Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a daytime high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 13h 59m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand eighth day.
A City of Whitewater Joint Public Works and Finance Committee will meet at 6 PM.
On this day in 1961, Communist East Germany begins construction of the Berlin Wall.
Recommended for reading in full:
AJ Vicens reports Mayberry v. Moscow: How Local Officials Are Preparing to Defend the 2020 Elections:
In early June, the Allegheny County Board of Elections held a special meeting in downtown Pittsburgh, inviting a trio of election security experts to offer advice as the county selects new voting equipment. Marian Schneider, a former Pennsylvania state elections official and the current president of Verified Voting, an election security watchdog group, gave an opening statement framing the day’s conversation in stark terms.
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After the meeting, Candice Hoke, a longtime election administration and security expert who’d also been invited to speak, described the gathering as an unusual bright spot, contrasting the attention Allegheny County had devoted to the issue to many places around the country where the state of election security lags. Efforts by federal agencies to work with states and jurisdictions to improve election security are helping, Hoke says, but the bureaucrats overseeing the country’s more than 10,000 election jurisdictions are still routinely outmatched.
Megan Squire writes How big tech and policymakers miss the mark when fighting online extremism:
Now, critics of Big Tech are lining up to plead, cajole, and threaten—from the left and right. In June, Senators Cruz (R-TX) and Hawley (R-MO) proposed legislation that would require social media companies over a certain size to prove no political bias when moderating content. Convinced that conservatives voices are being unfairly targeted, they followed up with a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking for an investigation into moderation policies on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. In July, Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, filed suit against Google for, among other things, “playing favorites, with no warning, no transparency—and no accountability” in their content moderation.
As with the reactive policies implemented by the media companies themselves, this legislation and lawsuit are also naïvely focused on yesterday’s problems. They do not acknowledge the way the platforms are actually being gamed today, nor how they will be abused tomorrow.
Serial harassers and trolls will always figure out tricks to avoid the bans, and even if they somehow catch a block that sticks, the growing “Alt Tech” ecosystem made of decentralized, niche services often located in other countries, is more than willing to scoop them up. Finally banned from YouTube? Try Bitchute or DLive. De-platformed from Facebook or Twitter? Try Telegram, Parler, or Gab—the site favored by the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter back in October 2018—or the so-called “image boards” like 8chan, where the Christchurch, San Diego, and El Paso shooters all posted their manifestos.
How Hong Kong’s Protesters Evade Police and Keep the Demonstrations Alive :