Cancel Culture Vs. Open Society

YouTube CEO Wojcicki: We've Cut Amount Of Time Americans Watch "Controversial Content" By 70%

YouTube CEO Wojcicki: We've Cut Amount Of Time Americans Watch "Controversial Content" By 70%

Posted By Ian Schwartz

On Date December 2, 2019

Story video link HERE 





YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki tells Lesley Stahl what the video platform is doing about hate speech in an interview Sunday on the CBS newsmagazine program '60 Minutes.'

Wojcicki told '60 Minutes' that Google employs 10,000 people to focus on "controversial content." She described their schedule, which includes time for therapy. Stahl also said there are reports that the "monitors" are "beginning to buy the conspiracy theories."

"What we really had to do was tighten our enforcement of that to make sure we were catching everything and we use a combination of people and machines," Wojcicki explained. "So Google as a whole has about 10,000 people that are focused on controversial content."

Lesley Stahl: I'm told that it is very stressful to be looking at these questionable videos all the time. And that there's actually counselors to make sure that there aren't mental problems with the people who are doing this work. Is that true?
Susan Wojcicki: It's a very important area for us. We try to do everything we can to make sure that this is a good work environment. Our reviewers work five hours of the eight hours reviewing videos. They have the opportunity to take a break whenever they want.
Lesley Stahl: I also heard that these monitors, reviewers, sometimes, they're beginning to buy the conspiracy theories.
Susan Wojcicki: I've definitely heard about that. And we work really hard with all of our reviewers to make sure that, you know, we're providing the right services for them.
Wojcicki on Section 230, stopping 70% of controversial content:
Lesley Stahl: Once you watch one of these, YouTube's algorithms might recommend you watch similar content. But no matter how harmful or untruthful, YouTube can't be held liable for any content, due to a legal protection called Section 230.

The law under 230 does not hold you responsible for user-generated content. But in that you recommend things, sometimes 1,000 times, sometimes 5,000 times, shouldn't you be held responsible for that material, because you recommend it?

Susan Wojcicki: Well, our systems wouldn't work without recommending. And so if--
Lesley Stahl: I'm not saying don't recommend. I'm just saying be responsible for when you recommend so many times.
Susan Wojcicki: If we were held liable for every single piece of content that we recommended, we would have to review it. That would mean there'd be a much smaller set of information that people would be finding. Much, much smaller.

Lesley Stahl: She told us that earlier this year, YouTube started re-programming its algorithms in the U.S. to recommend questionable videos much less and point users who search for that kind of material to authoritative sources, like news clips. With these changes Wojcicki says they have cut down the amount of time Americans watch controversial content by 70%.

Brendan O'Neill on The Collapse of Individualism

The War on Backpage

How Europe Censors Americans Speech

Congress Questions the "1984" Realspeak world of Google Search

Free Speech Online

Disturbing a Public Meeting or Assembly

Disturbing a Public Meeting or Assembly

California Penal Code 403 PC





California Penal Code 403 PC provides that "Every person who, without authority of law, willfully disturbs or breaks up any assembly or meeting that is not unlawful in its character...is guilty of a misdemeanor."

Here are examples of "disturbing a meeting" that would likely be prosecuted:
Protesting tuition hikes, a group of UC Berkeley students brings a "boombox" and blares loud music outside the chancellor's office during a meeting he's having with faculty
Protesters at a prayer vigil begin chanting loudly, making it impossible for the prayer services to go on

What About Freedom of Speech?

Penal Code 403 has the potential to infringe on peoples' First Amendment right to freedom of speech and freedom to assemble peacefully. It also gives law enforcement enormous power and discretion to decide that certain forms of protest are illegal.

Therefore courts have said that it's only the crime of disturbing a meeting if the defendant deliberately and substantially impairs the function of the meeting. Also, the nature of the disturbance must be in the defendant's behavior, not his message.

Whether it's a crime or a permissible exercise of free speech depends on what is customary for the type of meeting in question. As the California Supreme Court explained:
In applying these standards, the nature of a meeting necessarily plays a major role....The customs and usages at political conventions may countenance prolonged, raucous, boisterous demonstrations as an accepted element of the meeting process; similar behavior would violate the customs and usages of a church service. Audience participation may be enthusiastically welcomed at a bonfire football rally or an athletic contest, but considered taboo at a solemn ceremony of a fraternal order. Explicit rules governing the time and place of permitted nonviolent expressions...may in some circumstances fix the limits of permissible conduct.1

The California Jury Instruction for Penal Code 403 lays out what the three things the prosecution must prove if a case goes to trial:
The defendant is charged [in Count ] with (disturbing/ [or] breaking up) a public meeting [in violation of Penal Code section 403].

To prove that the defendant is guilty of this crime, the People must prove that:

1 The defendant intentionally committed acts that violated (implicit customs or usages of/ [or] explicit rules for governing) a public meeting;

2 The defendant knew or reasonably should have known that (his/her) acts violated those (customs[,]/ [or] usages[,]/ [or] rules);

AND

3 The defendant's acts substantially [and unlawfully] interfered with the conduct of the meeting.

You may not find the defendant guilty of this crime unless you find that the defendant's acts themselves, not the message or expressive content of the acts, substantially interfered with the conduct of the meeting.

[When deciding whether the defendant knew or reasonably should have known that (his/her) acts violated the (implicit customs or usages of/ [or] explicit rules for governing) the meeting, you may consider whether someone warned or requested the defendant to stop (his/her) activities.] 2
Penalties, Punishment and Sentencing for Disturbing
a Meeting

Penal Code 403 is a misdemeanor. As such, it carries a maximum sentence of up to six months in the county jail. However, judges have the discretion to grant summary (misdemeanor) probation with little or no actual jail time. The exact sentence in a given case depends on the circumstances of the offense and the defendant's prior criminal record, if any.

Marin IJ Editorial: A reminder of the importance of the public’s right to know

Editorial: A reminder of the importance of the public’s right to know

Tyrants who suppress speech are not worthy of respect.

By MARIN IJ EDITORIAL BOARD |
March 14, 2019 at 10:23 am


Many worthy causes latch onto weeks or months every calendar year to promote public awareness of important issues.

News editors and reporters have one, too. It usually doesn’t generate framed proclamations from town councils or boards of supervisors, who routinely pass resolutions designating months and days in honor of various causes.

But now you know: This week is national Sunshine Week, a campaign launched by the American Society of News Editors to shine a bright light on the need for open government and the importance of a free press.

The week intentionally coincides with the March 16 birth date of James Madison, one of the United States’ chief architects and a primary author of the U.S. Constitution, on which our rights and privileges are built.

In 1865, then-President Abraham Lincoln summed up our founding fathers’ vision when he spoke of “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Some 50 years later, Louis Brandeis, who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, wrote about the importance of public awareness as a “remedy” for corruption: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

It is with that objective that newspapers, radio, television and online media work to bring “sunshine” to government, important social and political issues and business.

The Independent Journal is among them, having covered news, needs and changes across Marin County for more than 150 years.

The media landscape, however, has changed dramatically as the internet has eaten away at the financial sustenance that had enabled newspapers — large and small, metropolitan and local — and TV and radio stations to maintain larger staffs to cover and report the news.


In the past 15 years, nearly one in five newspapers has stopped publishing, and thousands of journalists have lost their jobs, according to a study by Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight chair in Journalism and Media Economics at the University of North Carolina.

Digital startups haven’t had much of an impact in replacing newspapers that have vanished. And newspapers have grown thinner, as has TV and radio news coverage.

By our coverage, we seek out facts and figures we hope are of interest and of help to decision-makers and the public who have every right to information that is affecting those decisions.

Unfortunately, the concept that “the public has a right to know” is not always a top priority of our government. Decision-makers often seem to forget or avoid the adage and find themselves stumbling into controversy.

A good local example is county supervisors’ handling of plans to purchase the San Geronimo Golf Course, cooked up behind closed doors at the Civic Center and then rushed through the approval process. It generated enough public controversy that the county’s plan collapsed, and an initiative aimed at preserving the golf course will be on the ballot in 2020. The costs are being paid by taxpayers.

Had the public’s right to know been a higher priority, perhaps this issue wouldn’t have become the political train wreck it has been thus far.

see the article in the Marin IJ HERE

Marinwood CSD President Leah Green Threatens the Public with Arrest

Marinwood CSD board president, Leah Green threatens the public with arrest if they violate her interpretation of "public decorum".  A Marin County Sheriff was posted ready to arrest members of the public at the February 12, 2019 meeting.  Her interpretation of "public decorum" is so broad as to include speech that is clearly protected under the Constitution.  Language, tone and content of speech are "off limits".  Later during the public time, she repeatedly interrupts to speakers with whom she disagrees with their point of view.  Such arrogance of power must not be tolerated.  Our democracy requires both public participation and debate.  The "right to redress the government" is explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.  The meeting became tense as Green repeatedly provoked and argued with public speakers.  Though the Marin Sheriff did not respond as she hoped, it was clear that she was trying to set up a response so she could ban the attendance of me and other speakers, thus making their government meetings effectively secret.  

Marin County must intervene  to educate the Marinwood CSD to protect the rights of the citizens.

From the First Amendment to the Constitution:

The right to petition government for redress of grievances is the right to make a complaint to, or seek the assistance of, one's government, without fear of punishment or reprisals, ensured by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (1791).

The First Amendment to the Constitution: My Open letter to Marinwood CSD and Commission members.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

My Open letter to Marinwood CSD and Commission members:  

Last night during public comment I quoted from this paper on Public Speech and the First Amendment and was threatened with arrest. The claim was because I had stated the obvious point that email is free and addresses are freely obtainable in public records, there is no reason to prevent communication by email, post mail or personal delivery when all else fails. 

We can do better and I hope that you will read the linked document.  The public needs accountability from the Marinwood CSD and the First Amendment protects our right to redress the government.  

As far as I know, Marinwood CSD is the only public agency that prohibits direct contact with its elected and appointed officials.   Secret government is simply not in the best interest of democracy.   I am frankly quite surprised that the Marinwood CSD would even consider such as provision as this:

ARTICLE VIII – PUBLIC COMMUNICATION
As an advisory body to and appointed by the Board of Directors, communications and correspondences between the Commission or individual Commissioners and members of the public shall be restricted to open and public Commission meetings. Correspondences from the public to the Commission or individual Commissioners may be sent to the District Manager who shall then forward said correspondences to the Commission or individual Commissioners as appropriate and allowable. In such instance, a Commissioner may request an item be placed on a future meeting agenda for further discussion and consideration of the Commission.
Should Commissioners receive correspondence or any other form of communication directly from members of the public, at their discretion they may inform the Commission at the next Commission meeting and request an item be placed on a future meeting agenda for further discussion and consideration of the Commission.

=================

What if the public wishes to make written comments that are critical of the board or staff members?  Will this be deemed "important" to relate to the public body?   This provision is censorship plain and simple.

I believe most people still understand free speech is a basic right in the Constitution. I recommend that you revisit you knowledge of this subject.  Marinwood CSD must adhere to the law.

Legal white paper on the limitations of Public Speech and the First Amendment.  

http://www.savemarinwood.org/2019/01/may-i-address-elected-officials-at-my.html

May I address the Elected Officials at My Public Body?

This is how the left will die - Sam Harris

It is "Free Speech Week" at Berkeley.  

SPEAKING AT PUBLIC MEETINGS

By David L. Hudson Jr., First Amendment Scholar

Updated January 2013

A citizen feels strongly about an issue in the community. He or she attends a city council meeting to voice those concerns. Unfortunately, the powers that be prohibit the citizen from addressing the controversial topic. Have the citizen’s First Amendment rights been violated?

Such a scenario is not a product of a healthy imagination. It is a daily reality for countless citizens across the country.

Sometimes government officials need to silence disruptive citizens or to prohibit endless repetition. However, other times the officials may be squelching citizen speech because they want to suppress the message. This article seeks to explain the legal parameters surrounding the regulation of citizen speech.

Many government meetings are open to the public and reserve a “public comment” time for citizen commentary on issues. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals explained in its 1990 decision White v. City of Norwalk: “Citizens have an enormous First Amendment interest in directing speech about public issues to those who govern their city.” These meetings, particularly the “public comment” period, are at the very least a limited public forum during which free-speech rights receive heightened protection.

Types of public forums
In First Amendment jurisprudence, government property that has by tradition or by government operation served as a place for public expression is called a traditional public forum or a limited public forum. In a traditional public forum, such as a public street, speech receives the most protection and the government generally must allow nearly all types of speech. Restrictions on speech based on content (called content-based restrictions) are presumptively unconstitutional in a traditional public forum. This means that the government can justify them only by showing that it has a compelling state interest in imposing them, and that it has done so in a very narrowly tailored way.

At limited or designated public forums, however, the government designates certain types of subject matter. One court explained as follows: “After the government has created a designated public forum, setting boundaries on classes of speakers or topics, designated public fora are treated like traditional public fora.” This again means that content-based exclusions face a high constitutional hurdle. Even in nonpublic forums, restrictions on speech must be reasonable and viewpoint-neutral.

One must be careful in discussing the public-forum doctrine, because courts do not apply the doctrine with consistency. For example, some courts equate a limited public forum with a designated public forum. Other courts distinguish between the two, as a 2001 federal district court in Pennsylvania did in Zapach v. Dismuke. That court noted that “there is some uncertainty whether limited public fora are a subset of designated public fora or a type of nonpublic fora.”

Just because something is called a public forum doesn’t guarantee a person unfettered freedom to utter whatever is on his mind. Public bodies can limit their meetings to specified subject matters. Also, the government may impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on speech as long as those restrictions are content-neutral and are narrowly tailored to serve a significant government interest.

In other words, the government could impose a 15-minute time limit on all participants as long as it did not selectively apply the rule to certain speakers. Council members would violate the First Amendment if they allowed speakers with whom they agreed to speak a full 15 minutes, but allowed speakers they did not agree with to speak for only five minutes.

It bears stressing that First Amendment rights are not absolute during public-comment periods of open meetings. Speakers can be silenced if they are disruptive. Disruption has been defined to include far more than noisiness and interference. For example, a federal district court in Ohio wrote in Luckett v. City of Grand Prairie (2001) that “being disruptive is not confined to physical violence or conduct, but also encompasses any type of conduct that seriously violates rules of procedure that the council has established to government conduct at its meetings.”

“A speaker may disrupt a Council meeting by speaking too long, by being unduly repetitious, or by extending discussion of irrelevancies,” the 9th Circuit wrote in White v. City of Norwalk. “The meeting is disrupted because the Council is prevented from accomplishing its business in a reasonably efficient manner. Indeed, such conduct may interfere with the rights of other speakers.”

Unfortunately, many situations arise in which citizens are silenced because of the content of their speech or because they have disagreed previously with a government official. This raises the specter of censorship. Government officials may not silence speech because it criticizes them. They may not open a “public comment” period up to other topics and then carefully pick and choose which topics they want to hear. They may not even silence someone because they consider him a gadfly or a troublemaker.

In City of Madison Joint School District No. 8 v. Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, (1976) the U.S. Supreme Court said in a collective-bargaining dispute case arising out of teachers’ speaking at a board of education meeting:

“Regardless of the extent to which the true contract negotiations between a public body and its employees may be regulated — an issue we need not consider at this time — the participation in public discussion of public business cannot be confined to one category of interested individuals. To permit one side of a debatable public question to have a monopoly in expressing its views to the government is the antithesis of constitutional guarantees. Whatever its duties as an employer, when the board sits in public meetings to conduct public business and hear the views of citizens, it may not be required to discriminate between speakers on the basis of their employment, or the content of their speech.”

A federal district court in Pennsylvania explained in the 1993 decision Wilkinson v. Bensalem Township: “Allowing the state to restrict a person’s right to speak based on their identity could quickly lead to the censorship of particular points of view.”

An Ohio appeals court refused to dismiss the lawsuit of an individual who sued city officials after being thrown out of a city commission meeting for wearing a ninja mask. In City of Dayton v. Esrati (1997), the Ohio appeals court reasoned that the individual wore the mask to convey his dissatisfaction with the commission. “The public nature of the legislative process and the right of citizens to participate in and voice their opinions about that process are at the heart of democratic government,” the court wrote. “The government may not impose viewpoint-based restrictions on expression in a limited public forum unless those restrictions serve a compelling state interest and are narrowly drawn to achieve that end.”

Other issues
Courts have also been wary of laws, rules or regulations that prohibit criticism or personal attacks against government officials. A federal district court in California invalidated a school district bylaw that prohibited people at school board meetings from criticizing school district employees. In Leventhal v. Vista Unified School District (1997), the court wrote: “It seems clear that the Bylaw’s prohibition on criticism of District employees is a content-based regulation. … It is equally clear that the District’s concerns and interests in proscribing public commentary cannot outweigh the public’s fundamental right to engage in robust public discourse on school issues.”

Similarly, a federal district court in Virginia struck down a school board bylaw that prohibited personal attacks during public comments at meetings. (SeeBach v. School Board of the City of Virginia Beach, 2001.)

However, a higher court – the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – questioned the reasoning of the federal district court decision in Bach. In Steinburg v. Chesterfield County Planning Commission, the 4th Circuit wrote: “We conclude that a content-neutral policy against personal attacks is not facially unconstitutional insofar as it is adopted and employed to serve the legitimate public interest in a limited forum of decorum and order.” The appeals court reasoned that the policy was content-neutral, as people could still present their viewpoints and messages disagreeing with certain policies without resorting to personal attacks.

Another kind of restriction on citizen speech at public meetings involves residency. One federal appeals court determined that a city council rule prohibiting nonresidents from addressing the city council was constitutional. InRowe v. City of Cocoa (2004), a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit determined that a resident rule was reasonable and viewpoint neutral. “A bona fide residency requirement … does not restrict speech based on a speaker’s viewpoint but instead restricts speech at meetings on the basis of residency.”

Conclusion
When a government decides to offer a “public comment” period at an open meeting, it provides that citizens may exercise their First Amendment rights. Government officials can limit comments to the relevant subject matter, control disruptive or overly repetitive speakers and impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on speech. However, when government officials create a public-comment forum, they have created a limited public forum in which greater free-speech protections apply. The government may not silence speakers on the basis of their viewpoint or the content of their speech. The government must treat similarly situated speakers similarly. In essence, the government must live up to the values embodied in the First Amendment.

Citizens object to Plan for High Fees for public records.

Marin County: Furor kills plan to charge for public records

County Finance Director Roy Given. (Courtesy County of Marin) 

By Richard Halstead, Marin Independent Journal

POSTED: 08/22/17, 4:43 PM PDT | UPDATED: 10 MINS AGO

37 COMMENTS

A county proposal to start charging about $114 an hour to respond to public records requests was withdrawn Tuesday after the idea elicited a flurry of public protest.

County Finance Director Roy Given told the Board of Supervisors during its weekly meeting that it was never his intent to charge the general public for information requests under the California Public Records Act or the federal Freedom of Information Act.  See Article HERE

Stonewalling of public information by Marinwood CSD leaves us with little recourse

except a legal remedy. It is madness and likely in violation of the Brown Act to charge exorbitant fees.

How can citizens be informed and educated about their government if only the wealthy have access?