Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads-boycott-verizon/verizon-suspends-advertising-on-facebook-joins-growing-boycott-idUSKBN23W3HK <comment><USER3> Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because of COVID-19, so they're using this a way to redirect focus away from the negative impact on their business.

All of the companies doing this right now are 'pausing spend' rather than redirecting. They're reducing their marketing budgets and pointing the finger at Facebook so no one looks too closely at the implications of their reduced ad spend.

<comment><USER4> >Sounds like Verizon's Facebook advertising spend is losing value because if COVId-19

"We're pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable,"

Doesn't sound like it has anything to do with Covid-19 to me but rather advertisers don't want to spend money advertising on a platform promoting hate speech.

But let's say this was a conspiracy by all these companies to save their ad dollars because they are being wasted on FB, why would they be afraid of the "implications of their reduced ad spend"? Certainly there is nothing wrong with these companies coming out and saying we are not going to spend money advertising on FB because it's a waste of money. What else is the implication?

<comment><USER5> I see it as a "kill two birds" situation. Corporate ethics is a very different beast from human ethics. Getting any decision through a board room typically requires at least two entirely plausible value propositions.

<comment><USER6> No, it takes no decision from the board to cut ad spending due to COVID, which is happening universally.

The bit about 'Facebook' is a very secondary thing and it's not in the same category of 'birds'.

One is existential to the nature of the business, the other is a PR line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really don't understand this protest at all. If they really care about this, why aren't they pulling from YouTube and Google? Which has very very bad comment sections? I'm not for big corporations calling for people to police speech. Patagonia boycotted Facebook, but they have 13 factories in China...a country with concentration camps for Muslims and political prisoners. A lot of corporate good will falls on deaf ears for me, especially when they have been so silent on issues in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. Money talks, if this weren't a profitable thing to do, they wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER8> Choosing how to spend your own money is hardly 'policing speech'. It sounds more like it's not that you don't understand it but you're set on framing it in a specific way. As you point out, this can lead to hearing loss.

<comment><USER9> The premise is that the advertisers are pulling out bc they are disappointed with Facebook's relative lack of policing speech

<comment><USER10> Yes, it's Facebooks right to run their site as they see fit, and it's the right of all consumers and companies to associate with Facebook or not based on their own feelings about Facebook. End consumers are also free to express their opinions about Facebook, Verizon, and their relative agreements or lack thereof.

The marketplace of ideas is a pretty messy place.

<comment><USER11> Sounds good until those consumers form echo chambers that amplify crazy crap and then elect Actually Crazy people (on the left and right).

Then it's time for some guard rails.

<comment><USER10> How Facebook was used against American elections would not work if American democracy was healthy.

And of course, once actual crazy people control the government, who is going to install and maintain the guard rails?

<comment><USER7> There is no real evidence that the Russian campaign on Facebook was effective at all in 2016. I believe the entire campaign wasn't necessarily to effect the outcome, but to sow doubt on the outcome. Putin just wanted chaos. The real poll shift came when Comey made his statement on the Clinton email server within weeks of the election.

I'm 100% in favor of Facebook policing things like the "Plandemic" nonsense, but that's not what these companies are asking for. They are essentially asking for a partisan tilt to the platform...when the platform itself (imo) should strive to be a neutral party.

<comment><USER10> Alas, how do you define neutrality? What happens if Plandemic hypothetically becomes associated with a partisan party? How can Facebook be neutral there?

I agree they should try to be neutral, but I don't know if neutrality is even possible in a lot of cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The outrage in this thread doesn't make sense to me. This is how advertising works, it's a business decision based on business interests, Verizon doesn't care about any of this one way or another, they are simply taking a stance based on pressure from their customers. What so many of you flippantly dismiss as an outrage mob is a coalition of concerned citizens who believe Facebook is _wrong_ for allowing dishonest political content to disseminate unchecked. It's fine to disagree, but just repeating "censorship" is not convincing, other values exist and compete with the human right to shit-post on social media.

<comment><USER13> I don't think people are asking for a FB boycott over "dishonesty", despite the way it is being framed. You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content. The current Facebook boycott is Stop Hate For Profit and is focused around hate speech (using the definition of hate speech as defined by the left).

I lean quite heavily left, I'm Australian and my political compass aligns me the most with our Greens party. I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very obvious that the left is asking for some double standards. Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their platform [1]. I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side is being completely silenced in the mainstream media. I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices.

I hope people turn out and vote in the coming US elections because I suspect the Trump voters are going to come in huge numbers. The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016. ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared to admit they were going to vote Trump.

[1] - [https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709](https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709)

<comment><USER12> > _You literally have organisations like Sleeping Giants whose mission is to > convince sponsors to dump sites that host conservative content_

So what? There are a lot of controversial political organizations out there, corporations don't have to listen to them unless they feel it is in their best interest as a business.

> _I follow news sources from both the left and the right and it seems very > obvious that the left is asking for some double standards._

I think that's fair criticism, but twitter has a stated desire to draw the line _somewhere_ , so if you disagree with where they draw it I think it's fair to call them out or ask them to do better, but just keep in mind that fairness is an impossible ask, so imperfect moderation that incrementally improves is the best we can hope for on that website. Yet, I'd suggest we not hope for anything and just let twitter be twitter, there are many better places to be on the internet. Certainly, the conversation we're having right now would be impossible on twitter.

> _Twitter is celebrated online for being woke yet no one sees anything wrong > with them for allowing people to commit assault and share it on their > platform_

The only people celebrating twitter's wokeness is twitter, everyone else just rolls their eyes because twitter is a self-indulgent dramafest with very little in the way of productive discourse, it is perhaps the popular platform least suitable to substantive discussion due to the mechanics of the site.

> > [https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709](https://twitter.com/tariqnasheed/status/1273092750699720709)

I don't see the problem from twitter's perspective. Yeah, I agree it's assault, but the poster didn't commit the assault as your phrasing suggests, it's a video of a real event and there is a discussion about the event with a diversity of opinions represented in the comments.

> _I actually find the current US political climate quite worrying, one side > is being completely silenced in the mainstream media._

It's simply false to state that conservatives are being "completely silenced". Every influential conservative you can name has millions of followers on twitter and there are many millions of conservative users all over twitter which is obvious to anyone who has ever used it. Yes, there are more liberals on twitter, but you can't blame them for simply existing on the website in those numbers, if the site is too woke for your tastes just don't use it.

> _I think Democracy needs to have multiple voices._

Conservatives overwhelmingly control the federal government and state governments around the country, so I find it difficult to seriously entertain the idea that leftist bias on twitter represents a threat to the conservative voice in democracy.

> _The conditions of one side being silenced are very similar to 2016_

People see what they want to see, conservatives are more influential now than at any other time in the last 50 years

> _ALL the polls showed a landslide for Hillary because people were too scared > to admit they were going to vote Trump._

The polls were more or less correct, Hillary Clinton received millions of more votes than Trump, it is only that Clinton's complacency provided Trump's campaign with the opportunity to outmaneuver her in critical swing states, Trump managed to achieve the unlikely odds, but they were still unlikely, it's an open secret that even Trump himself mostly expected to lose.

<comment><USER13> I stand corrected in that I do not know the current makeup of the state and federal seats in the US. The current media coming out the US implies a huge Democrat power base, at least in the power to influence company policy. I will admit that it can be hard to get an accurate gauge of this, despite browsing both sides, because my own media is very left. I assume it's my own biases that make me disregard some of the rights media.

That being said, some of the media coming from the right seems crazy. If the people that watch that have control then that's crazy news to me. America seems so familiar due to Hollywood but at the same time it's so foreign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They own Yahoo and AOL, I'm claiming this is just in-house strategy presented in a theatrical ceremony.

They also own things like HuffPost, Engadget and TechCrunch... It's no secret that Facebook has siphoned news revenue without having to actually do the hard and pricey work of journalism.

Someone probably drew a chart of all of Verizon's properties and figured out that Facebook is an expensive middleman between them.

I'm not a big fan of Verizon but they certainly _do know_ how to run a business.

</comment><comment><USER15> For all the people mentioning the free speech ramifications, I would like to point to the recommendations from the group leading this boycott[1]. It doesn't seem like any of this is related to free speech. They are asking for extra moderation and support. They also are asking for Facebook to stop profiting from hate speech and misinformation, but they stop short of asking for changes to any policy regarding the removal of content. What is wrong with these requests?

Provide more support to people who are targets of racism, antisemitism and hate

* Create a separate moderation pipeline for users who express that they have been targeted because of specific identity characteristics such as race or religion. This pipeline must include experts on various forms of identity-based hate.

* Create a threshold of harm on the platform where they will put a target of hate and harassment in touch with a live Facebook employee to help them address their concerns.

* Release data from their existing reporting form around identity-based hate. For example, how many reports of hate speech based on race or ethnicity did they get in 2019? How many, and what kinds of actions were taken?

Stop generating ad revenue from misinformation and harmful content.

* Create internal mechanisms (for every media format on every Facebook platform) that automatically remove all ads from content labeled as misinformation or hate.

* Change the advertising portal on all Facebook products to tell advertisers how often their ads were shown next to content that was later removed for misinformation or hate.

* Provide refunds to advertisers for those advertisements

* Prove it: send out an audited transparency report specifically addressing these suggestions.

Increase Safety in Private Groups on Facebook.

* At the request of a member of a private group, provide at least one Facebook-affiliated moderator per group with more than 150 members. Consider more moderators for even larger groups.

* Create an internal mechanism to automatically flag content in private groups associated with extremist ideologies for human review. This content and associated groups would then be reviewed by internal subject matter experts on extremism.

[1] - [http://stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations](http://stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations)

<comment><USER16> I think the concern is that some people working in tech companies and media may define "hate" as anything to the right of Karl Marx, even well-researched centrist positions.

If this is true, then I can easily see why policing of political content is seen as censorship.

<comment><USER15> Facebook already has a definition for hate speech and this boycott is not asking for any changes to that definition so complaints about how anyone but Facebook defines hate speech is mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER13> They are asking for "experts", who will likely come from the extremely left leaning Social Science departments. If they attempted to fill those slots with centrists then they'd be decryed for not using the "real experts" or something similar.

On most platforms racism is only defined using the systematic defintion and not the traditional definition [1]. Calling a white person a Karen seems to have definite racist qualities but it's perfectly acceptable for some reason. Calling someone a N __ __* means people applaud when you get beat up.

I'll trust the "experts" when racism is applied in both directions.

[1] - prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group

<comment><USER17> > They are asking for "experts", who will likely come from the extremely left > leaning Social Science departments.

It's peak anti-intellectualism to question someone's credentials and an entire grouping of fields of study just because their educated opinions don't coincide with your own.

> On most platforms racism is only defined using the systematic defintion and > not the traditional definition [1].

Why are these two definitions at conflict in your mind? Furthermore why is that the definition? Why not Wikipedia's?

"Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another."

Your definition would seem more in-line with prejudice at large, not racism which carries a very specific historical context.

> Calling a white person a Karen seems to have definite racist qualities but > it's perfectly acceptable for some reason. Calling someone a N* means people > applaud when you get beat up.

Calling someone a Karen doesn't carry even remotely the amount of history or hatred as the other. No one's been called a Karen as they were being lynched, as their hat was being knocked of their head for not removing it as a white person walked by, for being relegated to the back of the bus, or to being bought and sold as slaves.

It's frankly perverse you'd compare the two.

<comment><USER13> Why do you think their opinions don't coincide with mine? I support the extreme left party in my nation and I vote. I'm also open minded enough to follow news from the left and the right so I can attempt to understand all viewpoints as I feel democracy relies on having many different views to bring balance. When I look at the right wing news I actually see some of the pain that racial slurs like Karen have on real people.

When you watch the both sides of the news you realise that there is racist, horrible behaviour occuring on both sides. I do see a huge imbalance in social power though. I believe that stacking committees with extreme left views will end up harmful due to few checks and balances.

I know about racial history in my country. Some of my black ancestors were taken from their families as babies to be raised proper by whites, google "Australian Stolen Generation" if you want to read more. That's the power language like N __ __* had. What I don 't want is for my children to be attacked because of their white skin due to the power of words in the modern world.

Have a look at the post I made 20 minutes ago if you want to see a link that shows the power of Karen and the pain it can cause people.

<comment><USER17> > Why do you think their opinions don't coincide with mine?

You used scare quotes, my dude.

Furthermore, you suggested that:

> If they attempted to fill those slots with centrists then they'd be decryed > for not using the "real experts" or something similar.

You're suggesting conspiracy.

> What I don't want is for my children to be attacked because of their white > skin due to the power of words in the modern world.

They're not attacking Karens because they're white. They're attacking Karens because a lot of people have worked dogshit retail jobs where they've been accosted by people aggrieved over the most inconsequential things imaginable. If that's what you associate with having white skin, then you're harboring racist beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Private company tells other private company which speech they should be > censoring

Welcome to the new era of information folks. You thought private companies were too powerful before, well, guess what? You've now given them the power to control almost all forms of communication.

"But, but, private companies should be able to decide who they want on their platform! What about the free market?"

Wake the hell up. Read up on monopoly. And then read about the network effect. And then go and try starting your own social network that believes in freedom of speech, and convince 1 billion people to join. Then come back and tell me that the private communication industry is a free market.

<comment><USER19> It's extremely frustrating being someone left leaning that believes in the principals of free speech.

It seems like all of the alternatives to the censored platforms, are naturally majority populated by the right.

This polarizing effect squeezes out any productive centrist discussion or debate.

<comment><USER20> The people asking for more moderation are not leftist. Would you believe Verizon is a left leaning company?

<comment><USER21> "Verizon" isn't the one making the decision here. Probably their marketing people are, and I'm gonna take a wild guess that their marketing department is staffed by stereotypically latté drinking art graduate types - the sort of people who believe academics are always right, and who get conspicuously upset about racism and sexism whilst loudly hating white men. All corporations have ended up with people like that, and even when CEOs disagree with them they prefer not to pick that fight because letting them set up diversity committees or whatever seems cheap relative to cracking down.

Now this stuff is moving beyond hosting seminars on white fragility, I wonder when or if the decision making classes will rediscover their own moral backbones and push back on it. There's really no moral virtue to be found in actions like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We need to get corporate interests as far away from political speech as possible.

It's honestly a disgrace these companies are trying to boycott Facebook for not wanting to censor our speech.

We all know the phase "hate speech" is interchangeable with anything that's not deemed advertiser friendly to these corporations.

You think these companies want to advertise against a status update critical of the BLM movement? Of course not. If Facebook buckles to these demands they'll be boycotting Facebook to censor posts critical of political movements they don't like next. We need to stop acting as if billion dollar corporations have our best interests at heart.

<comment><USER23> Corporations want their customers to buy their stuff. It helps when you don't offend your customers. Are you proposing that the government force companies not to discriminate where they advertise?

<comment><USER22> Of course not. They can advertise where they want. Were they fairer in its implementation I'd say YouTube's "not advertisement" friendly model is a good way to handle these problems.

My issue here is their intention is to boycott Facebook into censoring my speech. If they simply suspended advertising then fine, but they're claiming they're doing it as part of a wider protest to force companies to regulate what I can say online.

I don't have a perfect answer, but I do believe more regulation is needed. These "platforms" are the modern equivalent to 20th century communication technologies like the telephone. We should be extremely careful about allowing a service as important as Facebook the legal right to curate our speech so that we're advertiser friendly.

<comment><USER23> No the Internet is the communication technology. Not Facebook. You are free to create a blog and say whatever you like. If it's something worthwhile, you should be able to get a following. There were people getting their messages out through grass roots campaigns way before the internet was a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> While I do believe the Facebook boycott is real, Verizon has a fairly large advertising/media business of their own and so is competitor to Facebook. Not mentioning this as part of reporting isn't great journalism.

</comment><comment><USER25> The 'brand safety' shoe was about to drop for a couple years, and by definition it requires Facebook start deciding what's bad and what's good.

I hope Zuck has a plan, it's uncharacteristic for him to commit this hard to an approach and not have a way out...

<comment><USER26> If facebook gives in to moderation based on silicon valley politics they're done for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not American, I'm not in Facebook either. I've read TFA and still don't have a clue what is Facebook criticized for. What's that hate speech and who's doing it?

<comment><USER28> The triggering event, as I understand it, is they did not censor the President of the United States who said something to the effect of riots lead to death. There's two ways to interpret this. One way is that eventually people will get hurt in some way if riots continue. Another way to interpret it was as a death threat to protesters. FB's position was that even if it was a threat, that the protesters needed to know that the President was going to send in the military to come kill them. So they did not censor or otherwise flag the post. This is perceived as FB promoting violence.

<comment><USER27> Thank you for the clarification. Now I remember reading something about an "antifa" flag, that seemed unconclusive... please, remember I'm a foreigner so my judgement may lack some insights you have.

Actually all this seems absurd. Trump is a politician, actually a public officer, so censoring his speech is a alien concept to me. In my country certain politicians IMHO deserve jail for the outrageous nonsense they say everyday, promoting hate and justifying violence.

But nobody ask newspapers or tv to stop giving them interviews or air time. In a sense Facebook or Twitter are a kind of media, so even if the messages are disgusting, they're still relevant and the public should see them... and act accordingly when the time to vote comes.

It's other politicians who should criticize that speech and put a moderate counterpoint against it. Acting against the messenger seems misguided.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER29> >Now I remember reading something about an "antifa" flag, that seemed unconclusive...

You're probably thinking of this case recently where Trump ran ads on Facebook which called out antifa and used the same symbol for them that the Nazis used for leftist political prisoners sent to concentration camps. The ads even had other Nazi dogwhistles included too. Facebook took down those ads.

[https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/06/trump- ups...](https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/06/trump-upside-down- triangle-antifa/)

I find it outright amazing how much charity people around HN are still extending Trump.

<comment><USER27> I have no sympathy for the man and, trust me, I'm not playing dumb. I'm genuinely unable to see the logic in all this.

In a majority system you win by seducing the centrist vote. Why would anybody think it's a good idea to be associated with nazis? Or for that matter, dissolving the police, so his adversaries are trying to outdo him with similar egregious proposals.

What does Biden say about the lootings and the defunding? I can understand that extremist groups somehow justify the violence, but not a presidential candidate or his party. Verizon seems to be a phone company or gigantic ISP. Why does that kind of company takes sides in this fight?

What I find funniest is that over here even media in the opposite end of political spectrum complain when the government leaves them out of election adds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am very nervous that the main US political outcomes of 2020 will be a reduction in free speech and expansion of executive powers.

<comment><USER31> In other news, the US has been downgraded to "flawed democracy"

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index)

<comment><USER32> By The Economist, so it means nothing.

<comment><USER33> What's wrong with The Economist? Whom do you trust?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This sounds similar to the advertiser boycott that led to demonetization of YouTube channels that were pushing hate content.

I don't know what action FB realistically can take to similarly disincentivize hate content or violence promoting though, since its primary content producers (people who post) are not paid - they are posting for their own sake - <USER2> there is nothing to demonetize.

Maybe they can follow Twitter's lead and flag content with warnings, but that seems unlikely given their current stance.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yes, there a number of reasons to reduce an ad spend, but they also made a point of a key reason:

"Verizon Communications Inc said on Thursday it was pausing advertising on Facebook Inc in July, in support of a campaign that called out the social media giant for not doing enough to stop hate speech on its platforms."

Short, but insightful article. Worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER36> Fiduciary responsibility. The company would not boycott Facebook unless there was at least a business incentive in place. Meaning, even if there are moral concerns, they are entirely secondary to or constrained by business concerns. The opportunism isn't in this subordination, but in the PR that tries to present this as a purely moral decision.

(In any case, the concept and actual use of "hate speech" is dangerous. Laws regulating language that incites violence already exist, but "hate speech" is a phrase often unjustly used to silence people that those using the phrase don't agree with. The better response is to respond with better speech that addresses it or to ignore it.)

</comment><comment><USER37> FB is also not doing enough to stop spreading false misinformation and propaganda. I have seen a anti-EU page sharing lots of untrue and simplified claims. It is censoring people so after I asked them to provide sources and proofs of these claims or attempted to explain some of them myself, they blocked me. They keep only anti-EU fan comments there. And I can't even report the page to FB as there is no "misinformation" report category. This is slowly polarizing the society and amplifying anger.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would boycott Facebook for other reasons than them not boycotting Trump ads.

Facebook is simply a TERRIBLE company. They make us lose billions of hours and created a mental health epidemic, especially in teenagers that cannot stop comparing themselves with other's fake life on Facebook. That is a good enough reason to not want to advertise on that platform.

<comment><USER39> Accusing Facebook in that it's like accusing sugar companies in diabetes. Not saying the problem doesn't exist, but maybe they just abuse Facebook? I'm spending around 10 minutes a week in my fb account, checking on friends and family, that's mostly enough. What stops you from doing the same?

<comment><USER40> Some books you might benefit from reading on this topic:

"Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us"

"The Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu

<comment><USER39> Thanks for the recommendation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> They can boycott all they want small and medium-sized businesses make up majority of Facebook's advertising revenue.

</comment><comment><USER42> They should also boycott that Facebook spreads so much misinformation like antivax and antimask to millions of people

</comment><comment><USER43> None of this matters unless the end users stop using FB. If not, advertisers will keep spending money on ads.

</comment><comment><USER44> I love hearing these news. I cut all the ties with Facebook created products. Feel good.

</comment><comment><USER45> The word _boycott_ suggests a grassroots campaign against a company. But these are companies attacking individuals. Restricting their ability to trade, make a living and communicate.

What we have on our hands is a _trade blockade_.

</comment><comment><USER46> We want Facebook to censor speech on Facebook!

But oh not all speech just some speech that we don't like. Only we are allowed to define the type of speech we don't like. And we reserve the right to change at any time.

So, please just censor speech that we don't like. On this day. At this hour. At this minute. And next minute we'll tell you what to censor next.

<comment><USER47> Hate speech is _widely_ viewed as a legitimate exception to free expression, along with other classic examples of things like yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. Not by every country to be sure, but by _many_ democracies.

You're portraying this as some kind of whim that changes with people's moods, but that's a complete, total, 100% straw man. There are decades of legislation and jurisprudence, particularly in Europe, that can be used to define hate speech in a stable way.

<comment><USER46> What is hate speech? Can you define it for me? Better yet, use legal definitions.

<comment><USER48> As the OP mentioned, many countries, including democratic ones, do have laws around hate speech. Wikipedia has a few words about it in English: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France#The...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France#The_penal_code)

You also have laws against defamation that consider it illegal to defame people based on race and other criteria (since the 19th century in France).

<comment><USER49> The last such law in France was just cancelled for being unconstitutional.

And in practice they are impossible to enforce for a platform like Facebook, since in the end it's a judge who has to decide what is, and what is not hate speech.

In practice, enforcement is selective and the sentences are never formally enforced since it would create de-facto political prisoners, which gives a bad image to a democratic country.

So I'm not sure they're a good example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> So in this case, the enemy of my enemy is or is not my friend?

<comment><USER51> More like "politics makes strange bedfellows", Charles Dudley Warner [0]

[0] - [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Dudley_Warner](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Dudley_Warner)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Meanwhile fb doesnt even have a favebook advertisement support phone line. Otherwise I could have call and stay on the line for 5hours.

</comment><comment><USER6> So when Nike boycotts Verizon because some ugly site uses Verizon internet services ... and wants Verizon to stop allowing XYZ-speech on their network ... what then?

FYI this is mostly not executive fighting - this is PR and Comms firms literally duking it out.

And often they are the same comms firms.

Literally interns from Edelman NY with client A giving bullets to their client to fire at company B who's PR firm is ... Edelman LA, where some douche intern has to configure a response.

We should put the PR firms in their own echo chamber and let them sort it out.

</comment><comment><USER53> Conspiracy theory: These advertiser boycotts are just making it cheaper for the Trump campaign to buy targeted political ads.

<comment><USER54> Doesn't even matter if this is intended, it is the outcome. 2020 really is the year of peak stupidity - I hope 2021 is an improvement.

<comment><USER55> > 2020 really is the year of peak stupidity

It doesn't matter where you are, what you believe, what you do, or what you have - 2020 is peak stupidity.

No one has gotten out of this better than they went in. We're just seeing who lost the most credibility. My money on the WHO that was nearly without criticism 6 months ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I honestly don't understand this

</comment><comment><USER57> So no company pays attention to Project Veritas exposing FB for their bias? "Anti-Defamation League" is known for running hit pieces on everyone that does not bend over to the narrative and is actually a defamation organisation. How are people buying this stuff?

<comment><USER58> No, nobody pays attention to an organized effort to push propaganda. I question the health of anybody who believes in Veritas

<comment><USER59> Facebook does. They instantly fired HR person who appeared in the most recent video.

<comment><USER60> Of course they did. They're not a free speech platform and obviously they're concerned with their advertising money

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Increasingly, I just want a completely decentralized social networking toolchain, where people can subscribe to the moderation and filtration they like, and nothing can be universally censored.

<comment><USER62> But what happens when the moderation and filtration mechanisms are inevitably corrupted?

<comment><USER63> If it's fully decentralized why wouldn't the user change their selected mechanisms?

If all they have is voluntary subscriptions to others' feeds, in what manner can that be corrupted?

If they voluntarily chose to subscribe to a centralized third party as a data source or moderator how is that different from what we currently have? (And why wouldn't they just switch?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Consumers should boycott Facebook too. Switch to Friendica, a distributed social network. You can invite all your friends via email.

</comment><comment><USER65> They will come right back to Facebook in some months. No one ever remembers these things.

</comment><comment><USER66> Sigh, more politics intermingled with doing business. Just provide a service and leave it be.

<comment><USER67> Business is political. It's only can appear apolitical if business activity is so in harmony with the political status-quo that political conflict and negotiation is almost wholly absent.

Facebook is obviously involved politically, and has been well before 2016. Hell, how many millions do you think they spend on political lobbying? Why do they fill so many of their high-up executive positions with ex-politicians?

<comment><USER68> > Business is political. It's only can appear apolitical if business activity > is so in harmony with the political status-quo that political conflict and > negotiation is almost wholly absent.

100% agree.

It's amazing how techy-engineering-types are so unaware of how interdependent systems and institutions in the real world are. Especially given the nature of tech/engineering itself.

<comment><USER67> To be honest I think it's common for such types to have had essentially no higher education in politics and civics. Saying business is or should be apolitical is such a nonsensical opinion that you'd get laughed out of the room at university.

The dominant political ideology in tech hubs is _so_ dominant that it's usually invisible. Now that big tech is getting challenged political, some people think returning to the status quo would be to free themselves from political involvement.

The work you do 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 40 years is the biggest political thing in your entire life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Finally corporate companies are becoming woke in an age of bias recruiting

</comment><comment><USER70> Many of the comments in this thread do not understand the concept of free speech from a legal perspective.

Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want _on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation_ you want.

on a side note - these are super dog whistle comments, and I'm surprised the mods are ok with them.

<comment><USER71> >Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want.

Most people understand this. It doesn't need to keep being repeated in every thread.

Facebook isn't bobsmessageboard.com. The debate is over whether it is a de facto public communications utility and should be regulated as such, or if it is private company that is free to do whatever it wants on it's platform.

<comment><USER55> I'm quite free market... but in this case Google with its infinite resources tried to take just a piece of the Facebook pie and failed miserably.

If Google can't compete with them - then SocialSite5000 startup has no shot in hell.

Facebook is unfortunately a monopoly. We can wait it out, but they are in a position to keep their advantage for generations so I don't think that's entirely reasonable.

If there are a monopoly, then they should be held to the ideals of common carrier and free speech and platform vs publisher, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Keep politics out of business. Stop caving into activist pressure (whether internal or external) and online outrage. That isn't representative of what customers care about or want. Companies entering cultural/ideological wars (like Verizon) are doing so based on the voices of a small vocal minority of people.

By adopting such stances, these companies are doing the silent majority of their customers a huge disservice and alienating them. As an example, I don't think Facebook is wrong to operate neutrally (unlike Twitter), and I am not supportive of this campaign to get advertisers off Facebook. However, my opinion on the matter is invisible to Verizon. Verizon doesn't have any idea that numerous customers might be okay with them advertising on Facebook, because most customers are not willing to sacrifice their life to engage in activism. My opinion still should matter to Verizon. They should poll a large and diverse sample of their customers before committing to political actions like this.

Put another way, companies like Verizon are likely being misled by sophisticated organization, campaigning, and manufactured outrage. In the absence of knowing their entire customer base intimately, they should stay out of political issues, operate neutrally, and just do what maximizes their own value. Leave the rest to the public theater of politics (meaning elections, legislation, etc.).

<comment><USER73> > only do what maximizes their own financials

So if a company feels like they can acquire more customers or employees, or gain positive publicity by taking certain actions and expressing their right to free speech, shouldn't they be able to? This is why businesses take political stances in the first place. A company would be doing a disservice to shareholders by _not_ taking an action which could improve financials.

Before gay marriage was legal, for example, companies would stand up for gay rights and offer gay employees equal benefits, because it would help with talent acquisition and expand their pool of possible employees. This is a "political" stance with clear selfish, financial implications.

You have the right to not shop or procure services at a business which does not support your ideology, but others have their own right to choose companies based on the actions they take. That's the beauty of the free market.

Regulating or otherwise stifling companies' speech and actions in this way simply hinders progress and the marketplace of ideas.

<comment><USER72> You make some great points and I mostly agree with you.

I think my take is that Verizon taking this stance (on Facebook advertising) does not maximize their own financials. I think they're operating in the fog of (political) war and are giving more weight to this campaign against Facebook than they should. In doing so, they're likely alienating customers who are center-left, centrist, or conservative. Will those users switch away to a different provider? Realistically they won't do so in large numbers. But my gut tells me an even smaller number of customers would adopt Verizon specifically because they took a position on this issue, so they aren't really going to gain anything from this either. Unless of course, the play here is to weaken Facebook so that Verizon has a better shot at being a content provider themselves - in which case this is a wholly selfish move.

As for the regulation of companies' speech. I think I agree with you except in the case where companies become too big. I see Facebook, Twitter, Google (particularly with YouTube), and Amazon as being too big. These companies control so much of information flow in our societies that they are the new town square. Enough of societal discourse takes place on their platform that their acts of censorship are as problematic as governmental acts of censorship. I'd be OK with a solution that retains companies' speech but with revised/enforced anti-trust laws that breaks up big tech. I also think there's a reasonable argument to treat some of these companies as utilities and hold them to a standard of neutrality we'd expect from public agencies.</comment></comment></comment>


How Microsoft Research foresaw Google's 'Priority Inbox' feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/08/how_microsoft_research_foresaw_googles_latest_gmail_feature.html

<comment><USER2> So Microsoft invented and implemented this, and rolled it out to their own employees, without ever putting it into a product? Seems crazy, but maybe they found it just wasn't a feature people wanted/needed/could understand? I hope they don't make trouble with the patents though -- I wonder if patents could be invalidated if someone makes no effort to commercialise the invention or get someone else to. It'd be very hard to measure, but it would discourage trolling and patenting too soon, and encourage innovation to actually make it to customers instead of Microsoft potentially inventing things, patenting them, not releasing them and stopping their competitors making better products.</comment>


Case law is set free; what next? - <AUTHOR> http://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2014/10/caselaw-is-set-free-what-next.html <comment><USER2> Google deserves plenty of credit for Scholar. It's the best public legal research system out there.

Let's not pretend, though, that Google Scholar has "set free" court opinions or offers "open access." You're trapped in Google's ecosystem. You can't download opinions in bulk for any reason, whether it's legal practice or academic analysis. You certainly can't build your own legal research system.

The best "open access" resource I've found, oddly enough, is bulk XML from a Stanford grad student. It includes over 10 million documents in a fairly standard format.

[http://webpolicy.org/2012/12/28/advancing-empirical-legal- sc...](http://webpolicy.org/2012/12/28/advancing-empirical-legal-scholarship/)

[http://webpolicy.org/2013/12/29/advancing-empirical-legal- sc...](http://webpolicy.org/2013/12/29/advancing-empirical-legal-scholarship- state-materials/)

[http://webpolicy.org/2013/05/03/advancing-empirical-legal- sc...](http://webpolicy.org/2013/05/03/advancing-empirical-legal-scholarship- federal-appellate-opinions-and-rules/)

Also, it appears to be replicated on Carl Malamud's public.resource.org.

[https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/federal/](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/federal/)

[https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/state/](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/state/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's some suggestions for what next:

\- Free access to all of PACER: [http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california- northe...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northern- district-court/think-computer-foundation-et-al-v-administrative-office-of-the- united-states-courts-et-al/)

\- Vendor-agnostic legal citations: [http://www.plainsite.org/articles/20140115/a-modest- proposal...](http://www.plainsite.org/articles/20140115/a-modest-proposal- modern-legal-citations/)

\- Standardized digital legal opinions, motions, and other documents: [http://www.plainsite.org/articles/20140116/a-notsomodest- pro...](http://www.plainsite.org/articles/20140116/a-notsomodest-proposal-no- more-legal-pdfs/)

\- Better free access to state court systems: [http://www.plainsite.org/articles/20140114/xerox-strongly- ur...](http://www.plainsite.org/articles/20140114/xerox-strongly-urges-you- not-to-copy-this-data/)

\- Coming soon: the Bad Lawyer Database (BLDB), a compendium of lawyers who have been formally sanctioned, disciplined, and themselves involved in litigation concerning their conduct

</comment><comment><USER4> Please, oh please, make this a reality: "By classifying regulations using the same system that science librarians use to organize papers in agriculture, we can determine which scientific papers may form the rationale for particular regulations, and link the regulations to the papers that explain the underlying science."

I cannot begin to describe how incredibly useful this would be. Regulators rely on the information provided by regulatory attorneys to craft their policies, so it's critical that the attorneys have a deep understanding of the issues. And paid legal research tools just don't/can't/wont provide that sort of information. In this vein, it would be wonderful to include social sciences - topics like economics and finance. Perhaps SSRN is a good option.

<comment><USER5> I work in related field(s) in the technical sense (ie, NLP/Knowledge Engineering etc, but not related to law or legal services at all).

Is this a real problem? Is it really as simple as some ontology linking?

<comment><USER4> It's a problem I face almost every day.

The role of a regulatory attorney is to explain to the regulatory agency why they should do something (think: PPM in power plant emissions, high-frequency trading controls, restrictions on flight paths and requirements for airport construction, you name it, it's regulated). But the attorney doing the explaining is trained in law, not in whatever the technical subject matter is. So the attorney relies on his client's experts in the field for information. But if an attorney doesn't have a basic understanding of the technical aspects, he won't know what questions to ask to get the right details, and he won't be able to make meaningful strategy decisions. In turn, most regulatory agencies are required by law to make decisions based only on the documents and information provided to them in the hearing/filing process. And all those documents are prepared by attorneys. If the attorneys miss a detail, the regulatory agency misses it too.

I would envision this sort of tool as providing background that will allow the attorney to ask the right questions, rather than a complete education on the technical subject matter.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to write an answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Brian-Puccio Carl Malamud has been a big advocate for making not just case law [1], but public safety codes [2], tax records of non-profits [3] and other supposedly "free" information free and easy to access as well. Efforts to digitize documents that are only available in print format often at considerable expense through scanning [4] and he even had a (failed) KickStarter to make accessible safety codes of the world [5].

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Malamud](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Malamud)

[1] [https://law.resource.org](https://law.resource.org)

[2] [https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/safety.html](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/safety.html)

[3] [http://philanthropy.com/article/Open-Records-Activist- Shuts/...](http://philanthropy.com/article/Open-Records-Activist-Shuts/147177)

[4] [https://yeswescan.org](https://yeswescan.org)

[5] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publicresource/public-s...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/publicresource/public- safety-codes-of-the-world-stand-up-for-safe)

</comment><comment><USER6> Some people might be curious how lawyers were able to do legal research efficiently and effectively before computers and online legal databases. Here is a brief overview. I'll write in the present tense for convenience, but keep in mind that the "present" for this is before the age of computer law. Circa 1960, for instance.

First, let's look at statutes. The output of Congress is a stream of laws. The first law the comes out of Congress #X and is signed by the President is Public Law #X-1. The second one is P.L. #X-2, and so on. These public laws are collected and published in a series of books called the "Statutes at Large".

The Statutes at Large is not a convenient tool for legal research, since it is just a sequential listing of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. There's no organization by subject, so in theory you would have to look at everything starting at page 1 of the first volume up to the last page of the present volume (and then look at laws that have been passed since the last volume was printed...) and note which are relevant to the problem you are researching.

To make it easier to find law, private publishers took the Public Laws and organized them into a code. A code is basically a statement of the law, organized by subject rather than chronologically. These privately published codes had no official status. The official statement of the law remained the Statutes at Large.

In 1874 Congress made an official code of the US laws, and they updated it in 1878. These were authoritative, by which I mean if the code said one thing and the underlying Public Law said something else, the code version won. This meant that if you were researching a topic in, say, 1890, you would start at the 1878 code, and then only had to look at the Statutes at Large from between then and 1890, instead of having to go back to the very beginning.

Congress got its act together in the '20s, and started producing an official United States Code, and updating it every six years, with annual supplements. It's important to note that the USC is not automatically the official authoritative statement of the law. The law codified in the USC only supersedes the Statutes at Large when Congress explicitly says so. Congress does so on a title by title basis, by passing a law that basically says that title X of the USC is now the complete statement of a particular area of law, superseding all prior Public Laws in that area.

In addition to the official USC, published by the government, there are unofficial versions. The most important is the United States Code Annotated, published by a private company, West Publishing. It consists of the text of the USC code with, as you've probably guessed from the name, annotations supplied by West. The annotations give for each thing in the USC a list of appellate cases that have cited or construed that part of the court, along with a summary of what that case said. They also give legislative history information. The USCA is immensely useful. Suppose you have a question about fair use in copyright. You can read what the statute says in the USC or in USCA. But in USCA you will also see summaries of hundreds of court cases that have interpreted that statute--organized by West in a logical system based on what aspect of fair use they were construing.

Case law is similar. Courts issues opinions, and those opinions are officially collected and published in chronological order in a series of volumes. As with the similar Statutes at Large, this is not the best form for research.

Private publishers stepped in to address this. West Publishing is again one of the top players. They produced an outline of the law...a giant tree that breaks the law down into multiple levels of categories and sub-categories and assigns an identifier to each leaf. As court decisions come out, West takes them, identifies which areas of the law they touch on, and writes a short summary of what the court said about that area of law. This is published in a series of volumes, which is indexed by the leaf identifiers. There are other index volumes published that index this collection by time. The net result is that if you are interested in some particular area of law, you can find it in West's outline, get the relevant identifiers, and then go to West's index books and get pointed to the relevant cases. You can then look those up in West's books and read the notes to find out which cases you need to look at in detail.

That same outline and identifier system in West's case reporters is also used in West's USCA, so it all fits together.

Once you have found a relevant case, you need to find out of it is still good law. You don't want to build your argument around an appellate court decision that was later overturned by the Supreme Court. That is very embarrassing for a lawyer.

For this, you turn to a series of books from the Frank Shepard Company. These books list cases, and then tell you what other cases cite them and how they cite them (e.g., agreed with them, overturned them, distinguished them, and so on).

It sounds a bit awkward, but it actually works very well. With a good law library, you can reasonably answer any legal question concerning the law in your jurisdiction without too much flailing about. There are frequent supplements to the books (each book had a slip in the cover to insert a supplement), and cumulative indexes every so often so that you do not have to go through all the index volumes sequentially to find things.

If you need to research something outside your jurisdiction, it can be harder. A small county in Idaho, for instance, might not have Florida state court decisions in its library, so if for some reason Florida case law is relevant the lawyers or their researchers might need to go to a bigger library.

<comment><USER7> Have these systems been completely superseded by digital ones, or do many lawyers continue to use paper-based systems for their research?

<comment><USER8> The digital systems are direct continuations of the paper ones. For example, federal court opinions are published on a court's website in PDF form. West Publishing collects them and prints bound volumes of the Federal Reporter. In parallel, it pulls the text of the opinions into the Westlaw online service, and incorporates the pagination of the printed versions by embedding starred page numbers into the text.

Also, West still categorizes the digital system using the index developed for paper cases. Using this index is usually faster than using search queries. In fact, search really doesn't work very well for legal research, and Google-like free form search works particularly badly (it tends to take you to highly- cited cases rather than highly-relevant ones). I generally start my research by looking up the topic in the digital version of a printed treatise or legal encyclopedia and then doing a reverse citation search of the listed cases. Failing that, I'll do low-level search queries (e.g., "foo" within N words of "bar").

But the only time I ever actually used a book was when I was working for a judge. Every now and then West screws up and the pagination differs between the digital and printed versions of the Federal Reporter. So we'd do our final cite-check using the printed volumes.

<comment><USER9> The reason the West system works is because law is retrospective. Cases cite older cases. Amendments to laws cite older laws. Much of the "annotation" involves inverting those backlinks, so you can look up legislation and find all the cases which reference it. That process is now, of course, automated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Providing open access to caselaw (and constitutions, statutes, and periodicals, and ...) is wonderful, but there's a lot of room left in the realm of legal-oriented computing and software. The big boys (Westlaw and LexisNexis) and the other guys (FastCase, Bloomberg, etc.) provide a lot more than case text and search capability. Signals/Shepardization provides a quick way to understand treatment and subsequent history. Headnotes provide expert analysis and highlights for a given document.

Other functionality includes citation formatting, which as this article briefly touches on, can be devilishly complex. The ability to generate a formatted pin cite to a case (or other document) in Bluebook or another format, could be a huge time saver.

Non-US legal systems are a whole other can of worms and a huge opportunity.

These are just a few quick points; again, there's a huge amount of room to innovate in legal-oriented software.

<comment><USER11> I've wondered in the past how good some expert system like Watson would do with legal databases. There's a lot of speculation on how automation is going to reduce factory jobs, but very little discussion about Watson could maybe wipe out much of human-time needed for legal research. Has the hurdle mostly been that the data is locked up in difficult to access databases?

<comment><USER12> There isn't a ton of human time needed for legal research as it is. The time is in the fact finding, analysis, and arguments, not finding the law.

I'm a junior associate in a law firm, which means the legal research falls squarely on my shoulders (partners don't do legal research). And even then it's not a huge part of my job. Probably less than 10%.

Better index searching could be of help, but it'll be hard to actually make it better. Legal research databases are a huge industry and they spend a ton on improving search capabilities, but it is hard.

I think the search capability will be evolutionary not really revolutionary. But maybe I'm underestimating Watson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't see that it includes codes or statutes (not for Washington state anyway). That would seem like something to do next.

</comment><comment><USER14> Replying as breadcrumbs to an example of a High-Quality HN thread.</comment>


The Joel Test in Real Life and How I Try to Get 12 Points - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ksetyadi.com/2014/03/the-joel-test-in-real-life-and-how-i-try-to-get-12-points/

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting article but the grammar is a little off.</comment>


AMD offers up G-Series APU with 5.5 watt power draw  - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/amd-offers-up-g-series-apu-with-5-5-watt-power-draw-20110523/

<comment><USER2> With all due respect to these continuing amazing achievements, I'm no longer blown away by the ever-decreasing combination of price, size, power consumption against ever-increasing GPU, I/O & arithmetic performance. It seems clear this is just going to keep on at the same amazing rate, for quite a while.

What I wait eagerly to be blown away by is innovative uses[1] for these supercomputers that fit on your thumbnail and could be powered by the kinetic energy you generate when you walk (excuse the hyperbole.) Bring on the applications!

By which I mean applications of technology, not touchscreen apps. Low-power server farms & netbook-/iPad-alikes are fine and all, but I'm excited about what else gets created when excess computing power is essentially throwaway cheap and super portable...

"Ubiquitous computing" has been coming for a while now, I can't wait to actually see it!

</rant> :)

[1] iPads and iPad-derived ideas aside.

<comment><USER3> You need innovation at all layers of the stack. imo our engineer friends who work on lower layers of the stack dont get all the press and love they deserve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If my math is right, 5.5 W means you could power this chip from a pair of high-end rechargable AA:s for about an hour. That's pretty cool, for something with this level of performance.

I assumed 2400 mAh cells at 1.2 V; two in series gives 2.4 V, powering a 5.5 W load at 2.4 V requires a current of 2.3 A which said cells should be able to deliver for one hour (2300 mAh).

Of course, this skips any contemplation of what voltage the chip actually wants, which is probably lower than 2.4 V, and thus means some conversion (with losses, etc) needs to happen.

</comment><comment><USER5> I know everyone's fed up with the bitcoin articles, but I still wonder what this means for mining. Is there a CE or architecture guru who might be able to speculate how this architecture would perform? The reduced power footprint could make personal mining more viable in the long term as FGPU clusters start to take over.</comment>


Drug that creates a 'real sun-tan' could prevent cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-40260029 <comment><USER2> My friend purchased a drug that was like this from an online pharmacy close to a decade ago.

It was a subcutaneous injection that he did every week or so.

At one point he over did it and his skin got incredibly dark. My friend looks quite caucasian so I heard stories about him going to the bar and strangers pulling my friends aside to ask them if my friend was black.

<comment><USER3> Melanotan II?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanotan_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanotan_II)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Forms – Drag-and-drop database applications (with scripting) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sonadier.com/forms/ <comment><AUTHOR> Forms is a drag-and-drop database application builder meant to abstract users and developers from the same repetitive CRUD code. If you're familiar with Microsoft Access, it's like that except it's web-based and handles user management/permissions. Developers can immediately start writing code for their business logic. We have a full JavaScript API for interfacing with our servers, and presenting forms and submissions like models.

We posted here about a year ago with a somewhat hacked-together previous version. Since then we've added Zapier Support, Custom Scripting, Reports (we call them reports, but they are more like database views), and Report-based permissions. That last one means you can do interesting things like allowing a group of users to access only orders in the northeast.

</comment><comment><USER2> I had a quick look at the ToS and do not see anything about uptime guaranties ? Synchronized backups to other geographic locations ? How about optionally making a local backup of all the data ? And how secure it is on your servers anyway ? Things like this are very to businesses.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been working on documenting platform specifics pretty heavily at info.sonadier.com, but I hadn't thought to document business guarantees. Thank you for the heads up! They should be added shortly.

<comment><USER2> Maybe something like 'x companies with y users are using this every day' helps as well. With some specific company names and testimonials and/or specific use cases.</comment></comment></comment>


Java Vulnerability Discovered by US CERT And Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.itnewsoftechnology.com/2013/07/java-vulnerability-discovered-by-us.html <comment><USER2> This is a link to an article dated July 2013.

</comment><comment><USER3> _> 7/18/2013 12:30:00 am_</comment>


Ask HN: Ex-Employer gossiping I "hacked" their platform – what to do? - <AUTHOR> I am really at a loss right now. I worked for a startup for two years and put my heart and soul into helping build the company as a senior manager.
I ended up quiting about 2 months ago to focus on relaxing during the holidays and spending time with my family (did not take a vacation) before seeking a less intense position.
Some old members of my team have come forward to inform me that their was a set of data breaches on the platform and the internal answer was to not announce it and put the blame on me. From what I am told their is no prooof other then a geo location that points to where I (and multiple other employees) live.
I reached out to the CEO and basically the first question whas who was it to leak this and then basicly a statement that the company did not accuse me of anything and there is nothing that can be done about the gossip. When I left the company I took every precaution to revoke my credentials and return my equipment promptly. I now know I can not use anyone at my current employer as a reference and feel these false accusation will greatly damage my future employment opportunities. I am currently have meetings with attorneys on how to protect myself but figured I ask the community if anyone has ever gone though this. <comment><USER2> Been there myself and seen it in other places too.

It can actually be a good filter, prospect-wise: a company that does gossip about/blame an ex-employee for some of their failures is advertising their own lack of agency.

If they were smart, they wouldn't gossip, and not even let the gossip go. That's very bad strategy, both internally and externally.

If they're not, well, I can't tell you what to do.

What happened to me:

1\. first I spent several horrible months expecting my whole career to be over;

2\. until I realized my ex-employer and its own reputation in the field was totally irrelevant and could not harm much my reputation (or better yet, act as a useful filter);

3\. when looking for employment, when relevant, I explicitly mentioned this experience and what came with it, and what I was then looking for in a new company/position/team, so that I was the first to pitch what did happen and how I reacted to it.

It served me well. Those that listened to my story and took the time to understand it turned out to be great teams to work with. Those that dismissed me on the spot, well... I can't say really - but what I heard of afterwise from ex-employees was kind of reminiscent. :)

<comment><USER3> This is exactly what happened to me. I went from being a model "A-player" to "He was a C-player who needed to go". Don't think for 1 second the business will ever compromise itself for you.

#3 is really important. Do not shy away from sharing your stories with your potential new employer. It helps them better understand who you are. If they care about you and the investment they are making in you, then they will want to hire someone who is strong enough to stand up for something they believe.

<comment><USER4> #3 can also backfire badly. Personally I would avoid it.

<comment><USER5> If it's going to come up, either via references provided by the employee or via a backchannel, you're smarter to directly address it in the interview with the hiring manager. At least that way the hiring manager hears your side of the story too.

We hired someone who came within a hair of (deservedly) being charged with a felony by the FBI. He basically said he did something stupid 10 years ago, had learned a lesson, made amends, etc. Had he not addressed it during the interview, we would definitely have not hired him when it later came up during a formal background check.

<comment><USER6> > within a hair of (deservedly) being charged with a felony by the FBI. He > basically said he did something stupid 10 years ago, had learned a lesson, > made amends, etc

Was it a work-related alleged offense? If not, sounds a little extreme to not hire someone because of an allegation that happened 10 years ago that they weren't even charged with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A similar situation happened to me several years ago. My former employer claimed I was involved in a data breach a year after I quit. The FBI raided my home and questioned me for hours about what I knew. I was not involved and had no knowledge of any incident.

I would strongly urge you to retain counsel with a criminal defense attorney and seek to squash this as soon as possible.

When a company claims that someone, especially a former employee, is involved in criminal activity, they will point guns at you and ask questions later. In the eyes of law enforcement, you are presumed guilty.

<comment><USER8> Yes, so some terrible truths:

1\. Talk to lawyers, who will probably tell you to talk to no one and to refer LE/legal notices you get to them.

2\. Never reach out to your old company about this. You probably should not have done this in the first place, since perversely asserting your innocence often makes you look more guilty (since 'that's exactly what a guilty person would do').

Basically, if this evolves into a legal matter it's out of your hands. Try not to get anxious about this, since rumors at an old company are entirely out of your control. If you're innocent, internal or external investigations should prove so.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Op here, Thanks for all the advice, its honestly be helpfull and eye opening.

To clear up a few things.

\- The comments from the ceo were via text and more "I would of called you if i thought you did something" and "ill talk to them but I dont know what more I can do". TBH I was angry and not exactly cordial in my communication.

\- From what I understand the "hack" wasn't my credentials but someone logging in near where I live with the CEO's credentials and changing some settings in the admin. This honestly is what scares me the most... everything in the admin is (or at least was while I was there) soft delete only with 5 minute interval database backups. The action has a potential to rune my life but the actual impact is basically a mild annoyance to the company... at this point I get concerned about sabotage.

\- In terms of defamation apparently certain individuals though it be funny to take where I live and put it up on one of the system monitoring screens for the whole company to see. Currently I am seeking counsel to both protect my self and see if this action is something that is worth responding to.

<comment><USER9> Why would you know the CEO's credentials? Even if you did I would start pointing that out very loudly. At least until any blamers backed back into their holes.

<comment><USER10> Yeah... geolocation or IP addresses can be spoofed. But if it was the CEO's credentials, why in the world would you be getting the blame?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 Looks like the kind of employer you might not want to use for references anyway, but I'd gather as much evidence of that gossip as possible, talk to a lawyer and have him/her reach the company to cease propagating these gossip, which could as well be considered defamation. If they believe they're been wronged and something wrong actually happened, then they should bring those facts with proofs to back them up.

<comment><USER11> I don't think a lawyer will impact the water cooler.

<comment><USER12> and it will cost you a ton. I love when people immediately jump to "lawyer up" like that's just nothing.

<comment><USER13> lawyers cost money too. companies don't want to use their law resources for something like this. sometimes a letter on a law firms letterhead with harsh words is enough to at least get the company to take action. this probably won't cost you more than $1k, which if you believe your career is at stake is far less than future income.

<comment><USER14> Exactly - a scary letter should be enough to get the CEO to call the offending employees into his office and tell them to knock it off, as they may be opening the company up to liability. Any sane CEO will see that there's zero upside to allowing these rumors to continue and plenty of downside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have been in the same situation a few times, even at the company I still work at.

The truth is, it's in no one's best interest to drag this out. They'll do an investigation and only if they have solid evidence will anything come of it. In my case, I did nothing wrong and there was no evidence. Someone accused me of something I didn't do or coincidence(s) led to me being investigated (common in the area I work, actually).

Nothing came of it, because nothing happened on my end. However, it was a nerve-racking experience. Especially, because you never know if something is an accident or mistakenly evaluated.

In a case I'll share, we used a ruby on rails scaffold to create a web app. Unfortunately, it had a mailer in there and looked like we could send emails out. It wasn't active and all generic code "hello world", but you can see how people freaked out. Luckily, those investigating dug into the code and evaluated it, realizing nothing was connected.

In any case, if you did nothing, I'd put your odds at 99.9% chance nothing happens. In the 0.1% chance the company does something, they'll have the burden of proof and their customers will find out. Accusations do not prove guilt. The company would likely be more harmfully impacted than you will and you'll be able to provide a defense to the public record.

</comment><comment><USER16> >I reached out to the CEO and basically the first question whas who was it to leak this and then basicly a statement that the company did not accuse me of anything and there is nothing that can be done about the gossip.

If it was a formal statement then you have nothing to worry about. If the slander is getting to you mentally, you could seek legal counsel but sounds like they can't actually do anything to you

If it was not formal, and there is a chance they can take you to court, then you _need_ to get legal counsel, as you need to prep for defending yourself in court. If, as you say, they should not have anything which points to you being the malicious one here, then the hardest part is going to be the lawyer fees.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well if they even acknowledge it to you in writing you are in the clear. If they had real "proof" they would not have said this..

You could ask them formally to stop the slander and inform them that you will take legal action if you receive any more word of these rumours..

<comment><USER18> Lawyering up just in case might be wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know if this was your intention, but you posted this under your real name. Under the same account you posted an article that gives away your ex- employer.

If it is intentional, then why not say the company in the post?

<comment><USER20> interesting coincidence that their product can be viewed as basically a professional gossip platform :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One can hardly prevent gossip. You can do everything perfect and still get gossip... I would just move on and do quality work in another company...

</comment><comment><USER22> Get someone to ask them for a reference for you and see what it says.

<comment><USER23> Assuming this is in the US, it's exceedingly unlikely the company would risk putting a negative reference in writing. OP is unlikely to get more than a confirmation of dates worked though.

<comment><USER24> Many companies will share "eligible for rehire" status.

<comment><USER25> Is that legal in the US? And what is the sharing mechanism? Word of mouth?

<comment><USER24> Varies by state, but legal in most places. Big companies have automated reference checking. Via truework or theworknumber, or similar. Which can also verify salary...urgh.

[https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free- books/employee-...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free- books/employee-rights-book/chapter9-6.html)

<comment><USER26> >Which can also verify salary...urgh.

This seems so vulnerable to data entry mistakes that such data might just be completely useless.

What happens when stated salary doesn't match salary verifier numbers? Do you just not hire that person?

<comment><USER27> Salary means a lot of different things anyway. If someone asks me (and I need to provide something), I'm going to put down some rough total comp number that's at the high end of what I earn in a typical year. It's not going to match whatever is in the system as my nominal "salary" which really isn't all that relevant.

<comment><USER24> It is still irritating, because current salary shouldn't drive anything about proposed salary. Employers should have to provide low/median/high for employees of the same title in exchange :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> See if you can get them to demonstrate their false accusations by getting them to state that to a reference. Without that, you have no material damages to show, with it you have a case. Talk to an attorney. I'd be surprised if they would be so foolish as to try to wreck your future employment prospects over something you didn't do.

<comment><USER29> The OP likely already has material damages to point to. Reputation loss falls under speculative damage, as loss of a business or job opportunity may happen in the future due to his previous employer's actions.

As others in this thread have advised, hire a lawyer and discuss what your options are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You should ask your friends if there is any hard proof of such a statement, like an email. If so, that could potentially be grounds for a defamation suit.

</comment><comment><USER31> I never had an old employer accuse me, but I did have a consulting client do almost exactly the same thing. It boiled down to a few people at the company that didn't like that we pointed out a lot of security issues on things which were not our direct work but was theirs. Basically we found a few major holes in a couple of their systems we had to do some integration work with and we documented the holes and gave it to the company as part of our deliverable. Well like after 6 months post our exit they had a breach through one of those systems. One of the PM's and a couple of devs accused my team of the breach because someone had used one of the open doors we identified. Literally they had an open port through the firewall to a database system that was unprotected (no password even) and had client data in it, yea Mongo's stupid default no user/password back then.

Essentially I did the same thing you did, reached out to the CEO, he denied they blamed me or my team and said there was nothing he could do about a few "bad apples" running their mouths. I disagreed and pointed out that what they say in a professional capacity about myself or my team as a result of our time there was something he can and should concern himself with. In the end, I did what everyone here is telling you, get a lawyer. It cost me ~$500 to protect our name and put an end to it, essentially we sent a cease and desist letter and a some wording on potential damages given our work and what was being said. That letter only got one response which was they had addressed the employees and agreed my team had nothing to do with their breach. That was all I wanted, and it is what you should get because if it ever comes up you can show that to whoever asks. Took less than a week to resolve and we did work for that company again like 2 years later, guess who no longer worked there, the "bad apples" were all gone, but most of the rest of the team was still around including the CEO who brought us back. So it didn't cause us any damage long term with anyone other than we probably pissed off a few people that were already running their mouths a bit.

One last point. I have had people bad mouth me for a number of things over my career. Not once did it ever really hurt me professionally, mainly because I had a track record showing none of what they said was true. As a consultant I had lots of people pissed saying we were there to displace them, replace them etc etc (even old developers saying that cause they had ancient skillsets). I had articles in a few papers how we were destroying jobs through automation of services of a long term employer in a small town. None of it hurt us, it hurt our pride/feelings a little cause we knew what they were saying was false, but in the end none of it ever affected us professionally. In some cases it actually helped us get other work partially because people saw we didn't react and get defensive or go off the deep end. I am not advocating you don't defend your professional reputation, but just realize there is a time and place to, and a time and place to just let it drop.

<comment><USER32> OP this is what you do... Lawyer up and get them to throw paper.

This is outrageous, and they are going to respond with "we took care of it" and that letter is now GOLD.

I also want to back up what the above poster said about being a consultant and folks badmouthing you. It is much less meaningful than you suspect or think, and in some cases it can be a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Been there many times and I think, that it's a bit normal when leaving a company/a powerful position within. People blame always the leavers for their own mistakes or being in a crappy company. Then, the biggest challenge is to let go and accept that you cannot do anything. Of course you could 'fight back'. And tbh, I still don't know what's better.

Fighting back is a hassle, proving defamation is hard, getting lawyers is expensive, suing and the following process can take years. And the outcome? From an economic view, it's always a no, also the distraction from stuff that really matters, for what? Fighting is great, some like it a lot, but it costs so much energy. Moving on feels more sane. However, in the long run, there's always a bitter aftertaste, just an odd feeling that you lost a fight. This feeling will stay with yout for quite some time but it is often just in your head. Maybe the thing you are worrying about is not that big and not worth thinking one more sec about. You just don't know.

If there's a fool-proof way to fight + win something significant + in a short time frame, fight. Otherwise, get busy, get on new projects and once you are on a better position/in a new company you forgot them anyway.

So, asking us was a good first step to get a bit busy, get an achievement (getting on the front page) and out of racing thoughts. Now, keep on, write the next Ask HN about some tech, ask 10 peers for a coffee after new years eve, build a gaming pc, do whatever keeps you busy.

Edit: Not sure if you can trust the CEO but from what he wrote he sounds ok/friendly and he doesn't care (which is good, because if one of them would decide to sue you it would be him).

</comment><comment><USER34> See if you can get your friends to put their statements in an email or text message. After that, consult a lawyer with the evidence and perhaps sue for slander. I wouldn't take this lightly. This could damage your changes of getting a job in the future if a potential employer calls them.

</comment><comment><USER35> Announcing that they're so incompetent that they failed to revoke a former employee's credentials is pretty dense.

Talking to lawyers is the right thing to do. You don't want this gossip to become a legal issue for you. Collect detailed notes on when and where you turned in hardware, when / what credentials you had revoked, and to whom you delivered these things and informed about them. Just because you didn't perpetrate the hack doesn't mean that someone else wasn't using your hardware for something nefarious. I normally insist that a work laptop be wiped (obviously with all relevant work product handed off first) _before_ i turn it in.

</comment><comment><USER36> Legal protection is a great start. I would also say that most hiring managers understand that there are crappy companies out there, and that doesn't mean that all employees coming from them are bad news. I'd suggest for future interviews using the company as a reference, being direct that there was a issue with workplace culture and that you are excited about the culture of the prospective company. I would also recommend having some notes written down about the issue in the case that the hiring manager brings it up; if they know about it, they will probably ask, and if not then they probably never will.

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow. Something similar happened to me a while ago, and I'm surprised and relived by the replies in this thread to find out that I'm not alone. I thought it was just me.

My advice: Ignore it. There's enough churn on both the company and personnel level in the industry that it will all be soon forgotten. Tech is not a close- knit group of people who know other people. It's millions of people joining and leaving companies, and hundreds of thousands of companies Opening and closing each day.

The gossip is just bird poop in the paint can. Eventually after enough stirring it will disappear.

</comment><comment><USER38> Have your attorney contact them.

The CEO should issue you an apology and they should make an internal announcement explicitly stating that you are not suspected of any wrongdoing, and that it is wrong to accuse you further.

</comment><comment><USER39> Are you sure you're not just overreacting over what's essentially tongue-in- cheek internal speculation based entirely on coincidence of your departure and the breach?

</comment><comment><USER40> There's already some good advice in the thread for the OP.

I'll add-on that this should not have been an issue in the first place. The company should be protecting their customers better than this. It is already a failure of the process when employees are _maybe_ revoking their own creds on the way out. Not to mention what other issues actually led to the breach.

I'd also suspect a current employee (I feel sick even typing that out) before one that has moved on months ago.

</comment><comment><USER41> That sounds horrible. It might be best to talk to a lawyer, just in case.

In my case, a former client accused me of not giving them the source of a product released earlier. The old product was in the git history after a pivot, which I had given instruction on how to get back to a release tag. Luckily I could quote old emails that I sent to them.

</comment><comment><USER42> In he-said-she-said situations, have a good story. Deflect:

> Ha, yeah, I did no such thing, but they certainly want a scapegoat, don't > they? So, when I was there, lemme tell you about their data security > practices...

Gain empathy:

> Right, it's understandable that they'd want to blame _somebody_. And who > better than me, walking out the door, going to spend more time with my > family?

And minimize:

> But yeah, there's no real meat to their complaint. No attorneys or anything. > They're just upset that they got caught shirking their legal > responsibilities.

You might be able to hand-pick a reference from your old team, but you're right to not automatically volunteer your old manager's contact information.

I have to be good at telling stories like this. My first employer used legal strongarm tactics to disenfranchise me of thousands of commits of code, and my second employer tried to pin a sexual-harrassment claim on me and then fired me after I asked their head of HR to follow the law. Employers are dicks. Tell a story that lulls them to sleep.

<comment><USER43> I disagree with your 1st suggestion. When hiring someone, I expect them to have a clear, concise, mature explanation. Gossiping in response with "lemme tell you about their..." is a big red flag to me. I don't want to hire a blabber mouth. I think an appropriate answer is more in line with your second and third comments. I think it is fine to say "I left months before they had this problem. Perhaps they are looking for a scape goat and I'm convenient. I'd be happy to discuss my opinions of security design in general, but I won't discuss specifics of what was done at that company while I was there. I may not have agreed with their choices. I've made the choice to leave there"

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> [https://www.fastcompany.com/90304317/a-male-ctos-lessons- on-...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90304317/a-male-ctos-lessons-on-working- with-female-majority-team)

"5 things I've learned working with a women-dominated engineering team"

Make that six things that you have learned...

</comment><comment><USER45> You need a lawyer to send a cease and desist letter for defamation.

</comment><comment><USER46> > was a set of data breaches on the platform and the internal answer was to > not announce it and put the blame on me

In Europe this could be a violation of GDPR not to report it. If so, they would hurt themselves more by spreading this.

[https://gdpr-info.eu/art-33-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-33-gdpr/)

</comment><comment><USER47> So in the US, for software engineering jobs outside of DoD related stuff...I have yet to be asked for references (even then I don't think I was for being hired, just for the clearance, and that was more personal than professional). I would actually view being asked for them as a warning sign, given how useless they are (speaking as a hiring manager).

I wouldn't worry about it from that perspective. If you need to you can point out that the company hasn't spoken to the police even when you reached out to them with concern over it, or retained legal counsel, or etc...but chances are really good it's going to be a non-issue for future employment.

If they _do_ eventually reach out to police, and assert it was you, it will be more interesting. That said, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing where they'd have a particularly compelling case.

<comment><USER48> Same in Poland - I've never heard of anyone asking for references here (at least not in IT). You need to bring some paperwork from the companies you worked for in the past, but it's for administrative purposes only, you do this after you are hired.</comment></comment>