LowRes Wünderbred’s Mass State Lottery (2022), an X rated horror film inspired by real life cases of Boston’s drowning men, is currently facing legal threats to be shut down by the Massachusetts Lottery over its vaguely similar title and controversial contents.
The Massachusetts Lottery’s claim? The movie is intended to confuse people buying lottery tickets…
… “He clearly doesn’t take his law license very seriously when he doesn’t
take the time to pay the $265 dues,” said Daniel Uhlfelder, a Santa Rosa
Beach attorney who lives in Gaetz’s district. “He’s not a serious
lawyer. He’s not a serious congressman. He’s not a serious person. This
is one small but symbolic example of that.”
Company under fire as news reports detail spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories even as staff raised concerns
Facebook faced mounting pressure on Friday after a
new whistleblower accused it of knowingly hosting hate speech and
illegal activity, even as leaked documents shed further light on how the
company failed to heed internal concerns over election misinformation.
Allegations by the new whistleblower, who spoke to the Washington Post,
were reportedly contained in a complaint to the Securities and Exchange
Commission, the US agency that handles regulation to protect investors
in publicly traded companies.
In
the complaint, the former employee detailed how Facebook officials
frequently declined to enforce safety rules for fear of angering Donald
Trump and his allies or offsetting the company’s huge growth. In one
alleged incident, Tucker Bounds, a Facebook communications official,
dismissed concerns about the platform’s role in 2016 election
manipulation.
“It will be a flash in the pan,”
Bounds said, according to the affidavit, as reported by the Post. “Some
legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to
something else. Meanwhile, we are printing money in the basement, and
we are fine.”
The claims echo those of the whistleblower Frances Haugen,
a former Facebook product manager who has said the company repeatedly
prioritizes profit over public safety. Haugen’s recent damning testimony
before the US Congress, and forthcoming testimony before the UK
parliament, has prompted a major PR crisis for the social network, which
is said to be readying plans for a rebrand.
The whistleblower claims came on the same day that news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and NBC,
published reports based on internal documents shared by Haugen. The
documents offer a deeper look into the spread of misinformation and
conspiracy theories on the platform, particularly related to the 2020 US
presidential election.
The documents show that
Facebook employees repeatedly flagged concerns before and after the
election, when Donald Trump tried to falsely overturn Joe Biden’s
victory. According to the New York Times,
a company data scientist told coworkers a week after the election that
10% of all US views of political content were of posts that falsely
claimed the vote was fraudulent. But as workers flagged these issues and
urged the company to act, the company failed or struggled to address
the problems, the Times reported.
The internal
documents also show Facebook researchers have found the platform’s
recommendation tools repeatedly pushed users to extremist groups,
prompting internal warnings that some managers and executives ignored, NBC News reported. …
Watchdog finds dubious data gathering, illusory solicitations for consent
The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday said many internet
service providers are sharing data about their customers, in defiance of
expectations, and are failing to give subscribers adequate choices
about whether or how their data is shared.
The trade watchdog’s findings arrived in the form of a report [PDF]
undertaken in 2019 to examine the data and privacy practices of major
US broadband providers, including AT&T Mobility, Charter
Communications, Google Fiber, T-Mobile US, Verizon Wireless, and
Comcast’s Xfinity.
“[T]hese findings underscore deficiencies of the ‘notice-and-consent’
framework for privacy, especially in markets where users face highly
limited choices among service providers,” said FTC boss Lina Khan in a
statement [PDF].
“The report found that even in instances where internet service
providers purported to offer customers some choice with respect to how
their data was collected or used, in practice users were thwarted by
design decisions that made it complicated, difficult, or near-impossible
to actually escape persistent surveillance.”
The FTC study found that some ISPs combine data from their different
products and services, some combine data from personal app usage and web
browsing to target ads, some segment consumers into sensitive
categories related to race and sexual orientation, and some share
real-time location data with third-parties. …
