from the some-important-truths dept
What if the reason we’re so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is because we’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital world? What if we’re confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the specter of unavoidable harm?
No one is better at covering the moral panic about “the kids these days and their social media” than danah boyd. She literally wrote the book on this a decade ago (a decade ago!) and every time she weighs in, it’s with something deeply insightful and enlightening.
Her latest is a must-read. It makes a very clear point on something that had been bothering me, but which I was unable to put into words: there’s a difference between risk and harm, and the people pushing the moral panic about social media harms are deliberately blurring the lines between those two things:
This is a point I’ve tried (and failed) to get across for a while, so I greatly appreciate the way she put it here. No one is saying that social media is a riskless environment. But nothing is truly a riskless environment.
In the past, I’ve sometimes described this as one of the lessons I learned growing up. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a deli four blocks from my house. But to get there, you had to cross a pretty busy street. When I was little, I wasn’t allowed to go there alone. As I got older, my parents taught me how to cross that street safely, and later I was allowed to go with friends, and eventually, by myself.
There was still some risk involved, but we managed the risk by teaching me about it, and teaching me how to minimize the risk and to walk to the deli safely. There was always still the possibility that I wouldn’t be careful enough. Or that a car would be speeding much faster than it should have gone. Or a car could have gone out of control.
There’s still risk. That risk could lead to harm. But walking to the deli is not an inherently harmful activity.
I think about this a lot in relation to Jonathan Haidt and his books. In his earlier books (and even, to some extent, in The Anxious Generation), he’s a huge proponent of the “free range kids” movement, which is all about teaching kids how to move about in the world freely, without supervision. As with my parents and the deli, it’s about allowing kids to go into risky situations, but doing so in a way that gives them the tools to minimize those risks.
Yet, now, in the virtual world, he acts as if risks can’t be managed must be harms, rather than risks (even if the data completely disagrees with that).
danah’s piece (you really should read the whole thing) talks about risky activities, including crossing busy streets, but also activities like going skiing. Skiing is risky. I still do it (well, snowboarding), and I know there’s some risk in it, but I try to manage that risk as well. Still, every year, I see plenty of people (of all ages) end up hurting themselves on the mountain. There are risks. We know that. Yet many of us still get enjoyment out of it, and try our best to manage the risks.
This is the nature of living.
So why are we treating social media so differently?
As danah notes:
This essay contains so much important information to understand, and it is (as usual) so clearly stated.
This paragraph, though, represents so much of what I feel and what all of the actual research seems to support:
Also, this:
There’s so much more in the essay, and I feel like it’s something I’m going to keep pointing people to for a long, long time. But if I keep quoting it, I’m just going to end up reposting the whole thing here. So I’ll just say go read the whole thing, as there’s plenty more in there that’s worth reading, thinking about, and understanding.
Filed Under: danah boyd, harms, jonathan haidt, kids, moral panic, privacy, risks, safety by design, social media, teens
from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept
Back before T-Mobile merged with Sprint you might recall that academics, consumer groups, and beat reporters like myself warned that the deal would immediately result in less competition, higher prices, and a whole bunch of layoffs. Captured Trump regulators ignored those worries, but it didn’t take long before the deal’s critics were proven indisputably correct about, well, everything.
T-Mobile quickly got to work laying off thousands of employees. Analysis quickly indicated that the merger, which reduced the total number of major U.S. wireless providers from four to three, immediately put an end to wireless data price competition in the States. And T-Mobile’s pro-consumer “uncarrier” branding disappeared almost immediately.
Fast forward to this year, and T-Mobile is now trying to acquire U.S. Cellular for $4.4 billion, because if there’s anything U.S. telecom clearly needs, it’s even more consolidation. In recent meetings at the FCC, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular executives are trying to claim that they have to merge because the U.S. wireless sector is just so damn competitive:
Contrary to what executives claim, their markets aren’t suddenly awash in new wireless competition. MVNOs (like Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile) that do try to disrupt on price, inevitably get acquired too. And while cable companies do create some competition in wireless, they’re largely leasing backhaul and other structural assets from the major wireless carriers, who still get their cut.
Data also consistently shows that outside of Canada, the U.S. sees some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world, so the idea that U.S. Cellular is facing some incredible pressure to meaningfully compete on price in this country is an industry fiction.
“We face some fleeting competition so we have no choice to be swallowed up by a competitor” is a pretty steady refrain, despite endless promises of amazing benefits and synergies that never actually materialize. What happens is the remaining companies see even less incentive to compete on price than ever, which is, of course, the entire goal of the performance.
In this particular transaction, T-Mobile will acquire all of U.S. Cellular’s wireless customers and stores, and approximately 30 percent of spectrum assets. I’d assume the rest will be acquired down the road, or gobbled up by T-Mobile, AT&T, or Verizon later. While these deals do temporarily boost stock valuations and generate some lovely tax cuts, they’re actively harmful to the broader market, labor, and consumers.
But because Republicans and Democrats alike are both terrible on monopoly busting and the harms of corporate consolidation (though the latter is indisputably better than the former), I suspect this deal will be quietly approved. Likely with some argument that even more consolidation at the hands of captured U.S. regulators will somehow benefit America’s rural farmers.
Then, in a few years, when your wireless bill is even higher and the service quality and customer service remains in the toilet, policymakers, industry-backed think tankers, and the other folks responsible will stand around with a phony-confused look on their faces pretending to wonder precisely what might have gone wrong. Assuming they give any of it a second thought at all.
Filed Under: 5g, broadband, competition, consolidation, fcc, high speed internet, mergers, telecom, wireless
Companies: t-mobile, us cellular
from the holy-shit dept
When it comes to how you include religious texts in public school classrooms and libraries, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Want those texts of various world religions in place for secular teaching of topics they pertain to? All good! But picking one particular religion’s iconography and injecting it into public schools is a fairly blatant First Amendment violation. And if you’re one of those state officials looking to ban certain books due discussions about sexuality, gender, slavery, or violence and you aren’t banning most religious texts, including the bible, then you’re a flat-out hypocrite.
The point is that public schools are secular in nature. Any desire to put religious texts in them should be done so for secular reasons and not for the overt promotion of either a single religion or for political reasons.
And that brings us to Oklahoma and its state Superintendent, Ryan Walters. Walters decided that he wanted a bible in every public classroom in Oklahoma, suggesting it would be used due to the nature of American history and our founding fathers. I would normally simply argue about that history and talk about just how many of our founding fathers either weren’t religious at all, or were religious in a way that today’s conservative religious folks would find abhorrent (see: Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Thomas Paine). But instead I’m going to focus more on the original requirements Walters had in the state’s RFP.
Now, most bibles don’t include those other historical documents, and certainly they aren’t all bound in material best served for the interior of a car. But at least one does. And if you’ve followed politics and the news closely enough over the last year or so, you may have already guessed which one that is.
Was this a politically motivated move to get specifically Trump-endorsed bibles, for which he receives payment, into the public schools of Oklahoma, thereby using taxpayer funds to enrich the former President. Well, gosh golly gee, we just can’t say for certain, can we? But if that was the motivation, this is exactly the action a person so motivated would take.
Now, after many people in the state and nationally lost their collective shit over what is, at minimum, the appearance of a conflict of taxpayer interests, the state amended the RFP to make it so other, less expensive bibles would qualify. But of course that came along with Walters blaming everyone else for the concern expressed about his very, very tailored RFP.
I’m trying to picture Jesus saying this very thing and somehow I just can’t manage it.
In any case, it should go without saying that when we’re talking about introducing religious texts, paid for by taxpayers and for use in secular schools, it should be done with great care. Having a bloviating boot-licker go about it in this way ought to anger Oklahoman taxpayers, whether they are Christian or not.
from the still-rolling-hard-on-the-legal-contraband-assumption dept
If there’s anything that’s going to severely reduce the number of pretextual stops performed by cops, it probably won’t be the handful of traffic stop reform efforts being made by legislators. It’s going to be the continued legalization (or decriminalization) of marijuana possession.
One of law enforcement’s favorite tricks is to pull over a car for bullshit reasons, pretend officers smelled marijuana, and engage in a warrantless search in hopes of finding something far more illegal than the pretense that initiated the stop.
But “odor of marijuana” is no longer as effective as it used to be. Smelling marijuana now just means smelling a legal substance in many cities and states. It’s like a cop initiating a search after saying they smelled gasoline. Smelling burnt marijuana is the hot new action, since it means officers could be dealing with someone driving under the influence.
The problem with relying on that supposed indicator of crime is that it doesn’t immediately mean officers have permission to search stopped vehicles. At best, they can engage in an equally pretextual “inventory search” if the vehicle needs to be towed. But even at best, smelling marijuana is no longer a permission slip for invasive searches of stopped vehicles on its own.
There’s more precedent on the law books now, thanks to the Illinois Supreme Court. A recent ruling makes it clear that cops are no longer free to search vehicles simply because they’ve (allegedly) detected the odor of a substance that’s now a misdemeanor to possess, rather than a felony. Cops can issue citations, but they can’t treat smelling weed like it’s probable cause for a search. (via FourthAmendment.com)
This stop, in which Illinois State Police Officer Hayden Combs imitated a stop and search of resident Ryan Redmond’s car, was completely pretextual. The state’s top court doesn’t make a note of it, but its recounting of the stop in its precedential decision [PDF] makes it clear this stop had nothing to with Redmond’s driving.
Yep, that’s what we want to spend our law enforcement dollars on: hassling people for missing a screw or two from their license plate mounts while traveling at a speed that normally would be considered a speedometer accuracy fluctuation, rather than a driver thumbing his nose at the law while endangering other drivers.
Once Officer Combs had stopped the car, he turned to a bunch of bullshit to justify a search.
There are two problems here. First, the discovered cannabis was of the un-burnt variety. Second, under state law, that amount doesn’t support criminal charges. It’s an amount that’s only subject to a citation.
Furthermore, the officer didn’t come across anything that supports his claim that he smelled “burnt” marijuana. On top of that, he admitted lots of other stuff that undercut his supposition he had a legal right to search the car.
Then Combs went on to claim that Redmond was probably in the drug trafficking business because (in a statement that surely must come as a surprise to Des Moines, Iowa) both Chicago and Des Moines are “hubs of criminal activity.”
But it’s hard to pretend finding a gram of weed makes someone a drug dealer, especially when that quantity isn’t subject to criminal charges in Illinois. Resolving a split in the state’s lower courts, the state’s top court says the smell of marijuana (whether “burnt” or not) is no longer sufficient on its own to justify the search of stopped vehicles.
Note that last sentence: not only does this set precedent going forward, but the ruling is retroactive, affecting anyone who was subjected to this kind of law enforcement bullshit since the law’s enactment in 2020. Good stuff. More top courts should do this sort of thing more often, rather than just refuse to address the (pardon the pun) burning question of legality or constitutionality until a case more to its liking bubbles to the surface.
In addition, the court points out that a poorly mounted license plate adds nothing to the justification for a search. This is purely an external vehicle issue. No amount of searching the interior is going to uncover any more evidence of this “crime.”
The evidence is suppressed. Going forward, law enforcement officers in the state are now on notice simply claiming to smell a (mostly) legal substance isn’t going to prevent illegal searches from being rejected by the state’s court. And, going backwards, anyone with an unresolved motion to suppress or a string of rights violations initiated by searches predicated on cops smelling weed now have all the precedent they need to take cops to court.