Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was targeted by US CBP this week. They took his phone & asked him questions like did he believe Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, &if he had any Palestinian friends.
My first reaction was that CBP doesn't know the first thing about Israeli historians, & likely Israel's govt told the US to target him. Turns out Pappe believes Israel's govt was involved.
A meta research question for #lawfedi#lawstodon: do judges employ different writing styles based on an expectation their decision is likely to be successfully appealed?
In other words, would an appellate court spend more time, write a longer opinion, cite more cases, etc. if they expect a superior court is unlikely to grant cert and their decision is final?
Alternatively, if they know a case is likely to end up at SCOTUS, do they just ship a minimum viable opinion and move along?
@jonathan_shamir for Jewish Currents (on Twitter):
In addition to bombing #Gaza 10,000 times, Israel has stripped Gazans of their legal status & revoked work permits for them in Israel, detained many of them without trial in what human rights groups call “a prohibited act of vengeance."
One Gazan worker who fled Israel's arrest campaign to the #WestBank worries for his kids. "Please God, let me go to Gaza so | can die with them—so we can die together.” Reporting in @jewishcurrents #Lawstodon
Landlord: "You will be paying to have the building power washed and detagged, and you will be paying for the replacement and labor on the living room window in unit X, as someone thought it was your unit."
Me: "I what?!"
Landlord: "You were warned what the consequences would be if it happened again."
Me: "You know this is ileagal, right?"
Landlord: "You say that so often. Do you actually believe you know what the laws are?"
Me: "Uh yes. got a copy of the Tenant-Landlord laws right here, what me to quote them?"
Landlord: "You do know you can't fight this right? And where would you and your son be if you tried? Oh right, homeless and living on the street."
I just spent the last holiday weekend of the [summer] wrangling with my landlord about their highly unprofessional landscaper, who has weirdly harassed us & made our lives difficult for the past few months, culminating with trying to steal a giant tub of 75 pounds of organic peaches from our harvest. When my husband caught them, they lied about it first to us, then to the landlord.
Does anyone have expertise in LL/tenant law, specifically the implied covenant of quiet enjoyment? #Lawstodon#WA
Hey #lawstodon. As a kid it was explained to me that here in the United States we have two legal systems, the civil and the criminal. Is that a fair description? If so, where do regulatory bodies fit in? They have regulations which are basically laws, like the criminal system, but they can't put you in jail or convict you, only fine you money or strip you of special legal privileges, like the civil system. So...?
What exactly is a Board of Medicine or a Department of Public Utilities in this paradigm? They function like courts, conduct things a lot like trials, and have the legal authority to impose punitive sanctions. So what part of the legal system are they? Or do we just say they're part of the executive system, since that's what institutes them, and dust our hands of the issue? If so, has anybody noticed that the executive system is holding trials? Doesn't that bother the judiciary, what with their turf being incurred upon?
My financial institution sent me a letter that basically told me "fuck you for having #LongCOVID and being #immunocompromised, we want you to die, we are gaslighting pieces if shit who think that making people remove their masks "for a short time" doesn't "pose a health risk" and the worst part is they claim that "most financial institutions" would do this, despite them having let me open my account with them while masked. Literally the only thing that changed is now they feel empowered to #discriminate against me based on my #health status.
They literally sent it in writing that their policy officially is to deny service to people who won't remove their mask. That seems like something I should be able to sue them about, but I'm not sure. Any #MastodonLawyers want to chime in pro bono publica? Is #lawstodon a thing? I might well have the makings of a lawsuit against this credit union. I mean there were ever so many cases of people getting medical exemptions to wearing a mask, so why should I not be able to get an exemption that allows me to #MaskUp and protect myself against illness, not just #COVID but also everything else because I am #immunocomprised ?
There are many conversations happening in the fediverse regarding Meta and Threads, about their intentions, what the best approach of dealing with Threads is, and much more. One factor that is part of getting a better understanding of why Meta has launched Threads, and why they promise to add ActivityPub support, is the various regulations of Big Tech that are happening around the world. In this piece I take a look at three of them, to get a better understanding of how they can help get a better understanding of why Thread promises ActivityPub support. Two of these are European regulations, and it is no coincidence that Threads has not launched in the EU yet. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri explicitly gives the DMA and DSA as the reasons for not launching the EU, but does expect to launch there eventually.
Please note that I’m extremely not a lawyer, and all information below represents at best a limited understanding by a layman. It is best to see this post as a way to structure my own thoughts and understanding, that I hope might be of use to others. Any corrections and better explanations are much welcomed.
Digital Markets Act
The Digital Markets Act, DMA, determines if internet companies that operate in the EU are so big, that they classify as gatekeepers. Gatekeeper companies that want to operate in the EU have to meet certain extra requirements. The EU announced the preliminary list of companies that submitted themselves as gatekeeper early July and includes Meta. The EU will determine the final list on September 6th, after which the gatekeepers have 6 months to come into compliance. Two requirements of the DMA stand out in the context of Thread and federation: Gatekeepers cannot keep users locked into their ecosystem (data portability) and cannot treat their own other services and products more favourably (preferencing).
The article 6(9) deals with data portability:
“The gatekeeper shall provide end users and third parties authorised by an end user, at their request and free of charge, with effective portability of data provided by the end user or generated through the activity of the end user in the context of the use of the relevant core platform service, including by providing, free of charge, tools to facilitate the effective exercise of such data portability, and including by the provision of continuous and real-time access to such data.” (emphasis mine).
The phrases ‘continuous and real-time access’ imply for me that ActivityPub federation of Threads is a way for Meta to meet this requirement. GDPR requires data portability but it is not real-time and continuous. The practical implementation of current data portability according to GDPR is that you can export your Instagram posts, and import them in PixelFed, via a manual process.
The GDPR article on data portability does not require continuous and real-time access to data, and does not mention these terms. Assuming that Meta implements GDPR via only whats minimally required (big assumption here!), this implies that providing data portability via an archive export does not meet the requirements for ‘continuous and real-time’. With a surface level reading, it seems to me that using ActivityPub to allow account transfer to other platforms such as Mastodon would meet the stricter requirements of data portability.
Another requirement for the DMA is not preferencing your own systems and services. It is unclear if only being able to sign up with Instagram for Threads would qualify for this. This quote in The Verge explains the situation:
Georgios Petropoulos, Stanford Digital Economy Lab digital fellow, told The Verge in an interview on Thursday that Threads wasn’t an unambiguous self-preferencing case — but that it did raise concerns. “If it uses the existing popular products it has like Instagram, like Facebook, to promote this new platform, that could also be viewed as something,” said Petropoulos. “It’s not a clear violation of the self-preferencing obligation, but it could be considered this way.” The EU is expected to provide more guidance to companies this fall, potentially clearing up the confusion.
I personally find it hard to read article 5(8) in a way that implies that only being able to sign up for Threads via Instagram is according to the DMA however. It reads:
“The gatekeeper shall not require business users or end users to subscribe to, or register with, any further core platform services listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9) or which meet the thresholds in Article 3(2), point (b), as a condition for being able to use, access, sign up for or registering with any of that gatekeeper’s core platform services listed pursuant to that Article.” (emphasis mine).
Currently Meta (the gatekeeper) requires end users to register with Instagram (a core platform service) as a condition for being able to sign up with Threads (any of the gatekeepers’ core platform service). I would imagine that Threads will allow signing up with without Instagram before launching in the EU.
Digital Services Act
The Digital Services Act (DSA) goes into effect for social media platforms that have over 45m monthly active users in the EU, which Threads does not qualify for yet. The DSA is mainly focused on making online platforms safer for people, and give better user protection. The EU lists some of the obligations for online platforms here. These are obligations that Meta will have to make for their other products, such as Facebook and Instagram. As such it seems reasonable to assume that Meta can also do this for Threads. One requirement stands out to me:
“Measures to counter illegal content online, including illegal goods and services. The DSA imposes new mechanisms allowing users to flag illegal content online, and for platforms to cooperate with specialised ‘trusted flaggers’ to identify and remove illegal content;”
The main open question for me is, how these new mechanisms for flagging of illegal content interact with federation. If illegal content is posted on a platform that is not Threads, but does federate with Threads, how does that interfere with this requirement? I could not find much more that relates to both this specific new mechanism and federation.
Canada revenue sharing
The Canadian Online News Act requires Big Tech companies (‘digital news intermediary’ in the bill) to pay Canadian online news organisations to pay to link to their websites. In response, both Meta and Google have banned links to Canadian news outlets altogether. Meta holds a fair amount of power in this dynamic. Adam Mosseri goes out of his way to reiterate the stance that Threads is not interested in hard news and politics, because it contributes to significant extra political scrutiny and moderation questions.
If Meta indeed does not budge on this, Canadian news publishers will have to find a new way to reach their audience. How federation of Threads with the rest of the fediverse plays into this is an open question. For Meta it might be beneficial if a links to Canadian news publishers get posted on a different platform such as Mastodon, with the posts then potentially federating towards Threads users. This might prevent Meta from having to pay Canadian news publishers, while people on Threads still being able to see and click the links.
With a surface level reading of the bill (again, I’m not a lawyer and even more not a Canadian lawyer) two clauses stick out to me:
In the definitions of what a digital news intermedia is, article 2(1):
digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada.
Personally I feel that the phrasing of this definition, ‘makes news content […] available to persons in Canada’, does not give Threads much room to differentiate between content that is posted on Threads, versus content that is posted on Mastodon and gets federated and read by users on Threads.
The definition of making news available, article 2(b):
For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if […] access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.
The phrase ‘facilitated by any means’ seem to leave not much room for Meta to get around the issue of linking to news by federating with ActivityPub. My interpretation would be that it is not legal for Meta to show a Mastodon post in Threads if that post contains a link to a Canadian news site, without paying the news site.
Conclusion
This post has been helpful for me to get my own thoughts more clear on this issue. My takeaways:
The provisions around data portability in the DMA are stronger than I expected. My guess is that they are playing a significant role in the deliberation of Meta to add ActivityPub support to Threads.
The DSA is more of an open question to me. Federation with ActivityPub would seem to make compliance for Threads significantly more difficult.
Regarding the Online News Act, before diving into it I assumed that federation of Threads would be a convenient workaround for Meta. They could let other servers host the content, while they do not have to deal with it, and Thread users can still read it. Now that I’ve looked more into the details of the bill I’m doubtful that this would be in compliance with the bill.
Any feedback or corrections would be much appreciated, as I’m far from an expert in these fields. You can find me @fediversereport. And if you want to receive a weekly update on whats happening in the fediverse right in your mailbox, you can sign up below.
@rodhilton This is perhaps a question for #law or #lawstodon , but is there some mechanism for these various vendors and landlords to address these debts collectively? It seems insane to force them to individually sue for relief. What’s the distinction between a company that refuses to pay or renegotiate its obligations and a company that is bankrupt?