Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 55m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred ninety-ninth day.
On this day in 1865, the 10th Wisconsin Light Artillery musters out:
It had fought in the battles of Stones River, Resaca, Jonesboro, and Bentonville, the sieges of Corinth and Nashville, the Atlanta Campaign, and Sherman’s March to the Sea.
Recommended for reading in full:
Tom Hamburger reports House panel moves to hold former White House official in contempt after he obeys Trump administration’s instruction not to testify:
“The White House and [Trump Admin official] Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump,” [Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Elijah] Cummings said in a statement. “Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”
Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler write Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too (“A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians”):
In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.
The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.
There is no indication that this position is an official policy of Twitter, and the company told Motherboard that this “is not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But the Twitter employee’s comments highlight the sometimes overlooked debate within the moderation of tech platforms: are moderation issues purely technical and algorithmic, or do societal norms play a greater role than some may acknowledge?
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Twitter has not publicly explained why it has been able to so successfully eradicate ISIS [from the platform] while it continues to struggle with white nationalism. As a company, Twitter won’t say that it can’t treat white supremacy in the same way as it treated ISIS. But external experts Motherboard spoke to said that the measures taken against ISIS were so extreme that, if applied to white supremacy, there would certainly be backlash, because algorithms would obviously flag content that has been tweeted by prominent Republicans—or, at the very least, their supporters. So it’s no surprise, then, that employees at the company have realized that as well.