Facebook, USA Today reports, “is asking some U.S. users whether they may have been exposed to extremist content, or if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist.”

The pop-ups are part of something called The Redirect Initiative, which attempts to “combat violent extremism and dangerous organizations by redirecting hate and violence-related search terms towards resources, education, and outreach groups that can help.”

The Redirect Initiative sounds like something that could be a valuable public service if Facebook was serious about fighting extremism. But that’s obviously not the case.

Only the least popular and least powerful extremists need worry that they’ll be targeted by Facebook. The company actively coddles and cuddles up to the most powerful, violent, and deadly extremist groups on the planet: Governments.

Facebook’s Community Standards on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” divides extremist groups into three tiers. The top tier includes “entities that engage in serious offline harms — including organizing or advocating for violence against civilians, repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against people based on protected characteristics, or engaging in systematic criminal operations.”

And yet the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — two groups explicitly organized for violence against civilians — maintain active Facebook pages on which they publicly advocate for, and openly celebrate, their depredations with nary an objection from the company.

The US Internal Revenue Service — a protection racket no different in principle from any other “nice income you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it” criminal scheme — also uses Facebook without negative consequence.

Oh, Facebook will come down hard on a government or government-affiliated actor now and then, but only if that government or individual has managed to get on the wrong side of the political establishments Facebook itself supports and caters to.

Domestically, Donald Trump is the obvious example, and not a terribly sympathetic one.

Abroad,  regimes and state actors who find themselves at odds with the regimes controlling Facebook’s most profitable markets may face bans or “Facebook jail” for activities the company considers “legitimate” when the US or EU (for example) engages in them.

Facebook’s claimed opposition to extremism isn’t a principled stand against violence, hate, or criminal activity. It’s performance art, virtue signaling, and propaganda in service to the extremist groups Facebook endorses and willingly works with — with opposition to those extremist groups itself often falsely labeled “extremism,” or at least “misinformation.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Confusion reigns. More than a week after Democratic voters from New York City’s five boroughs cast their primary ballots, we still don’t know who those voters chose as their party’s nominee for mayor. Seven days after the polls closed, the city’s Board of Elections issued preliminary results, then quickly withdrew them, citing a discrepancy in which test ballots were counted along with real votes.

Opponents of Ranked Choice Voting  are having a public field day, declaring that the results — or, rather, lack of results — prove the method is defective. It’s just too complicated, they claim, for the average voter to figure out.

They’re wrong. The New York City Board of Elections’s apparent inability to quickly, competently, and accurately count votes isn’t an indictment of Ranked Choice Voting. It’s an indictment of the New York City Board of Elections.

What’s going on here? What’s the problem?

One possible explanation is incompetence. Mike Ryan, the board’s director, went on extended medical leave after his relationship with a voting machine vendor led to calls for a conflict of interest investigation. His absence left the board’s operations in the hands of deputy executive director Dawn Sandow, who may be a token Republican appointee rather than a skilled administrator. An anonymous fellow GOP official tells the New York Post that Sandow “isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”

Another possibility is that this Ranked Choice Voting exercise isn’t going very well because the powers that be in New York City politics don’t WANT it to go very well.  In a system where two parties continually dominate, and in a city where one of those parties enjoys a pretty firm stranglehold on power, RCV threatens to upset the (big) apple cart. It produces winners based on the broadest level of popular support rather than leaving voters with a binary choice between lesser evils. Party bosses hate that idea. It’s possible that New York City’s version of RCV was built to fail

A non-possibility is that Ranked Choice Voting itself is to blame for the fiasco. There’s simply nothing complex or confusing about it.

The voter simply ranks the available candidates from first place to last, something he or she probably already did when considering which candidate to vote for in “vote for one” elections.

At the election administration level, RCV MORE work, but it’s not COMPLICATED work. If no candidate receives a majority of “first place” votes, the candidate with the fewest such votes is eliminated. His or her votes are transferred to those voters’ second choices. This process repeats until one candidate holds a majority. Even in hand-counted elections it would be a simple and tedious chore, not rocket science. In the computer age, it’s a simple coding problem.

Among the explanations for the New York City debacle, I lean toward administrative incompetence rather than political conspiracy. But either way, New Yorkers shouldn’t let the opponents of Ranked Choice Voting defeat its future use. Where democratic processes are important, RCV is a needed improvement.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Raw Story‘s headline is disturbing: “Florida goes full fascist,” quoting a tweet referenced in the story.  “Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys.”

“Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote ‘intellectual diversity’ at colleges and universities,” Travis Gettys reports.

OK, well, “reports” may be stretching it just a teensy weensy bit. In the Tampa Bay Times story Gettys cites, Ana Ceballos tells us the legislation “will require public universities and colleges to survey students, faculty and staff about their beliefs and viewpoints,” not that those students, faculty and staff members will be required to respond to the surveys.

Looks like Mr. Gettys saw what he wanted to see instead of what was actually there. I empathize. It happens to the best of us.

What about Ms. Ceballos? Is her account accurate? Let’s consult the bill itself:

“The State Board of Education shall require each Florida College System institution to conduct an annual assessment of the intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity at that institution. The State Board of Education shall select or create an objective, nonpartisan, and statistically valid survey to be used by each institution which considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and members of the college community, including students, faculty, and staff, feel free to express their beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.”

Nothing at all in there requiring students, faculty, or staff to “register their political views” (Gettys), or even requiring the schools to ask them about those views (Ceballos).

The surveys cover what’s being taught at the schools (a reasonable area of interest for the State Board of Education, and for the legislators who appropriate funding for those schools), and whether the people on campus feel free to speak their minds (a reasonable area of interest for anyone who supports freedom of speech).

When it comes to the main claims in the two stories, there’s just no “there” there. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s legislature aren’t requiring anyone to”register their political views” with this law. Ceballos’s story is, intentionally or not, fake news, and Gettys’s story is more fake news stacked on atop Ceballos’s.

I get it. Reading legislation is incredibly boring. But if you’re going to report on it, carefully reading it first seems like part of the job.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY