimed at science reporters.
True, but Newton's laws still are assumed to describe classical, macroscopic, non-relativistic mechanics like these EM drives. If such classical systems behave in a non-Newtonian way, then a lot of theoretical physics breaks. But something like that needs to happen because what we have simply isn't consistent.
I'm talking about Twitter
I don't know of any service that has a 133 character limit.
If by "love to communicate", you mean "trolling", "baiting", "bragging", and "posturing"; you can't do a lot more in 140 characters.
Apparently neither does Twitter.
You don't say! Wow, that is so insightful! You must be like really smart! Do you work at a rocket brain surgery facility, like as a janitor or something?
Geez, how dense are you? I referred to Newton because TFA referred to Newton and commenting on the superficial way in which reporters use science.
And your comment is also nonsense for another reason: we are talking about macroscopic, non-relativistic mechanics here. Both QM and relativity are supposed to reduce to Newtonian mechanics in that limit. Yeah, if a large metal box containing some circuitry starts moving on its own with nothing coming out of it, that is properly described as a violation of Newton's laws, even in the 21st century.
You obviously haven't read TFA and you are just confabulating. They weren't advertising anything or excluding anybody. This is an activist group that is complaining about the existence of ethnic ad targeting.
Again, you are confabulating. There is no evidence that they "tried to exclude minorities" for any reason; the FHA suit was brought because there was a disproportionately small percentage of minorities in Trump's housing development.
I also don't understand your compulsion to comment on US political matters; when it comes to racial discrimination, your own country is a cesspool: spend your energy on fixing that.
I didn't use Newton. Read TFA.
How about you read TFA and then comment?
The only thing that's defective here is your understanding of sarcasm.
You don't say. It's almost like you had a year of college physics or something!
I thought the science was settled on Newton's laws...
It is perfectly legitimate for most advertisers to discriminate by race. Furthermore, the advertisers who most commonly discriminate based on race, sexual orientation, or gender are those who actually benefit minorities and women. So, you want to hurt minority businesses?
There are many legitimate uses for ad targeting, so providing the mechanism isn't per se discriminatory. Furthermore, discrimination is legal in many contexts; for example, Hillary Clinton has targeted many of her ads to different racial groups.
The discrimination for Ebony Magazine is behavioral, just like Facebooks. That is, nobody is keeping you from behaving in a way so that these ads are targeted at you.
Well, I don't use Facebook and I don't know how they target. On Google, however, you can see what information Google has inferred about you, and you can also turn off ad targeting.
Well, Facebook and Google are big guys, and they have actively supported this SJW nonsense, so let them deal with the consequences. The rest of us can go on merrily discriminating the way we want. Personally, I am certainly going to continue to discriminate against homophobic religions, progressives, and anybody who accuses me of being a racist.
This isn't about illegal content, it's about ad targeting. Ad targeting isn't prohibited by law: read what you quoted.
It's not that simple. Newspapers are potentially liable when they have real estate sections and when they knowingly accept discriminatory ads. Since Facebook advertising is automatic and there is no separate real estate section, their situation is different. Facebook's liability is likely the same as for any other content: they need to remove it once they know about it. But, again, that doesn't even apply in this situation, since ProPublica isn't complaining about content, but about targeting.
You aren't paying attention. ProPublica is complaining about ad targeting. Translated into the real world, that means that if you place an ad in the East Hampton Star, you also need to place it on Black Entertainment Network. That's obviously ridiculous. Advertisers frequently target specific demographics. The law only requires that the ads themselves don't discriminate (and even that is more political posturing than effective public policy).
They haven't just failed, they have been counterproductive. The effect of these various laws has largely been to keep homophobes, racists, and sexists in business and to turn overt discrimination into hidden discrimination.
That's absurd. Of course, you can target your ads to certain groups. People have done that for a century. Minority groups are some of the biggest beneficiaries of this ability.
Note that ProPublica posted the racist ad themselves, and there was no actual discrimination.
Furthermore, this is about ad targeting by demographics, not housing discrimination; you know, like you don't want to target Hip Hop events to Norwegian bachelor farmers, or gay pride events to Black protestant church goers. And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
How do you know? Hillary's actual political program is radically different from that. I think Hillary's actual political program sucks, so if I were to vote for her, I would have to assume that she is lying through her teeth. So, which is it? Is she a pathological liar and a psychopath, or has she turned into a Sanders-style political radical over the last few years?
Well, luckily, I'm not a conservative, Republican, progressive, or Democrat. Neither are the majority of Americans. Nor do most Americans share your literal or partisan mindset. I have voted Democratic before and I may again in the future. I'm not voting for Hillary because I think she is actually a pathological liar and a psychopath, and even a loudmouth nutcase like Trump is preferable to her in the Whitehouse.
All Snowden pointed out is that you can easily check 650000 emails for duplicates; you can. But that's not the point.
Whether duplicate or not, what the new FBI probe suggests is that there were numerous classified emails sent from Clinton on yet another laptop outside Clinton's control. This is a laptop about which Human Abedin says that she didn't use it and she has no idea about how the classified emails ended up on there.
Even if you want to talk about just a review of "new" emails, the FBI has indicated that there were, in fact, new classified emails among those they found. They have refused to say how many; the logical conclusion is that if they had released the actual number, it would have looked bad for Clinton and/or their ability to review them in such a short time.
In addition, they have retreated from "did she mail classified materials" (which is a certainty at this point) to "did she intend to mail classified materials; If Hillary had been treated like other government officials, she should have been charged simply because she emailed classified materials, regardless of her intent.
At this point, it's been clearly established that Hillary used a private email server, that she used it for classified materials, that she accessed it from multiple and unsecured devices, that she lied about it repeatedly, and later lied about what the FBI found. Whether she is charged by Obama's FBI or not is irrelevant; legally, simply being the SoS might have given her the legal freedom to ignore regulations, but that doesn't make it right. It's our job as voters to judge high government officials at the ballot box. Hillary Clinton's conduct was reckless and irresponsible for a high government official. How those facts affect whether you want to vote for her or not you have to decide for yourself.