Trump's call to detect mass shooters on social media before they act raises civil liberty questions. After mass shootings in [Dayton, Ohio](, and [El Paso, Texas](, this weekend, President Donald [Trump called on social media companies]( to âdevelop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.â Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are already detecting and deleting terrorist content â whatâs new is that Trumpâs statement specifically called for them to work âin partnershipâ with the Department of Justice and law enforcement agencies. This raises some questions over whether such a partnership would be effective, and what impact it could have on Americansâ civil liberties.
- Itâs probably not going to work: If such a tool is developed and used as Trump has suggested â to try to predict mass shooters before they act â itâs unlikely that it would work. What's more likely is that all sorts of speech, and people, would get swept up in technology dragnets. As Electronic Frontier Foundation technology projects director Jeremy Gillula told Recode: âTech is not a magic solution to societyâs problems. You have to fix society at large.â
[[Rani Molla / Recode](]
[Internet domain masking service Cloudflare cuts ties with 8chan.](The service, which offered cybersecurity protection for 8chan, a message board that's become a haven for people to post anything they want, barring copyright violations and child porn, said the site has become âa cesspool of hate.â The El Paso shooting suspect was at least the third mass shooter in 2019 to announce their plans on 8chan. 8chan seems to have switched domain registrars to the alt-right friendly registrar Epik, â[whose CEO Rob Monster]( aided the alt-right-centered social media platform Gab after multiple tech companies ended their relationship with it.â
- Will booting 8chan fix anything? 8chan is merely âa window opening out to a much broader landscape of racism, radicalization, and terrorism. Shutting down the site is unlikely to eradicate this new extremist culture, because 8chan is anywhere,â [writes BuzzFeed News](. Thereâs no special algorithms or tech behind 8chan; itâs just a platform whose users radicalize other users.
[[Aja Romano / Vox](]
[While weâre at it, video games donât cause violent crime.](Voxâs Matthew Yglesias writes that President Trump and Rep. Kevin McCarthyâs argument over the weekend that violent video games lead to violent attacks âflies in the face of the basic reality that the United States has a much higher murder rate than any other rich country, even though video games are widely available in Europe and Japan.â The real cause? Guns.
- What does the research say? Yglesias writes that itâs critical to understand that the best research available on the subject demonstrates that video games do not lead to violent crime, and actually, âtime spent playing video games reduces the amount of time that young men can get into mischief.â
[[Matthew Yglesias / Vox](]
[Another Google employee is accusing the company of retaliation, this time for being pregnant.](A woman posted a memo to an internal message board for expecting and new mothers claiming that Google is discriminating and retaliating against her for being pregnant. According to Vice News, the memo âsays that her manager made discriminatory remarks about pregnant women. She says she reported the manager to human resources, which she alleges spurred retaliation.â Vice also reports that the woman was told that her maternity leave might âstress the teamâ and ârock the boat.â
- (Not so) fun fact: This week marks the two-year anniversary of former [Google employee James Damoreâs]( viral memo. Damore wrote that women are ânaturally less disposed to be good engineers compared to menâ in a 10,000-word essay that was meant to encourage Google to stop diversity efforts.
[[Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Jason Koebler / Vice News](]
[Meanwhile, also at Google: YouTube removed the account of a 14-year-old girl after she uploaded an anti-LGBTQ video.](A girl who goes by the name Soph, whose YouTube account has almost a million followers, posted a 12-minute anti-gay video titled âPride and Prejudiceâ on the platform last week. In the video, Soph encourages her followers to âmake sure to blame me in your manifestos,â referencing the practice of posting to 8chan prior to committing attacks like the El Paso shooting suspect did over the weekend. YouTube said it terminated the account under its strike system (three violations of its Community Guidelines in 90 days).
- Some background: According to BuzzFeed, Soph threatened to murder YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki earlier this year. Still, she âhad managed to keep her account active, though YouTube did levy a temporary suspension and demonetize her account.â
[[Joseph Bernstein / BuzzFeed News](]
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[Facebook is building tech to read your mind. The ethical implications are staggering.](
Our brains are perhaps the final privacy frontier.
[[Sigal Samuel](]
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[Rocket ride-shares, courtesy of SpaceX.](ð ð
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