Yesterday, the tragic death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant and members of his family in a helicopter crash. I'm not a fan of basketball but have at least heard of Kobe Bryant. Since he's a legend of his sport and did not die from old age but at 41, it means the media has covered Kobe's death extensively. But in doing my daily review of "sex offender" news stories, it was the last place I was expecting to see a news story about Kobe Bryant.
The Times-Leader, a newspaper covering Northeastern PA, particularly the Wilkes-Barre area, ran a news story about the tragedy, written by Stefanie Dazio of the Associated Press. The article talks about some charity work but ends the article about an accusation made against Kobe almost 20 years ago.
This is an ongoing problem with the media. Even in death, the media feels the need to shame anyone accused or convicted of a sex offense, even when the story is unrelated to the actual news event.
In 2017, a number of (mostly conservative) news outlets pointed out one of the three people who died in a train derailment was on the sex offense registry. Why did the media feel the need to point that out?
Of course, live registrants often cannot catch breaks from the media, either. A few months ago, after the Washington Examiner wrote a story exposing Facebook's policy of allowing people to make death threats against registered persons, I wrote a letter to the editor about the vigilante groups proliferating on social media. I was contacted by David Freddoso, who edited my original letter to include details about my offense and requested my permission to publish the edited article. I refused.
For some reason, the media believes we should wear this label like it is some kind of job title. Educating the public should start with these uninformed media personalities because the media is where nearly every American gets much of their information. Yet, individual reporters often do not write unbiased articles; I should know, since I've dealt with numerous media outlets over the years. (I'm looking at you, Kyra Phillips. Worst. Interviewer. Ever.) There IS a reason why I have a special category just for reporters on the annual Shiitake Awards.
Our voices won't be heard as long as we subject ourselves to labels, or let reporters get away with lies about "high re-offense rates" or other myths. Are you doing your part to educate the media?
In case you’re interested:
ReplyDeleteI looked up the article “Facebook updates standards to allow death threats against alleged sexual offenders” (John Gage, Washington Examiner, 9 July 2019) regarding Facebook community standards on Violence and Incitement as updated at some point last July. Unfortunately, Facebook neither dates these precisely nor offer direct links to these posts; see
https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/recentupdates/credible_violence/
and use the browser’s ctrl-F on “market” to locate it. It may disappear within a few months as additional posts accumulate on the page, but now reads, in part:
“Do not post…threats that could lead to death… defined as…calls for high-severity violence (unless the target is an organization or individual covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, or is described as having carried out violent crimes or sexual offenses, wherein criminal/predator status has been established by media reports, market knowledge of news event, etc.) …”
The lack of exact dates and links, making it difficult for outsiders to reconstruct standards which Facebook had been applying at earlier times, fits in with this company’s evasive, opaque nature. No wonder I don’t use Facebook. However, the special exception didn’t last long; it was stricken later in July. Current policy doesn’t permit it.
Check by noting that the quoted paragraph appears twice on the page, in the original update and a few posts up where it was crossed out. Facebook seems to recognize several kinds of reference to violence in its standards, a “credible” category denoting threats someone might act on, and a rhetorical category Facebook deems unlikely to materialize. An example of the latter is “let’s boot Trump out of the White House.”
Google & Facebook didn’t really care about this stuff until activists upset over Election 2016 began pressuring them over their role in hosting creators—InfoWars, Stefan Molyneux, Pamela Geller, Russia Today, etc.—whom they felt had helped Trump win via “fake news” and appeals to racism or anti-migrant sentiment. Even then, Big Data proved slow to rouse. Curation, e.g. YouTube “redirecting users to authoritative information” with conspiracy theory or fringe sites suppressed in search results, became evident to me only last summer.
Curation is effected by machine-learning algorithms that remain imperfect. Rapidly-evolving standards, as with the violence against sex offenders exemption, may reflect the algorithms’ inability to distinguish between posts advocating this and posts opposing it. Both would share many keywords in common and show similar sentence structure. Once the algorithm improved, the exemption ended.
Best wishes
It is still up but it has strikethroughs, a line through the offensive statements. The fact you can still see it is evidence it was once there.
Delete