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Google reportedly sent identifying info of extremist users to law enforcement
Google may have shared identifying information of certain users with law enforcement, according to a report from The Guardian.
Facebook pulls Trump ad TV networks took off the air
Facebook confirmed that it has followed in the footsteps of most major media outlets and pulled a controversial advertisement released by the Donald Trump campaign. The social media giant, which allowed the video to run for several days on its platform, said the advertisement violates its policy against sensational content, according to the Daily Beast.
New Tesla lawsuit accuses company of LGBT discrimination
Tesla has just been hit with its second discrimination lawsuit in as many days. Just yesterday, the company was sued for racial harassment in its factories. A few months back, its diversity panel uncovered a slew of sexism. Now The Guardian reports that another employee is suing the automaker for anti-LGBT taunts.
Sarah Nyberg's Twitter bot feeds the emptiness of alt-right trolls
Engaging with "alt-right" Pepe-spewing racists on Twitter is a diversion I have yet to tire of, but the fact is even I can't tweet enough satisfy the masses. Fortunately, automating the process is a viable option, as shown by writer Sarah Nyberg's @Arguetron Twitter bot. It's not the first such scripted process to hit social media (according to Nyberg, her inspiration came from a number of similar bots created by Nora Reed including @opinions_good and @good_opinions.), but it does have a remarkably deep capability to create benign but baiting responses. One egg avatar'd tweeter determined to defend the honor of a not-as-popular-as-his-follower-count-suggests alt-righter went back and forth with Arguetron for about ten hours without catching on.
Post a racist comment online, see it on a billboard near your house
Messages posted on Facebook, Twitter and other online spaces may feel like they carry less weight than things said in the physical world -- but that's not the case, argues Brazilian civil-rights group Criola. This year, Criola launched a campaign labeled, "Virtual racism, real consequences," which pulls racially bigoted comments from the internet and places them on billboards in the neighborhoods where the commenters live. Criola finds racist messages online and then uses geotag data to locate the author's neighborhood; the group then rents billboard space nearby and prints the comments for the world -- and the original writer -- to see. The names and images of the commenters are blurred out, but the message rings clear: Things said online affect people in real life, in real ways.
Reddit bans some of its most well-known racist communities
Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong predicted that racist and sexist users who agitated to push his replacement, Ellen Pao, out the door were actually sealing their own fates, and it appears that has happened. Newly-returned leader Steve Huffman just announced that as a part of its new Content Policy, Reddit will do more than just quarantine some of the most vile content hubs its members have built -- it will ban some of them. That includes r/Coontown and some of its spinoffs (but apparently leaves other gems to be shoved behind the curtain), which Huffman says are getting chopped because they "exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else." As the new CEO puts it, those communities were becoming what Reddit was known for, and making it hard to recruit people.
Halo 4 gets tough on sexist players
343 Industries wants to make it clear: It will brook no further discrimination of any kind in Halo 4. Executive producer Kiki Wolfkill and studio head Bonnie Ross say that sexist discrimination of any kind will be met with a lifetime ban from both the game and the Xbox Live network.Ross says that "most people look at a franchise like Halo, and automatically assume it's run by a guy," but this particular franchise is run by a few ladies, and they're not having any discriminatory nonsense in their latest sequel.We agree with the sentiment, and hope that the harsh penalties make sure that the losers who make sexist and other offensive comments get shown the door for good. The ideal should be to make sure all forms of this offensive discrimination are squashed as far and wide as possible, no matter who's running the show.
Minecraft language update inadvertently contained racial slur (but it's fixed now)
Minecraft has demonstrated some magnificent feats of community creation, but now it's also offering a lesson in the volatile side of crowd-sourcing. Changing the language to Afrikaans, spoken in South Africa and Namibia, yesterday caused the title screen to display the phrase "You are a NIGGER." As Minecraft Forums user EgXPlayer commented, "Thats racist."Mojang's Jens Bergensten apologized for the slur and encouraged fans to check the new translation via Crowdin -- the Afrikaans home screen now reads "enkelspeler," which translates to "single player," as it should. [Image via Minecraft Forums user TripleHeadedSheep]
Eurogamer notes racism in its Resident Evil 5 hands-on
The Resident Evil 5 "racism issue" has reanimated itself in the latest hands-on preview by Eurogamer. The site believes the "debate is only going to get louder" once the game is released. It notes that Chris Redfield's partner, Sheva, fits neatly into the "approved Hollywood model" of a light-skinned black heroine, and describes sensitive images later on in the game as "outrageous and outdated."The RE5 hands-on concludes that all the mainstream media needs is an image of Chris Redfield stomping on the face of a black woman, "splattering her skull," to have a field day. Yikes!%Gallery-5253%
Anti-Aliased: See the griefing, taste the griefing
If home is where the heart is, then PlayStation 3 users have some pretty cold, racist, and sexually demeaning hearts. Hearts that make Halo 3 players look like cute puppies in comparison. Now I'm not saying that PlayStation Home is not a great idea -- in theory it's a brilliant idea. Play in a world like Second Life, meet other users, play mini games, launch into full PS3 games, what's not to love about any of that?Well, it seems Sony forgot about the precedents of other virtual worlds. Second Life, while nice, can have the uncanny ability to resemble slums in certain areas thanks to the scary nature of some of the creators. Xbox Live sports some of the most offensive users (NSFW) around. So how exactly was Home suppose to avoid the travesties that affect other worlds?Sony has already stated that "user behavior and feedback" will shape where they go with the Home beta. If that's the case, where are they going to go? Totalitarian state, anyone?
You don't have to tolerate racism in WoW
As with any grouping of people online, some WoW players can perfectly sociable and respectful of others, and some can be nasty, offensive and even bigoted. As the player Adaan wrote on the European WoW forums, he had the displeasure of encountering some players who use a certain racially offensive word, and it made him feel very angry. It turns out that if you encounter such language in WoW, you can report other players for racism. Vaneras stepped in to confirm that Blizzard does not tolerate racist language, and such comments will get those players banned. Although I have not encountered racist language in WoW myself, I heartily encourage anyone who does to report that player. Dealing with racism in real life can often lead to awkward confrontations with people who refuse to admit what they were saying was wrong in any way, but in WoW, Blizzard is all set to do that for you, while at the same time helping to make sure there are negative consequences on racist behavior.Although Vaneras doesn't mention it in his post, it is my understanding that the same also follows for other forms of discriminatory language, such as sexism. While of course there can be a lot of annoying grey area in such issues, another reason to such offenses in WoW is that Blizzard may actually have proof of what the other person said stored in their systems, and a genuine problem is more likely to receive a real consequence than might otherwise be the case.
Video Sandwich: July 23, 2006
Ah... the weekend. While the other Joystiq and Fanboy sites seem to offer absolutely no updates, PSP Fanboy strives to entertain you... at any cost. You should know the format of the Sandwich by now: you get two new interesting PSP videos, usually made by fans. In the middle of this video bread is the meaty, cheesy and tasty commentary by me. At the top, you'll see an incredible parody of how to hack a PSP. It's a lot less sane than other guides, but it's also a lot more funny. If you don't find it particularly amusing, at least you can laugh at this man's clear abuse of technology. Who wants to bet that his monitor didn't work after this experiment?At the bottom, you'll see a real world reprucussion of the racist white PlayStation Portable ads. I love how awkward the news anchors seem when discussing this topic. But then again, news anchors always look awkward, don't they?
Cingular drops "La Migra" ringtone
Cingular Wireless has pulled a ringtone that mocks Latin American immigrants from its site, after being contacted by an advocate from a group called the League of United Latin American Citizens. The $2.49 ringtone, called "La Migra," ridiculed Latinos, with wording such as "Step away from the telephone-o. I'm deporting you back home-o." According to reports, a Cingular exec was "nearly speechless" after listening to the ringtone.Update: Thanks to Sascha Segan for pointing out that the ringtone was actually a bit of satire put together by Latino comedian Paul Saucido. You can catch Sascha's interview with Saucido here.
