#Boycott The Debate
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originalleftist · 3 months ago
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ABC has refused to commit to fact-checking the Harris/Trump debate tomorrow.
In a fair world, this would be accepted as reasonable grounds for Harris to withdraw immediately (as would the fact that her opponent is an illegitimate insurrectionist who should not be on the ballot, that platforming him platforms stochastic terrorism and directly contributes to hate crimes and political violence, and that its a huge security breach regarding the VP as he is a direct physical threat to her safety).
In the real world, of course, she'd be immediately denounced as hostile to the press, afraid to face Trump or scrutiny, and unfit for office.
My guess? Little King Donny threw a tantrum over the possibility of being fact-checked, and threatened to withdraw. And ABC wants those sweet, sweet fascist audience numbers. So they caved and gave Little King Donny what he wants. Again.
For me, this just reaffirms my commitment not to watch the debate.
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motherofplatypus · 1 month ago
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Harris' supporter harassing a baby
You harris supporters are no better than trump supporters.
This post has been compiled in Record of Genocide.
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charavioli · 4 months ago
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Those three seem like a fun friend group
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ilys00ga · 7 months ago
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Israel literally blew some displaced refugee tents up (2) (3) (4) last night, a baby was beheaded in the process along with many other deaths, why is the world still so fucking silent? why is the world standing still with its hands over its entire face, coward????
(⚠: major graphic and bloody scenes in the footages linked above!)
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astraystayyh · 7 months ago
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Hi! First off- I love your work. Apart from that I had a question regarding The song 'Lose my breath' ft the zionist Charlie puth
Why did we need to boycott this song? So what if Charlie is a Zionist? We are supporting our boys. Not him.
-P.s- I'm not saying this in a rude way, I might come off as rude, but I swear it's a genuine question.
-â˜†đŸŒ
just now israel attacked a refugee camp in rafah, the supposedly « safe » place in gaza, burning children, women and men alive. this came in a direct response to the icj’s ruling for israel to stop their rafah invasion. this is what zionism is. do you think it’s okay for us to give a platform to zionists, for us to welcome zionists in any capacity, shape or form, even if indirectly? it’s immoral to do so especially in the midst of an ONGOING genocide. this is why we are boycotting the song
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gryficowa · 5 months ago
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Black people are the best strikers in the world (My translator broke down and translated to the worst ones lol)
In Poland, farmers
Fuck Israel, it still hasn't been banned from sports competitions
Fuck Biden, Harris and Trump, they are Zionists, just like those who elect them
Fuck liberals for ignoring that blue people are blue zionist terrorists because they support LGBT+ and suddenly it's not an issue
Fuck Putin, because he's fucking Putin, a queerphobe and he's attacking Ukraine
Fuck all the musicians who stood for Israel
Fuck Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift for remaining silent on Gaza
Fuck Zionists for harassing Jews who support Palestine
Fuck capitalism, because it makes looking for products that don't support Israel is like looking for a needle in a haystack (I live in Poland, I don't have stores as big as the US)
Fuck Poland for queerphobia and silence about Palestine, Sudan and Congo
Fuck Andrzej Duda for supporting Israel and supporting a country that Congo is fighting, which put an innocent Pole in Congo in prison because he was considered a spy and saboteur
Fuck Donald Tusk for wanting to strengthen the wall where civilians are trapped on the border because they were deceived by Lukashenko when they fled the war (Yes, Afghanistan)
Just fuck it all
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news4dzhozhar · 1 year ago
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macro-microcosm · 6 months ago
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Look, I'm sorry, but you cannot say "there is no antisemitism in the Free Palestine movement" and also say that you think Israeli youth should be put into Viet Cong-style reeducation camps.
And no, it's not a more vindicated or less bigoted opinion just because nobody comes to you with a better single-sentence solution to hate crimes.
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fr0gc4t · 2 years ago
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that’s just outrageous!!!
im begging anyone who may see this, if u care about art and artists AT ALL, then please BOYCOTT AI ART!!!
Why real artists NEED to be protected from AI.
Full article here.
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originalleftist · 6 months ago
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Why I Will Not Be Watching the Biden-Trump Debate:
(Reposting from Spoutible):
"I will not watch the Presidential debate. Here's why:
Trump is an insurrectionist oath-breaker. Per the 14th Amendment, Section 3, he should not even be on the ballot. That SCOTUS chose to ignore the Constitution does not erase it.
Trump used a prior debate to give pre-insurrection marching orders to the Proud Boys. He will use this one to spread more lies, hate, and incitement to violence. Giving him a huge platform is a national security risk, that will likely lead directly to loss of life.
Trump violated Covid protocols at a prior debate, endangering then-candidate Biden. He also TRIED TO STAGE A COUP. Putting an insurectionist terrorist on a stage with the President is madness, security breach and threat to the President that would be tolerated under no other circumstance.
Placing him-a terrorist traitor who has actively tried to cause the President's death-on a debate stage like a normal candidate normalizes everything he has done, and aims to do.
This is not normal. It is not right. And it should not be treated as entertainment.
I appreciate that Biden is in a difficult position, that he can't be seen as afraid to debate. But this debate should never happen. So I will be boycotting it, and any future debates featuring the convicted felon.
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satireinfo · 1 month ago
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Israel Cultural Boycott
Israel Cultural Boycott A Cautionary Tale of Literary Self-Cancellation In the world of high culture, there are few things more sacred than the printed word. It has the power to shape minds, stir hearts, and occasionally get you banned from the local library for a few too many F-bombs. So, when 6,000 writers and publishing professionals signed a petition to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,

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lyciafenty · 4 months ago
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(via Donald Trump’s Calculated Absence: The Boycott That Could Reshape the 2024 Presidential Race)
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taviokapudding · 6 months ago
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Good news everybody
As we speak journalists across twitter are saying Biden as "a strong cold" and he's debating Trump while neither wear a mask
Continue boycotting the debate, they ain't fact checking shit at all so you will get dumber if you watch but YIPPEE
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sarcasticscribbles · 10 months ago
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BOYCOTT EUROVISION FOR ISRAEL PARTICIPATION.
I am the Eurovision gay this time of year, I love this show. Not only is my country hosting 2024 but it's also in a city I love, but I can't watch as people sing about peace and love while Palestinians are getting killed by one of the participants.
I've complied a couple of petitions, open letters and information regarding Eurovision: Eurovision isn't the highest priority regarding Gaza, but this show is marketing & tourism for countries, Israel is using it to pink wash their politics
According to SVT, Swedish television network in charge of Eurovision 2024 in Sweden Malmö, Eurovision is apolitical, and therefore Israel qualify. They refer to any calls for boycott meaningless ( via )
SVT statement:
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[ID: "SVT statement on the debate over Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest
Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest is generating debate and today a number of Swedish artists have called on the EBU to cancel Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024. It is the EBU’s decision which public broadcasters may take part in the event, and as the host broadcaster, SVT follows the EBU’s decisions. The humanitarian suffering in this deeply complex conflict is devastating. Nobody can be left unmoved by the current situation in Gaza, or by the Hamas attack in Israel. We are also concerned about these developments. We understand and respect that groups of people wish to make their voices heard. As the host broadcaster, SVT has an ongoing dialogue with the EBU about the challenges of producing Europe’s largest TV-production in times of unrest. We are humbled by the task and are working to ensure the project can be carried out in the best way possible, with the vision that music unites." END ID]
Eurovision has always been political, and was created as a celebration of peace after WW2. Songs are statements, and EBU took action by banning Russia and Belarus for the invasion of Ukraine. It's a way to show sympathy and solidarity, which Gaza is in need of now.
Why Eurovision is so important to Israel is the opportunity of pink washing, and appearing liberal and LGBTQ-friendly, that the show encourages. This leads to great marketing and tourism for the country, alqueerian on twitter did a great thread about it:
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[ID: Tweet from @ alqueerian on X formerly known as Twitter. Tweet: "A really quick thread on pinkwashing and why it’s wrong: pinkwashing is a term that was coined by LGBTQ Palestinians to specifically refer to the use of homophobia as a justification for israeli war crimes, ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, starvation etc." END ID]
Full thread
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
Here are a couple of petitions, open letters and links to encourage the ban of Israel in Eurovision
And if all fail: we boycott
Here are two petitions for the ban of Israel: Petition 1
Petition 2
A list of emails and contact information for broadcasters regarding Israel participation: copy, paste and send. Document
It's created by verilybitchie on YouTube who also made a great call to action video I can recommend
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[ID: Screenshot of verilybitchie youtube video "Genocide at the Eurovision Song Contest". The video is showing an article by Chris Lockeyer, news reposter, titled "Israel to compete at Eurovision despite boycott threats" The article says: "The European broadcast Union said its member organisations approved Israel's participation in the competition and it remains aligned with other competition organisations on its stance." The article is from December 19th, 2023. END ID]
And for Swedes, I think it's extra important for us to speak up; here's what we can do:
Open letter via Björk & Frihet, a charity in SkÄne offer letters to sign but also have pdf version to print at home!
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[ID: Photo from Björk & Frihet, a swedish charity offering open letters to sign to send to the government. "Stoppa folkmordet" as the letters are ladled, means "stop the genocide" END ID]
This is also a letter regarding the contest being held in Malmö, a city with a long history fighting for Palestine! Sign here
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[ID: Vote for Swedes in Malmö to sign to protest Israel's participation in Eurovision. END ID]
Meanwhile, don't forget your daily clicks to help Palestine while we wait for EBU to stand by their words and prove we are united by music!
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[ID: Iceland's Hatari holds up Palestinian flags during Eurovision in Tel Aviv, May 19, 2019. END ID]
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gryficowa · 4 months ago
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And all the bombs were provided by the USA and it was those who said empty "ceasefire" who supplied all the bombs

Yes, the number of victims is higher than in World War II

This is where your money goes, Americans, on bombs that murder whole families

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months ago
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UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets
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THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.
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Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.
It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."
And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).
These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.
This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.
Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.
Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.
But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.
This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.
So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.
But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!
But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.
It's money.
Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.
This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web
This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores
Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.
First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!
This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you
while serving as the judge
and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.
So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech
Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).
It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again
Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.
And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/
The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.
This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.
You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561
You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA
Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.
Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.
That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg
This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand
Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.
By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.
Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free
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