I wrote about “community”speak in The Freethinker.

The day after the terror attack near Finsbury Park Mosque, the BBC interviewed Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the ironically named Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The IHRC is in fact not so much a human rights organization as a public relations firm with one client: a reactionary theocratic version of Islam. In 2015 it distinguished itself by giving Charlie Hebdo an award for “Islamophobia” two months after 12 members of its staff were murdered by the Kouachi brothers, who shouted the obligatory “Allahu akbar” afterwards.

Why does the BBC consult organizations like that? Why doesn’t it talk to the not loathsome organizations instead? Why doesn’t it talk to women instead of men? Why doesn’t it talk to liberals instead of reactionaries?

Pro Publica provides a large bale of information on why Facebook does the strange things it does.

In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

Higgins’ plea for violent revenge went untouched by Facebook workers who scour the social network deleting offensive speech.

But a May posting on Facebook by Boston poet and Black Lives Matter activist Didi Delgado drew a different response.

“All white people are racist. Start from this reference point, or you’ve already failed,” Delgado wrote. The post was removed and her Facebook account was disabled for seven days.

A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general.

Over the past decade, the company has developed hundreds of rules, drawing elaborate distinctions between what should and shouldn’t be allowed, in an effort to make the site a safe place for its nearly 2 billion users.

…

While Facebook was credited during the 2010-2011 “Arab Spring” with facilitating uprisings against authoritarian regimes, the documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.

Who ya gonna suck up to? Established power, or rebels?

The question answers itself, doesn’t it.

One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.

The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)

Of course this further rests on the absurdity that all members of the “protected categories” get the protection – so whites as well as non-whites, men as well as women, locals as well as immigrants, gentiles as well as Jews, straights as well as gays.

Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing discrimination, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to defend all races and genders equally.

“Sadly,” the rules are “incorporating this color-blindness idea which is not in the spirit of why we have equal protection,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and expert on information privacy at the University of Maryland. This approach, she added, will “protect the people who least need it and take it away from those who really need it.”

Thanks, Facebook. That’s working out beautifully.

There’s a lot more. It’s both interesting and frustrating.

H/t Sackbut

Ben Schreckinger at Politico takes a look at the Southern Poverty Law Center and its expanded…agenda.

Since 1971, the SPLC has fought racial discrimination in the South and established itself as the nation’s most prominent hate-group watchdog, most notably winning legal fights that put some of the last nails in the coffin of the Ku Klux Klan. It has also built itself into a civil rights behemoth with a glossy headquarters and a nine-figure endowment, inviting charges that it oversells the threats posed by Klansmen and neo-Nazis to keep donations flowing in from wealthy liberals.

Trump has been a kind of gift to them, P argues, renewing their Relevance Ticket and inspiring new donors.

The rise of Trump is a moment made for Dees, the SPLC’s 80-year-old founder, who is more than a little Trumpian himself. Smooth, publicity-savvy and detail-averse, Dees is a marketing genius whose greatest success may be selling his own persona as a crusader—a skill on display across the street from the SPLC’s office, where a black granite memorial to the casualties of the civil rights movement proclaims it was built by the Morris Dees Legacy Fund. Inside the memorial’s gift shop, visitors will find on the wall a framed photo of Dees staring off into the distance, looking equal parts pensive and saintly. On a shelf next to SPLC-branded water bottles and mugs, the same image of Dees reappears in another frame; it’s also printed on nearby postcards, which are available for purchase.

Touches such as these have led some journalists to nickname Dees, with irony, “the Mother Teresa of Montgomery.” And as Dees navigates the era of Trump, there are new questions arising around a charge that has dogged the group for years: that the SPLC is overplaying its hand, becoming more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog. Critics say the group abuses its position as an arbiter of hatred by labeling legitimate players “hate groups” and “extremists” to keep the attention of its liberal donors and grind a political ax. Which means that just as the SPLC is about to embark on its biggest fight in decades, taking on rising racism and prejudice across the country, its authority to police the boundaries of American political discourse is facing its greatest challenge yet.

Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t even restrict itself to policing US political discourse, where at least it can be assumed to know something of what it discusses. Maajid Nawaz is part of UK political discourse, not US.

In October, the SPLC faced explosive blowback when it included British Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz on a list of “anti-Muslim extremists.” The targeting of Nawaz—a former Islamist turned anti-extremism campaigner who is considered a human rights leader by many in the mainstream—even sparked critical coverage in the Atlantic, creating the unusual spectacle of a publication founded by abolitionists going after a group founded to fight the KKK.

Well, it was a destructive, reckless, factually wrong, outrageous thing for the SPLC to do. Maajid is in no possible sense an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

Is tough immigration control really a form of hate, or just part of the political conversation? Does rejecting a religion make you an extremist? At a time when the line between “hate group” and mainstream politics is getting thinner and the need for productive civil discourse is growing more serious, fanning liberal fears, while a great opportunity for the SPLC, might be a problem for the nation.

That second question appears to be a reference to Maajid, but Maajid hasn’t even rejected the religion – he’s very much still a Muslim. This is part of the damage the SPLC has done: people assume they must have had some reason to include him.

The SPLC’s hate group and extremist labels are effective. Groups slapped with them have lost funding, been targeted by activists and generally been banished from mainstream legitimacy. This makes SPLC the de facto cop in this realm of American politics, with all the friction that kind of policing engenders.

Yes, American, which is, to repeat, another reason they shouldn’t have pinned the lie on Maajid Nawaz.

The SPLC’s leaders say they are aware of the various critiques lodged against them but have no plans to change their approach. Heidi Beirich, the head of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, says the group’s criteria are clear and transparent, pointing to the definition published on its website of hate groups as ones that “have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”

Which doesn’t apply to Maajid, as many people (including me) pointed out to her when she sent us a form letter saying that.

Trish Bendix at Slate also writes about Facebook’s tendency to recoil at the word “dyke,” though as an aside in a longer piece on dyke marches under threat.

[M]uch like the larger community has done with “queer,” lesbians have been working to reclaim the word for their own use and identification for decades.

“Lesbians have long been the object of vicious ‘name-calling’ designed to intimidate us into silence and invisibility,” wrote J.R. Roberts in the 1979 essay “In America They Call Us Dykes.” “In the Lesbian/feminist 1970s, we broke the silence on this tabooed word, reclaiming it for ourselves, assigning it to positive, political values.”

Since then, dyke has been a political identity for many young lesbians, its meaning expanding to, as Roberts detailed, “a strong independent lesbian who can take care of herself.” The word was used for a feminist lesbian magazine (DYKE: A Quarterly), Alison Bechdel’s famous long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For[,] and perhaps most famously, the all-women’s motorcycle crew Dykes on Bikes. And when the political activist group Lesbian Avengers decided to pull thousands of women together as part of the LGBT March on Washington in 1993, they did it under the name the Dyke March. Its success spawned siblings in several other cities, many of which are annual parts of Pride celebrations taking place this month.

…

Yet even within cities that hold dyke marches every year, some women find it hard to locate any positivity or power in the word’s meaning. And this, along with a lack of organizational support (some of which stems from queer women’s [in?]ability to volunteer free time and labor) and external logistical pressures, has placed the institution of the dyke march under threat.

Facebook is banning people – women mostly – for causing the word “dyke” to appear, while words like “cunt” and “whore” are of course sacrosanct. Perhaps you think Facebook is doing that only when “dyke” is being used as a pejorative? Ha no.

Lesbians are getting banned from Facebook in droves for posts that include the word “dyke.”

On Friday, in the days leading up to the annual Pride marches that take place in many North American cities, reports that lesbians were being banned from Facebook began to surface.

See the post for screenshots.

So, while the rash of bans over the weekend appeared to be targeted and connected to Pride, it’s not a new phenomenon. At Slate, Trish Bendix reported that Facebook removed a popular New York-based group called “Dyke Bar Takeover,” claiming the use of dyke in their name constituted “hate speech.” Even the term “lesbian” itself is not permitted on Facebook, as part of a username. Lisa A. Mallett and Liz Waterhouse report that posts arguing that lesbians are female have been removed by Facebook, as well.

Not allowed, huh? When the fact that lesbians are female is basic to the definition? Does Facebook disallow saying apples are fruit, spiders are arachnids, daffodils are flowers, cars are machines, cats are felines? I’m assuming a big no, here. So why would they remove a post saying lesbians are female?

The great irony in all of this is that Facebook refuses to take action against groups and individuals who post and share pornography or who engage in hate speech against feminists. I have personally reported dozens upon dozens of threats and hate speech directed at myself, other women, and posted on the Feminist Current Facebook page. The posts reported have included words like “cunt,” “whore,” and “bitch.” Many have paired the anti-feminist slur, “TERF,” with death threats. Not a single one of these incidents has ever qualified for any form of action, according to Facebook. Not once has Facebook removed the post in question or banned the user.

Meghan posts a few examples:

There are more. Facebook wrote back and said that’s very sad for you but we don’t care.

I am not alone in this. Many women report having experienced abuse or threats that Facebook has ignored, and having reported content including revenge porn, child exploitation, and other forms of sexual violence that did not go against the company’s “community standards.”

When asked about this lack of action on misogyny and male violence on their platform, Facebook will often claim dealing with the amount of flagged content is too challenging to get it right — employees must make decisions so quickly that errors are common. The company has also told users that reporting posts is the only way to deal with abusive content, that “every single report of abuse is read and acted upon by a human being,” and that Facebook does not scan for and remove content. Yet they managed to ban dozens of female users within a matter of days — most of whom are not public figures, do not necessarily have enormous followings, who clearly aren’t being reported through nefarious means, but are in fact being sought out by the company itself.

It’s beyond infuriating.

The National Resources Defense Council reports:

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers issued the Clean Water Rule in May 2015, they clarified, after decades of confusion and debate, that tens of millions of acres of smaller waterways across the United States were, in fact, eligible for protection under the Clean Water Act. Less than two years later, in February 2017, after several failed attempts by Senate Republicans to kill the rule, President Trump signed an executive order directing the EPA and the Army Corps to begin the process of repealing the Clean Water Rule, with the aim of eliminating it altogether. Today, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt indicated that the two agencies will send a proposal to repeal the rule.

“This proposal strikes directly at public health,” said NRDC president Rhea Suh. “It would strip out needed protections for the streams that feed drinking water sources for one in every three Americans. Clean water is too important for that. We’ll stand up to this reckless attack on our waters and health.”

The Clean Water Rule, also known as the Waters of the United States (WOTUS), limits pollution in the streams and wetlands that feed our larger waterways—critical for safeguarding the drinking water that more than 117 million Americans rely on and for ensuring that people across the nation can continue to swim in and otherwise enjoy these bodies of water. “The Clean Water Rule provides the clarity we need to protect clean water. Its repeal would make it easier for irresponsible developers and others to contaminate our waters and send the pollution downstream.” Suh said.

Well that’s the goal, isn’t it – to take the burden off developers and corporations and put it back on the streams and wetlands and all the animals and people who depend on them.

We need something cheerful and pretty, and fortunately there is the Handmade Parade in Hebden Bridge, which happened yesterday.

Ok that’s not good:

All 75 high-rises in Britain that have been tested for fire safety since the Grenfell Tower tragedy have failed, a leading government official said on Monday, raising concerns that even more buildings may have to be evacuated while emergency repairs are undertaken.

Addressing the House of Commons, Sajid Javid, the minister for communities and local government, said all 75 towers in Britain whose cladding had so far been tested for combustibility had failed. He said hospitals and schools would also be tested to ensure they had not been built with cladding that could easily catch fire.

It’s pretty remarkable. Someone in charge chose the slightly cheaper but more combustible cladding every single time. It’s almost as if the ruling class just really does not give a fuck about the lower orders. So they can’t get health insurance, so their apartment block goes up like a torch one midnight, who cares? The rich still have their SUVs and their houses in Aspen.

The United States, a world leader in fire safety standards, forbids the application of the sort of highly flammable materials used on Grenfell Tower. But under the regulatory system in force in Britain, builders and property owners faced less strict restrictions and may have wrapped hundreds of buildings in the potentially risky cladding.

John McDonnell, the opposition Labour Party’s spokesman on economic issues, said those killed in Grenfell Tower had been “murdered” by “political decisions” made over recent decades.

Wow, for once something at which we’re not shamefully worse than all other developed nations.

As many across the political spectrum have criticized the regulatory shortcomings that may have led to the Grenfell fire, members of the insurance industry have said they warned the government about the risks of flammable cladding just a month before it happened.

Malcolm Tarling, a spokesman for the Association of British Insurers, said the industry was closely watching the response to the fire. “We have been calling for the U.K. government to review fire regulations since 2009,” he said. “As recently as May, we made a submission to the government which referenced the need to consider the fire risk posed by combustible cladding.”

In its submission to the government, the association warned that “external cladding made from combustible material can often cause significant fire spread upward and between buildings, which is a particular concern for areas of high building density.”

And they were right.

Good news, the Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would throw fewer people off health insurance.

The Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act would increase the number of people without health insurance by 22 million by 2026, a figure that is only slightly lower than the 23 million more uninsured that the House version would create, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday.

Yes but a million is a million. Nothing to sneeze at.

Next year, 15 million more people would be uninsured compared with current law, the budget office said.

They should have thought of that before they decided to be those people, shouldn’t they.

Before the budget office released its report on Monday, the American Medical Association officially announced its opposition to the bill, and the National Governors Association urged the Senate to slow down.

Now, the budget office’s findings will give fodder to Democrats who were already assailing the bill as cruel. It could give pause to some Republican senators who have been mulling whether to support the bill — or it could give them an additional reason to come out against the bill altogether.

Or they could just say hey it’s the luck of the draw and support it anyway.

Meanwhile, in Turkey –

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish schools, a senior education official has said, in a move likely to raise the ire of the country’s secular opposition.

Alpaslan Durmuş, who chairs the board of education, said evolution was debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.

So if a subject is complicated, the thing to do is stop teaching it. Interesting. They might find that working against them over the long haul.

Critics of the government believe public life is being increasingly stripped of the secular traditions instilled by the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The secular opposition has long argued that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pursuing a covert Islamist agenda contrary to the republic’s founding values. Education is a particularly contentious avenue, because of its potential in shaping future generations. Small-scale protests by parents in local schools have opposed the way religion is taught.

What a lot our two great nations have in common.

The Islamist-secularist debate is just one of a series of divides in a country that two months ago narrowly approved a referendum granting President Erdoğan broad new powers.

Many in the religiously conservative element of the president’s support base admire his piety and see his ascension as a defeat of the elite “White Turks” – a westernised elite that used to dominate the upper echelons of society and was accused of looking down with disdain on poorer, more religiously inclined citizens.

Yes, that’s another thing we have in common.

H/t Ian