With Reddit's interest in sending some stocks soaring showing no sign of slowing down, the trading app Robinhood started restricting some transactions Thursday morning. Reddit wasn't happy -- and neither are some lawmakers. From a report:The incident apparently struck an unusual bipartisan chord, with Texas Republican Ted Cruz throwing his weight behind progressive Democrats who called out the company. Rep. Rashida Tlaib called Robinhood's decision "beyond absurd" and suggested that the House Financial Services Committee hold a hearing on what she deemed "market manipulation" from the personal finance startup. "They're blocking the ability to trade to protect Wall St. hedge funds, stealing millions of dollars from their users to protect people who've used the stock market as a casino for decades," Tlaib said. Her colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- a member of that committee -- chimed in with support for a hearing on Robinhood, calling the situation an "unacceptable" step to prevent retail investors from trading. Seeing Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez line up on anything right now is unusual, to put it mildly. Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna also flagged Robinhood's decision to stop some trades, slamming the startup for freezing out small investors while powerful hedge funds scramble to get control of the situation.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Live Science: In his inaugural address last week, President Joe Biden called for unity. But how can Americans come together, given what seems to be growing political contention and deep divides? New research suggests the answer can be found in stories, not statistics. People respect those they disagree with more when their position comes from a place of personal experience, not facts and figures, finds a new series of experiments published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is especially true when the personal stories are rooted in experiences of harm or vulnerability.

"In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts," said Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina. For the new research, Gray and his colleagues focused on how facts versus experiences affected people's perceptions of their opponent's rationality and their respect for that opponent. Over 15 separate experiments, they found that, although people think they respect opponents who present facts, they actually have more respect for opponents who share personal stories.

In March Andrew Yang's nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang's newest proposal as he runs to be New York's mayor: to give the city's public-housing residents billions of dollars in a "Borough Bucks" currency that would hopefully recirculate in the community: "I was like, you know, am I the only person here that would love to live in a society where we can actually barter our talents and skills, instead of depending on this economy that's not working for us?"

Yang made a similar point when I asked him about the origins of the Borough Bucks proposal. "If you're going to invest resources in a community, your preference is that the resources circulate within the community, particularly if you can serve multiple goals," he said. "They're just imaginative ways for communities to unlock resources."
The article also notes that in an earlier run for the U.S. presidency, "his pitch was that the economy needed to be modernized to account for automation and other technological advances. In his mayoral run, his pitch is that New York City should become the 'anti-poverty' city." But they explored the larger question of whether Yang sees a growing acceptance for universal basic incomes: I asked Yang about the debate, now happening in Congress, about whether Biden should push for fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks in the next bailout package, or two-thousand-dollar checks, or two thousand dollars a month until the economy rebounds. Yang said that he favored the last proposal.

I asked him how he felt about the fact that even as other candidates in the race were attacking him, several — Eric Adams, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the City Council member Carlos Menchaca — had expressed interest in the U.B.I. policies he had championed. "I would love to check out their plans," Yang said. "It's an idea whose time has come. I'm certainly very proud to have contributed to the idea's popularity, but anyone who wants to adapt a version of it, like, fantastic."

While NBC News reported on Tuesday that Facebook "has no plan in place to lift the indefinite suspension on President Donald Trump's Facebook account," there was a new twist two days later.

"Facebook on Thursday announced that it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend the account of former President Donald Trump to its newly instituted Oversight Board," reports CNBC: The independent body, which has been described as Facebook's "Supreme Court," will review the decision to suspend Trump and make a binding decision on whether the account will be reinstated. Until a decision is made, Trump's account will remain suspended, the company said in a blog post.

The board will begin accepting public comments on the case next week, it said in a tweet. It will have up to 90 days to make its decision, but its members have committed to move as quickly as possible, a spokesman for the body told CNBC. A decision can't be overruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg or other executives.
"We believe our decision was necessary and right..." Facebook's VP of Global Affairs wrote on their blog, adding "We look forward to receiving the board's decision — and we hope, given the clear justification for our actions on January 7, that it will uphold the choices we made..." Some said that Facebook should have banned President Trump long ago, and that the violence on the Capitol was itself a product of social media; others that it was an unacceptable display of unaccountable corporate power over political speech. We have taken the view that in open democracies people have a right to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can be held to account. But it has never meant that politicians can say whatever they like. They remain subject to our policies banning the use of our platform to incite violence. It is these policies that were enforced when we took the decision to suspend President Trump's access.

Whether you believe the decision was justified or not, many people are understandably uncomfortable with the idea that tech companies have the power to ban elected leaders. Many argue private companies like Facebook shouldn't be making these big decisions on their own. We agree... It would be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that we cannot duck.

This is why we established the Oversight Board. It is the first body of its kind in the world: an expert-led independent organization with the power to impose binding decisions on a private social media company. Its decision will be available at the board's website when it is issued.

President Joe Biden has named Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC's leading Democrat, as acting FCC chairwoman. She is replacing Ajit Pai, who concluded his four years as chairman yesterday. Engadget reports: Rosenworcel is known as defender of net neutrality policies, and as an advocate for closing the "homework gap," a reference to students who lack high-speed internet at home. As acting chair, Rosenworcel will lead the FCC until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. With Pai's departure, there's currently one spot open at the FCC for Biden to fill.

Outgoing President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at thwarting foreign use of cloud computing products for malicious cyber operations against the United States, the White House said on Tuesday, Trump's last full day in office. From a report: The order, first reported by Reuters, gives the Commerce Department authority to write rules to bar transactions with foreigners in cloud computing products or services, if a foreigner uses them for cyber attacks. "What we have seen in this space is that...an individual will rent thousands of pieces of this infrastructure inside the United States and resell them to actors who then abuse them," a senior administration official told Reuters. "This provides the Secretary of Commerce the ability to say...' There is no reason for you to continue to have access to the nation's products,'" the person added, noting the restrictions could apply to jurisdictions as well as people and companies. The order also requires the agency to write rules in six months for U.S. providers of Infrastructure as a Service, a type of cloud computing, to verify the identity of foreigners with whom they do business and keep certain records.

Facebook has no plan in place to lift the indefinite suspension on President Donald Trump's Facebook account following his departure from the White House on Wednesday, NBC News reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the company's plans said. From the report: The ban on Trump's account remains indefinite, the sources said, and there is no current plan in place to lift it. The social media giant said on Jan. 7 that it would "indefinitely" ban the president's account due to his role in inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol a day earlier. The company said the ban would last at least through the end of his term. Facebook's suspension stopped short of the permanent ban that other social media companies like Twitter and Snapchat lated placed on Trump's accounts.
UPDATE: CNBC reported two days later that Facebook had announced "it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend the account of former President Donald Trump to its newly instituted Oversight Board," and it would be that Board which would ultimately make the final determination.

In a blog post, Facebook still that "we hope, given the clear justification for our actions on January 7, that it will uphold the choices we made..."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology.

Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoon following inquiries from The Washington Post and other media outlets. Third-party merchants that attempt to evade Amazon's systems to list QAnon goods may find their selling privileges revoked, Fan added.

CNN reports: Twitter on Sunday temporarily suspended the account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for repeated violations of new rules the social media platform put in place following the violent U.S. Capitol riot earlier this month, a company spokesperson told CNN.

"The account referenced has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy," the spokesperson said. As a result, the congresswoman will be locked out of her account for 12 hours.
CNN also notes that Greene is a QAnon supporter, and that during her 12-hour suspension she'd complained that conservative Americans "shouldn't have to fear being cancelled by American corporations where they work, do business, and use services.

"They shouldn't be scared into submission by Socialists who want to end their way of life."

Nine days ago America set a record: nearly 290,000 new Covid-19 cases within 24 hours. according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

Four days later, anti-mask protesters in Oregon filmed their confrontation with employees at a Trader Joe's grocery store who wouldn't let them enter the store unless they were wearing a mask. Their 8-minute video has since been viewed over 325,000 times. The Oregonian newspaper reports: As other masked customers enter the store, the manager repeats that the protesters are welcome to shop too, as long as they wear masks. He says he is more than willing to talk to the group but isn't interested in debating policy. Trader Joe's nationwide policy requires customers to wear masks in stores.

"We're not demonstrating, we're buying groceries," a protester says. "That's why I'm here." The manager says he is enforcing the store's mask mandate. "It's not a law. You cannot enforce non-law," a protester says. "You cannot deny somebody the right to commerce." The store manager appears to offer to shop for the protesters and bring out what they want.

Amid growing shouting, a woman says: "I need to buy groceries. I don't know what I want until I go in and see it. The Civil Rights Act protects me to go in and shop like everybody else."

Legal experts have told USA Today that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not give people the right to shop without a mask.
The manager patiently explains to the protesters that "The difference you guys are trying to make isn't going to made with us. It can made with your government."

But soon one protester starts amplifying their voice with a bullhorn, while another continues filming the grocery store's employees — zooming in on their name tags — and threatening, "I'm sorry that you're not going to be able to let anyone else in, because we're standing here."

Another protester says "Right, that's pretty much the only resolution. It's either we get to shop, like free American citizens, right? Without being forced into wearing this mask, right...?"

They don't appear to follow through on their threat to blockade entry into the store, but the manager continues talking to them throughout the video. And at one point he says calmly that "It's disheartening that we can't have any conversations any more... It's really disheartening.

"It's disheartening that people can't just talk to one another."

"Online far-right movements are splintering," argues NBC News:

Users on forums that openly helped coordinate the Jan. 6 riot and called for insurrection...have become increasingly agitated with QAnon supporters, who are largely still in denial that President Donald Trump will no longer be in the Oval Office after Jan. 20... [QAnon adherents] have identified Inauguration Day as a last stand, and falsely think he will force a 10-day, countrywide blackout that ends in the mass execution of his political enemies and a second Trump term...

According to researchers who study the real-life effects of the QAnon movement, the false belief in a secret plan for Jan. 20 is irking militant pro-Trump and anti-government groups, who believe the magical thinking is counterproductive to future insurrections...

While several specific doomsdays have passed without any prophecies coming true, experts who study QAnon believe another failed prophecy on Inauguration Day could further decimate the movement. Fredrick Brennan, who created the website 8chan where "Q" posts and has spent the last two years attempting to have the site removed from the internet for its ties to white supremacist terror attacks, said he believes reality may devastate the movement on Inauguration Day. "This week has been hugely demoralizing so far and that will be the final straw," he said. "Even though Q is at the moment based on Donald Trump, it is certainly possible for a significant faction to rise up that believes he was in the deep state all along and foiled the plan."
The fracture is "apparent on viral TikToks and Facebook posts," reports NBC News, with one TikTok post mocking "the number of the gullible people who are still out there saying Q is going to run to the rescue."

"This will be the account for my official duties as President," tweeted U.S. president-elect Joe Biden on Thursday — but from a new account at @PresElectBiden (which will transition to @POTUS after Wednesday's inauguration).

But Bloomberg reports Biden is still "clashing with the social media company over its decision to deny the incoming administration millions of existing White House followers." Biden's transition opened @PresElectBiden in order to start building a following for one of the official accounts the new president will inherit at noon on Jan. 20: @POTUS. In a change in practice from 2017, when President Donald Trump entered office, Twitter Inc. plans to reset both the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse official accounts to zero followers for Biden. The two accounts currently have a massive audience — nearly 60 million followers combined, though there is overlap.

Trump got a head start in 2017 when he inherited about 12 million followers of @POTUS from President Barack Obama's tenure, plus millions of followers from other official accounts. Though Trump used his personal account, @realDonaldTrump, as his primary social media mouthpiece throughout his presidency, Biden's aides think it's unfair Twitter isn't handing over followers along with the official accounts...

Twitter said it is too technically difficult to copy or roll over the millions of followers from the Trump White House accounts to Biden's official accounts. But two transition officials privately expressed skepticism, pointing to other social media platforms' handling of the change in administration. Both Facebook Inc. and its subsidiary Instagram will duplicate the millions of followers currently following the Trump White House accounts to follow new Biden White House accounts. "They are advantaging President Trump's first days of the administration over ours," Rob Flaherty, the transition's digital director who will be director of digital strategy in the Biden White House, said of Twitter. "If we don't end the day with the 12 million followers that Donald Trump inherited from Barack Obama, then they have given us less than they gave Donald Trump, and that is a failure."

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire.

The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences.

Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Aljazeera: Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a former presidential contender, officially declared his run for New York City mayor. In a campaign video released late Wednesday on Twitter, Yang put forth an agenda that included a guaranteed minimum income, bringing universal high-speed Internet, starting a "people's bank" and reopening New York City "intelligently" from the pandemic. "I moved to New York City 25 years ago," he said in the video. "I came of age, fell in love, and became a father here. Seeing our city in so much pain breaks my heart." His agenda includes a focus on New York City's nightlife. On his campaign website, Yang pledges to make permanent outdoor dining, "to-go cocktails" and other temporary measures put in place during the pandemic. He also says he wants to attract so-called TikTok hype houses, where social-media influencers live together in big mansions and shoot videos together.

Yang's basic income program would start by providing $2,000 a year to half a million New Yorkers in extreme poverty. Participants would receive the cash through monthly transfers to a bank account opened in their name at a newly-created "People's Bank." His most detailed policy focuses on reviving the city's small businesses. He pledged to open 15,000 small businesses by 2022 and also offered a bevy of unconventional ideas, including buying heaters in bulk and then selling them to restaurants that are serving customers in the frigid outdoors as indoor dining remains shut. He also suggested the city make an investment in Cinch Market, a Brooklyn startup that brings together small businesses on one online platform, whose tagline is "Shop Brooklyn Not Bezo$." Yang, 46, whose two kids attend public school in the city, also said he wanted to subsidize broadband for schools, expand the city's universal preschool program, and reform the school system's admissions process. "There will be no recovery without schools being open and teaching children safely every day," he said.

A House majority, including several Republicans, on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for "incitement of insurrection." The New York Times reports: The House had enough votes on Wednesday to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as more than a half-dozen members of the president's party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors for an unprecedented second time. Reconvening under the threat of continued violence and the protection of thousands of National Guard troops, the House was determined to hold Mr. Trump to account just one week before he was to leave office. At issue was his role in encouraging a mob that attacked the Capitol one week ago while Congress met to affirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory, forcing lawmakers to flee for their lives in a deadly rampage.

The House put forward and was on the brink of adopting a single article of impeachment, charging Mr. Trump with "inciting violence against the government of the United States" and requesting his immediate removal from office and disqualification from ever holding one again. [...] The vote, which was still underway, set the stage for the second Senate trial of Mr. Trump in a year, though senators appeared unlikely to convene to sit in judgment before Jan. 20, when Mr. Biden will take the oath of office. The last proceeding, over Mr. Trump's attempts to pressure Ukraine to smear Mr. Biden, was a partisan affair. [...]

This time, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, was said to support the effort as a means of purging his party of Mr. Trump, setting up a political and constitutional showdown that could shape the course of American politics when the nation remains dangerously divided. [McConnell said he would not agree to use emergency powers to bring the Senate back into session for a trial before Jan. 19.] The House's vote was historic. Only two other presidents have been impeached; none has been impeached twice, by such a large bipartisan margin, or so close to leaving office.

"It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use," jokes TechCrunch.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Stripe Inc. will no longer process payments for President Trump's campaign website following last week's riot at the Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter.

The financial-technology company handles card payments for millions of online businesses and e-commerce platforms, including Mr. Trump's campaign website and online fundraising apparatus. Stripe is cutting off the president's campaign account for violating its policies against encouraging violence, the people said...

Stripe asks users to agree that they won't accept payments for "high risk" activities, including for any business or organization that "engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property," according to its website.
TechCrunch fills in the rest of the story. "Sources told the Journal that the reason for the company's decision was the violation of company policies against encouraging violence....

"The deplatforming of the president has effectively removed Trump from all social media outlets including Snap, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify and TikTok."

U.S. President Donald Trump was "permanently suspended" from Twitter Friday afternoon. "After close review of recent Tweets from the account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence," reads Twitter's announcement.

The announcement has since caused a new word to trend on Twitter: "Permanently."

Meanwhile, Reddit has banned r/donaldtrump for encouraging and glorifying violence after Wednesday's mob attack on the US Capitol. The Verge reports: Axios reporter Sara Fischer first reported the news, noting that the unofficial pro-Trump forum had been given multiple warnings. A Reddit splash page says the subreddit was "banned due to a violation of Reddit's rules against inciting violence." The r/donaldtrump forum had approximately 52,000 members before its ban, according to an Internet Archive snapshot.

"Reddit's site-wide policies prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals. In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed," a Reddit spokesperson tells The Verge. "We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the US Capitol."

Facebook will ban President Donald Trump's account from posting for at least the remainder of his term in office and perhaps "indefinitely," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post on Thursday. From a report: "We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. "Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete." The decision marks a major escalation by Facebook as it and other platforms have come under intense pressure from advocacy groups and prominent figures to ban Trump following his inflammatory rhetoric encouraging insurrection. Facebook and Twitter took the extraordinary step on Wednesday of temporarily locking President Donald Trump's account on their platforms after his supporters stormed the Capitol building to protest the election.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Georgians head to the polls to vote on their two U.S. Senators -- and effectively, partisan control of Congress -- on Tuesday, voters face an online landscape far different from what they saw in the weeks surrounding November's general election. In the fall, Facebook -- by far the most popular social network -- clamped down on sponsored posts about politics in order to ensure that misinformation would not spread the way that it had during the 2016 presidential election. But a few weeks before the Georgia race, Facebook turned off this safeguard in Georgia. The Markup decided to take a look behind the curtain to see if we could determine the impact on Georgia voters' news feeds. We recruited a panel of 58 Facebook users in the state and paid them to allow us to monitor their feeds, starting in late November, using custom software we built for our Citizen Browser project. The Citizen Browser project is a data-driven initiative to examine what content social media companies choose to amplify to their users.

While Facebook's controls were in place, we found that links to traditional news sites were present in almost all election-related posts that appeared on our Georgia panelists' feeds. After Dec. 16, however, when Facebook flipped the switch to turn on political advertising for the Georgia election, we noticed that partisan content quickly elbowed out news sites, replacing a significant proportion of mentions of the election in our users' feeds. The Markup defined election-related content as anything containing mentions of Trump or Biden, the names of the four major-party senate candidates, or the terms "senate," "vote," "election," or "ballot." We looked at the URLs attached to those election-related posts and tabulated the most common domains. For the first half of the month, the most commonly appearing election-related content came primarily from news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But after Dec. 16, just over one third of the most commonly appearing domains were partisan campaign sites buying ads, including WrongForGeorgia.com, an attack site targeting the Democratic candidates; and DeserveBetter.org, an attack site targeting the incumbent Republican senators. We discarded any domains that only appeared on a single panelist's feed.

On Tuesday night, McConnell introduced a new bill tying increased stimulus payments to a full repeal of Section 230. From a report: The bill comes amid new momentum for direct $2000 stimulus payments, and increasing pressure on party leaders to appease President Trump's escalating demands. Democratic party leaders criticized the inclusion of Section 230 repeal as an effort to scuttle stimulus talks. "Senator McConnell knows how to make $2,000 survival checks reality and he knows how to kill them," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement Tuesday. "Will Senate Republicans go along with Sen. McConnell's cynical gambit or will they push him to give a vote on the standalone [bill]?"

McConnell's bid for a full repeal of Section 230 comes amid increasingly chaotic negotiating over the level of direct payments to be included as part of stimulus efforts. On Sunday, President Trump signed into law Congress' $900 billion COVID-19 relief and government spending package that would provide $600 in stimulus payments to most Americans. In a public statement after signing the bill, Trump urged congressional leaders to hold a standalone vote on increasing direct payments to $2,000.