Portland Residents Push Back Police Coming to Evict an Afro-Indigenous Family

By Petr Knava | Social Media | December 9, 2020 | PAJIBA.COM


The Kinney family had lived in their home in North Portland for 65 years. Then, without warning, on the morning of September 9th, 2020, local police armed with assault rifles stormed the Kinney’s house and demanded they leave within half an hour. The family had been battling an unfair, predatory eviction for a good number of years. Despite their case still pending in a higher court, the cops had decided it was time to fulfill their purpose and enforce capital’s bidding. The local community, however, was having none of it. Protests erupted in response to what would amount to yet another example of ethnic displacement in the name of gentrification, and they have been ongoing ever since.

As a mixed Black and Indigenous working-class family, the Kinneys had been feeling the brunt of America’s cruel and racialised capitalism for a long time. The family first came to the house in North Portland in the 1950s, when African-American couple William and Pauline Kinney travelled up from Little Rock, Arkansas in an effort to escape the worst of institutionalised Southern racism. They dreamt of a life for their children free from the kind of hate they’d known. Unfortunately, it was simply repackaged. Their oldest son William Kinney Jr. served as a security guard at Portland Community College from 1976 to 1992. He was fired as retaliation for speaking up against his employer not allowing him to take training courses that his white colleagues could. He sued the college, and was awarded a sum of $900,000, though he ended up accepting just a fraction of the amount due to the college threatening to appeal. William Kinney Jr. would return to the house in the 1980s with his wife Julie, who is an Indigenous Native of the Upper Skagit Tribe of Washington. Then, in 2002, their son, William III, aged just 17, was sentenced to a prison term of 10 years for an automobile incident. Desperately hoping to save their son from the fate that the American prison system means for people of their heritage, the family took out a loan against their home. The loan did not help William, but it did open the door for the vultures of capitalism to come calling.

You can read the full story of the Kinney family here. In brief, the family has been using every possible means, at great personal cost, to forestall a predatory eviction. Meanwhile, the banks and the capitalists in government have been doing their best to sacrifice yet more Black and Indigenous people on the altar of their demented religion. As the page set up to support the Kinney family states:

We don’t need another empty, high-rise, high-rent luxury condominium. The Kinneys are one of the last Black families remaining on Mississippi and their fight for their home is also a real-time fight against gentrification. In order to stand a chance against the big banks and developers who’ve systematically displaced Black families across North and Northeast Portland, we need leverage.

We need to raise $250,000 by Wednesday, February 24th, 2021, the last day of Multnomah County’s extended writ of execution. This money will be an essential bargaining tool to initiate negotiations with developer Roman Ozeruga and ensure the Kinney family can remain housed for generations to come.

You can donate to the Kinneys here.

The most recent development in the story following the eviction attempt in September this year and the months of community protest and occupation that followed it came this Tuesday, when the Mayor of Portland Ted Wheeler authorised the use of force to remove the family and the 100-strong group of protesters from the area.

The police arrived at the Kinney’s family home with the intention of removing them 

According to a news report on the protest in the OPB:
Maurice Fain, the president of the Historic Mississippi Avenue Business Association, was watching from the sidewalk.

“I’ve been following this family from day one since the first eviction,” he said. “You can clearly see that something ain’t right with this.”

Fain, who owns the Southern Kitchen PDX food cart on Mississippi Ave., said it’s upsetting to see how gentrification in the area has so severely impacted Portland’s historically Black neighborhood.

“You’re taking away something that belongs to them that they’ve been having in their family for generations,” Fain said. “As business owners, as community people living here, we should help another family stay in the community. We shouldn’t want to destroy them so we can build sky rises and apartment complexes to get wealthy.”

Instead, this happened:

Benjamin Young Savage (ᐱᓐᒋᐱᓐ)

@benjancewicz

·

Dec 8

Portland police attempt to serve an eviction notice during a pandemic. Residents push them back.

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Benjamin Young Savage (ᐱᓐᒋᐱᓐ)

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The home they’re protecting belongs to a Black Indigenous family. white people; take note. Do you see how the cops retreat? Do you see how violence is not used against the protestors? Do you see what happens when people unify? This is our work.

According to a news report on the protest in the OPB:
Maurice Fain, the president of the Historic Mississippi Avenue Business Association, was watching from the sidewalk.

“I’ve been following this family from day one since the first eviction,” he said. “You can clearly see that something ain’t right with this.”

Fain, who owns the Southern Kitchen PDX food cart on Mississippi Ave., said it’s upsetting to see how gentrification in the area has so severely impacted Portland’s historically Black neighborhood.

“You’re taking away something that belongs to them that they’ve been having in their family for generations,” Fain said. “As business owners, as community people living here, we should help another family stay in the community. We shouldn’t want to destroy them so we can build sky rises and apartment complexes to get wealthy.”

It’s Not Section 230 President Trump Hates, 

It’s the First Amendment
BY ELLIOT HARMON
DECEMBER 9, 2020 EFF


President Trump’s recent threat to “unequivocally VETO” the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) if it doesn’t include a repeal of Section 230 may represent the final attack on online free speech of his presidency, but it’s certainly not the first. The NDAA is one of the “must-pass” bills that Congress passes every year, and it’s absurd that Trump is using it as his at-the-buzzer shot to try to kill the most important law protecting free speech online. Congress must reject Trump’s march against Section 230 once and for all.

Under Section 230, the only party responsible for unlawful speech online is the person who said it, not the website where they posted it, the app they used to share it, or any other third party. It has some limitations—most notably, it does nothing to shield intermediaries from liability under federal criminal law—but at its core, it’s just common-sense policy: if a new Internet startup needed to be prepared to defend against countless lawsuits on account of its users’ speech, startups would never get the investment necessary to grow and compete with large tech companies. 230 isn't just about Internet companies, either. Any intermediary that hosts user-generated material receives this shield, including nonprofit and educational organizations like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

Section 230 is not, as Trump and other politicians have suggested, a handout to today’s dominant Internet companies. It protects all of us. If you’ve ever forwarded an email, Section 230 protected you: if a court found that email defamatory, Section 230 would guarantee that you can’t be held liable for it; only the author can.

If you’ve ever forwarded an email, Section 230 protected you.

Two myths about Section 230 have developed in recent years and clouded today’s debates about the law. One says that Section 230 somehow requires online services to be “neutral public forums”: that if they show “bias” in their decisions about what material to show or hide from users, they lose their liability shield under Section 230 (this myth drives today’s deeply misguided “platform vs. publisher” rhetoric). The other myth is that if Section 230 were repealed, online platforms would suddenly turn into “neutral” forums, doing nothing to remove or promote certain users’ speech. Both myths ignore that Section 230 isn’t what protects platforms’ right to reflect any editorial viewpoint in how it moderates users’ speech—the First Amendment to the Constitution is. The First Amendment protects platforms’ right to moderate and curate users’ speech to reflect their views, and Section 230 additionally protects them from certain types of liability for their users’ speech. It’s not one or the other; it’s both.

We’ve written numerous times about proposals in Congress to force platforms to be “neutral” in their moderation decisions. Besides being unworkable, such proposals are clearly unconstitutional: under the First Amendment, the government cannot force sites to display or promote speech they don’t want to display or remove speech they don’t want to remove.

It’s not hard to ascertain the motivations for Trump’s escalating war on Section 230. Even before he was elected, Trump was deeply focused on using the courts to punish companies for insults directed at him. He infamously promised in early 2016 to “open up our libel laws” to make it easier for him to legally bully journalists.

No matter your opinion of Section 230, we should all be alarmed that Trump considers a goofy nickname a security threat.

Trump’s attacks on Section 230 follow a familiar pattern: they always seem to follow a perceived slight by social media companies. The White House issued an executive order earlier this year that would draft the FCC to write regulations narrowing Section 230’s liability shield, though the FCC has no statutory authority to interpret Section 230. (Today, Congress is set to confirm Trump’s pick for a new FCC commissioner—one of the legal architects of the executive order.) That executive order came when Twitter and Facebook began to add fact checks to his dubious claims about mail-in voting.

But before, Trump never took the step of claiming that “national security” requires him to be able to use the courts to censor critics. That claim came on Thanksgiving, which also happened to be the day that Twitter users starting calling him “#DiaperDon” after he snapped at a reporter. Since then, he has frequently tied Section 230 to national security. The right to criticize people in power is one of the foundational rights on which our country is based. No matter your opinion of Section 230, we should all be alarmed that Trump considers a goofy nickname a security threat. Besides, repealing Section 230 would do nothing about the #DiaperDon tweets or any of the claims of mistreatment of conservatives on social media. Even if platforms have a clear political bias, Congress can't enact a law that overrides those platforms’ right to moderate user speech in accordance with that bias.

What would happen if Section 230 were repealed, as the president claims to want? Online platforms would become more restrictive overnight. Before allowing you to post online, a platform would need to gauge the level of legal risk that you and your speech bring on them—some voices would disappear from the Internet entirely. It’s shocking that politicians pushing for a more exclusionary Internet are doing so under the banner of free speech; it’s even more galling that the president has dubbed it a matter of national security.

Our free speech online is too important to be held as collateral in a routine authorization bill. Congress must reject President Trump’s misguided campaign against Section 230.

Don’t Blame Section 230 for Big Tech’s Failures. Blame Big Tech.
BY ELLIOT HARMON  NOVEMBER 16, 2020 EFF


Next time you hear someone blame Section 230 for a problem with social media platforms, ask yourself two questions: first, was this problem actually caused by Section 230? Second, would weakening Section 230 solve the problem? Politicians and commentators on both sides of the aisle frequently blame Section 230 for big tech companies’ failures, but their reform proposals wouldn’t actually address the problems they attribute to Big Tech. If lawmakers are concerned about large social media platforms’ outsized influence on the world of online speech, they ought to confront the lack of meaningful competition among those platforms and the ways in which those platforms fail to let users control or even see how they’re using our data. Undermining Section 230 won’t fix Twitter and Facebook; in fact, it risks making matters worse by further insulating big players from competition and disruption.

While large tech companies might clamor for regulations that would hamstring their competitors, they’re notably silent on reforms that would curb the practices that allow them to dominate the Internet today.

Section 230 says that if you break the law online, you should be the one held responsible, not the website, app, or forum where you said it. Similarly, if you forward an email or even retweet a tweet, you’re protected by Section 230 in the event that that material is found unlawful. It has some exceptions—most notably, that it doesn’t shield platforms from liability under federal criminal law—but at its heart, Section 230 is just common sense: you should be held responsible for your speech online, not the platform that hosted your speech or another party.

Without Section 230, the Internet would be a very different place, one with fewer spaces where we’re all free to speak out and share our opinions. Social media wouldn’t exist—at least in its current form—and neither would important educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The legal risk associated with operating such a service would deter any entrepreneur from starting one, let alone a nonprofit.

As commentators of all political stripes have targeted large Internet companies with their ire, it’s become fashionable to blame Section 230 for those companies’ failings. But Section 230 isn’t why five companies dominate the market for speech online, or why the marketing and behavior analysis decisions that guide Big Tech’s practices are so often opaque to users.
The Problem with Social Media Isn’t Politics; It’s Power

A recent Congressional hearing with the heads of Facebook, Twitter, and Google demonstrated the highly politicized nature of today’s criticisms of Big Tech. Republicans scolded the companies for “censoring” and fact-checking conservative speakers while Democrats demanded that they do more to curb misleading and harmful statements.

There’s a nugget of truth in both parties’ criticisms: it’s a problem that just a few tech companies wield immense control over what speakers and messages are allowed online. It’s a problem that those same companies fail to enforce their own policies consistently or offer users meaningful opportunity to appeal bad moderation decisions. There’s little hope of a competitor with fairer speech moderation practices taking hold given the big players’ practice of acquiring would-be competitors before they can ever threaten the status quo.

Unfortunately, trying to legislate that platforms moderate “neutrally” would create immense legal risk for any new social media platform—raising, rather than lowering, the barrier to entry for new platforms. Can a platform filter out spam while still maintaining its “neutrality”? What if that spam has a political message? Twitter and Facebook would have the large legal budgets and financial cushions to litigate those questions, but smaller platforms wouldn’t.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Facebook has joined Section 230’s critics: it literally has the most to gain from decimating the law.

Likewise, if Twitter and Facebook faced serious competition, then the decisions they make about how to handle (or not handle) hateful speech or disinformation wouldn’t have nearly the influence they have today on online discourse. If there were twenty major social media platforms, then the decisions that any one of them makes to host, remove, or factcheck the latest misleading post about the election results wouldn’t have the same effect on the public discourse. The Internet is a better place when multiple moderation philosophies can coexist, some more restrictive and some more permissive.

The hearing showed Congress’ shortsightedness when it comes to regulation of large Internet companies. In their drive to use the hearing for their political ends, both parties ignored the factors that led to Twitter, Facebook, and Google’s outsized power and remedies to bring competition and choice into the social media space.

Ironically, though calls to reform Section 230 are frequently motivated by disappointment in Big Tech’s speech moderation policies, evidence shows that further reforms to Section 230 would make it more difficult for new entrants to compete with Facebook or Twitter. It shouldn’t escape our attention that Facebook was one of the first tech companies to endorse SESTA/FOSTA, the 2018 law that significantly undermined Section 230’s protections for free speech online, or that Facebook is now leading the charge for further reforms to Section 230 (PDF). Any law that makes it more difficult for a platform to maintain Section 230’s liability shield will also make it more difficult for new startups to compete with Big Tech. (Just weeks after SESTA/FOSTA passed and put multiple dating sites out of business, Facebook announced that it was entering the online dating world.) We shouldn’t be surprised that Facebook has joined Section 230’s critics: it literally has the most to gain from decimating the law.

Remember, speech moderation at scale is hard. It’s one thing for platforms to come to a decision about how to handle divisive posts by a few public figures; it’s quite another for them to create rules affecting everyone’s speech and enforce them consistently and transparently. When platforms err on the side of censorship, marginalized communities are silenced disproportionately. Congress should not try to pass laws dictating how Internet companies should moderate their platforms. Such laws would not pass Constitutional scrutiny, would harden the market for social media platforms from new entrants, and would almost certainly censor innocent people unfairly.

Then How Should Congress Keep Platforms in Check? Some Ideas You Won’t Hear from Big Tech

While large tech companies might clamor for regulations that would hamstring their competitors, they’re notably silent on reforms that would curb the practices that allow them to dominate the Internet today. That’s why EFF recommends that Congress update antitrust law to stop the flood of mergers and acquisitions that have made competition in Big Tech an illusion. Before the government approves a merger, the companies should have to prove that the merger would not increase their monopoly power or unduly harm competition.

But even updating antitrust policy is not enough: big tech companies will stop at nothing to protect their black box of behavioral targeting from even a shred of transparency. Facebook recently demonstrated this when it threatened the Ad Observatory, an NYU project to shed light on how the platform was showing different political advertising messages to different segments of its user base. Major social media platforms’ business models thrive on practices that keep users in the dark about what information they collect on us and how it’s used. Decisions about what material (including advertising) to deliver to users are informed by a web of inferences about users, inferences that are usually impossible for users even to see, let alone correct.

Because of the link between social media’s speech moderation policies and its irresponsible management of user data, Congress can’t improve Big Tech’s practices without addressing its surveillance-based business models. And although large tech companies have endorsed changes to Section 230 and may endorse further changes to Section 230 in the future, they will probably never endorse real, comprehensive privacy-protective legislation.

That the Internet Association and its members have fought tooth-and-nail to stop privacy protective legislation while lobbying for bills undermining Section 230 says all you need to know about which type of regulation they see as the greater threat to their bottom line.

Any federal privacy bill must have a private right of action: if a company breaks the law and infringes on our privacy rights, it’s not enough to put a government agency in charge of enforcing the law. Users should have the right to sue the companies, and it should be impossible to sign away those rights in a terms-of-service agreement. The law must also forbid companies from selling privacy as a service: all users must enjoy the same privacy rights regardless of what we’re paying—or being paid—for the service.

The recent fights over the California Consumer Privacy Act serve as a useful example of how tech companies can give lip service to the idea of privacy-protecting legislation while actually insulating themselves from it. After the law passed in 2018, the Internet Association—a trade group representing Big Tech powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, and Google—spent nearly $176,000 lobbying the California legislature to weaken the law. Most damningly, the IA tried to pass a bill exempting surveillance-based advertising from the practices from which the law protects consumers. That’s right: big tech companies tried to pass a law protecting their own invasive advertising practices that helped cement their dominance in the first place. That the Internet Association and its members have fought tooth-and-nail to stop privacy protective legislation while lobbying for bills undermining Section 230 says all you need to know about which type of regulation they see as the greater threat to their bottom line.

Section 230 has become a hot topic for politicians and commentators on both sides of the aisle. Whether it’s Republicans criticizing Big Tech for allegedly censoring conservatives or Democrats alleging that online platforms don’t do enough to fight harmful speech online, both sides seem increasingly convinced that they can change Big Tech’s social media practices by undermining Section 230. But history has shown that making it more difficult for platforms to maintain Section 230 protections will further isolate a few large tech companies from meaningful competition. If Congress wants to keep Big Tech in check, it must address the real problems head-on, passing legislation that will bring competition to Internet platforms and curb the unchecked, opaque user data practices at the heart of social media’s business models.

You’ll never hear Big Tech advocate that.

USA EFF

Federal and State Antitrust Suits Challenging Facebook’s Acquisitions are a Welcome Sight

BY MITCH STOLTZ AND KAREN GULLO
DECEMBER 10, 2020 EFF

Antitrust enforcers charged with protecting us from monopolists have awoke from decades-long hibernation to finally address something users have known, and been paying for with their private data, for years: Facebook’s acquisitions of rival platforms have harmed social media users by reducing competition, leaving them with fewer choices and creating a personal data-hoovering behemoth whose profiling capabilities only cement its dominance.

Now the government’s enforcers want Facebook broken up. The company’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 are at the center of lawsuits filed yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and forty U.S. states and territories that accuse the giant platform of having and illegally maintaining monopoly power in the “personal social networking” market. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the lawsuits allege, strategized that it was better to buy rather than compete. Acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, the lawsuits allege, deprives social media users of the benefits of competition—more choice, quality, and innovation.

The suits also focus on how Facebook treats companies that want to interoperate with its services. Facebook has long recognized that the ability to interoperate with an incumbent platform is a powerful anti-monopoly weapon. That’s why, say the lawsuits, Facebook attaches conditions when it allows app developers to use its APIs: they can’t provide services that compete with Facebook’s functions, and they can’t connect with or promote other social networks.

Like many antitrust suits, a key issue will be whether the court accepts the governments' definition of the relevant market that’s being monopolized. In other words, is “personal social networking services" a unique type of service that Facebook dominates? Or does Facebook compete head-to-head with everything from email to television as one player among many? That issue is sure to be hotly contested as the government and states grapple with Facebook about what other companies are part of the relevant market.

Facebook will probably also argue that its acquisitions were good for consumers and weren’t illegal from an antitrust standpoint because, even if they gave the company market dominance, they led to innovation that benefited users. Because no one can know for sure what would have happened if Instagram and WhatsApp had remained independent, Facebook will argue, the courts can do nothing now.

Tell that to former Instagram and WhatsApp users who saw the platforms they chose over Facebook be subsumed into Facebook’s ecosystem. Those users thought their preferred network, and their data, could be kept separate from Facebook’s; first because they were actually separate, and then because Facebook told them so, only to go back on its word, siphon off their data, and be opaque about the privacy implications to boot.

Antitrust regulators were mostly asleep at the wheel. Meantime, Instagram users saw the Instagram Direct logo disappear and be replaced with Facebook Messenger logo. Facebook continues to blur the lines between the two apps, we noted last month, as part of a broader plan to consolidate Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. In a recent messaging “update,” Facebook encouraged Instagram users take advantage of new “cross-platform messaging” features that in essence give you Facebook Messenger inside Instagram. But hey, you get innovations like colors in chats and new emojis.

Facebook will also have to defend its 2013 acquisition of VPN maker Onavo, which was specifically called out in the states’ lawsuit. Onavo’s data-gathering features were billed as a way for Facebook customers to keep their web browsing safe. But as it turns out, Facebook was using Onavo to gather intelligence about potential rivals by seeing how many messages users were sending through WhatsApp, which is what led it to buy WhatsApp. Facebook shut down the Onavo service after the practice was revealed. Whoops.

The enforcers aren’t asking that Facebook pay damages in the lawsuit. Rather, they want a court to require Facebook to divest Instagram, WhatsApp and possibly other acquisitions, and to limit the companies’ future mergers and acquisitions.

That’s the right approach. Even though company break-ups are hard to achieve—the last significant technology company to be broken up was AT&T in 1982—spinning off Facebook’s acquisitions could inject competition into a field where it’s been stifled for many years now. Even the pursuit of a break-up and restrictions on future mergers can create needed space for competition in the future. That’s why these lawsuits, though they won’t be easy to win, are a welcome sight.

Syrian refugees take citizenship oath on fifth anniversary of first arrivals

OTTAWA — A group of Syrian refugees took the Canadian citizenship oath in an online ceremony Thursday, the fifth anniversary of when the first plane carrying Syrian refugees arrived in Canada as part of the Liberal government's promise to resettle tens of thousands.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Ibrahim Nafash, who was one of 29 Syrian refugees who participated, said he is happy it is finally happening after he and his family waited more than a year.

He said he submitted his citizenship application, along with those for his immediate family, in February 2019. They passed the exam that October, but his oath-taking was delayed until now due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We asked (the Immigration Department) when we will take the oath, and we were told we have to wait because of the COVID-19," he said in an interview, adding they were contacted recently to take part in the online ceremony.

Nafash, 48, said he came to Canada with his wife and two sons from Syria via Lebanon in December 2015.

Since then, he has been working as a chef for a Middle Eastern food supplier in Montreal after learning French and attending culinary school. His wife worked at a real estate company before she lost her job during COVID-19 pandemic.

When asked about the long delay in Nafash's case, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said Thursday that the pandemic has posed some new challenges.

"We want to welcome him and everybody else as quickly as possible," he said in an interview.

Mendicino said nearly 73,000 Syrian refugees have been resettled in Canada since 2015.

He said the 29 Syrian refugees who took the citizenship oath today are among over 43,000 new citizens participated in online citizenship ceremonies since April.

"I'm very optimistic about our ability to continue to meet a high service standard when it comes to citizenship ceremonies," he said.

Mendicino said his department is going to be moving citizenship exams online too.

The federal Immigration Department has suspended citizenship exams since the pandemic began, creating a backlog, but it said recently it will launch a pilot project to begin holding exams online for about 5,000 applicants who mostly filed before the pandemic.

"This is a perfect example of how we have adapted and evolved to become even more efficient despite the very significant disruption that has been caused by COVID-19," Mendicino said.

"My hope is that following this pilot that we will be able to scale it up significantly and become even more efficient in the future," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 10, 2020

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Maan Alhmidi, The Canadian Press