Diversity
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">this is a general category</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">sub cat is biological diversity</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">in systems, monoculture creates vulnerability blindspots (inequality? --> instability)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aha doh!</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</font></div><div><div class="mag-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 19px; padding: 0px; position: relative;"><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; letter-spacing: 1px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/turns-out-letting-efficient-monopolies-control-our-food-supply-was-a-terrible-idea/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Turns out letting ‘efficient’ monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea</font></a></h3><div class="grid-post-box-meta mag-meta" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 7px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="author-italic author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/clairekelloway/" title="Posts by Claire Kelloway" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Claire Kelloway</a> / <a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/washington-monthly/" title="Posts by Washington Monthly" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Washington Monthly</a></font></span></div></div><div class="mag-excerpt entry-content" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce…</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; font-style: italic;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/when-capitalism-kills-culture/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/when-capitalism-kills-culture/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>When capitalism kills culture</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Defense Secretary Ash Carter, center, tours Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, March 3, 2016. DoD photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Tim D. Godbee</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by The Conversation November 15, 2019</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Julien Lefort-Favreau, Queen’s University, Ontario</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The story is all too familiar – yet it should command more attention from Canadians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recently, the Globe and Mail reported the Ben McNally bookstore, located on Bay Street a stone’s throw from Union Station, would close in 2020. Two days later, Rupert McNally, the founder’s son, confirmed the news on the store’s website. It had been open since 2007.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The reason for the closure is simple: the store will be replaced by an alleyway linking Bay Street to the alley behind it. This redevelopment is part of a project that the owner calls (ironically?) “The Bay Street Village.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It is therefore a stupid example of gentrification that pits a modest shopkeeper against a greedy landowner.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The increase in the value of Toronto’s real estate is not exactly new. But we can see here an example of a paradigm that is not reassuring for the future of large cities: the profitability of businesses devoted to cultural property is hardly compatible with the overbidding in real estate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Montréal is facing the same problem, and it affects all independent businesses. In August, the City gave the Commission on Economic and Urban Development and Housing the mandate to conduct public consultations on vacant space on commercial arteries. Several of these areas have rates ranging from 10 to 15 per cent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A “hygienization” of urban centres</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It has already been demonstrated that gentrification is largely based on a city’s ability to offer an interesting and diversified cultural life. Some, such as Richard Florida, have linked this phenomenon to the emergence of a “creative class.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Geographer Oli Mould, in his excellent book, Against Creativity, published in 2018, attacks the very notion of creativity. He criticizes Richard Florida with virulence by brilliantly showing how “creative” gentrification can also act as a form of hygienization in urban centres that, ironically, hinders spontaneous citizen initiatives. To put it bluntly, once gentrification is completed, culture is more or less eliminated from the central districts.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We are interested in the case of the closure of the Ben McNally bookstore because it shows the consequences of real estate speculation on the vitality of a city and, ultimately, on culture on a national scale. Very quickly, after the announcement by the owners of the bookstore, many players in the Canadian publishing ecosystem expressed serious concerns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That is because independent bookshops, Ben McNally in particular, do not belong to a large group or chain and aren’t limited to the sole function of selling books. They are truly a place of cultural mediation.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The purpose of booksellers is to introduce readers to more complex works that have received less media attention. In Kingston, Ont., the city where I live, the Novel Idea bookstore is part of the community life. It organizes meetings with local authors and federates a community of readers. In Montréal, bookstores such as Le port de tête, L’Écume des jours and Gallimard also have a clearly established cultural function.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Independent bookstores are places where demanding literature or radical essays can find readers. In short, the exact opposite of a virtual library where algorithms – certainly effective – guide readers’ tastes. There is no doubt that these algorithms favour books that are already selling well, regardless of the careful work of smaller publishers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For a “bibliodiversity”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why defend the independence of Canadian literature? Out of pure nationalism? Not exactly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rather, it is a question of how the bookstore can, in an era of advanced globalization, be a place of defence for the diversity of cultures, what some have referred to as bibliodiversity: a diversity of languages (in the case of Canada, English, French and Aboriginal literatures), but also socially equitable modes of production and dissemination. In this case, it ensures that cultural property produced with our public funds finds takers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To put it simply, a book in Canada will sometimes be subsidized at the time of writing through creation grants, in its production through operating grants to publishers, and then sold by Amazon or, in the worst case, unsold due to a lack of suitable distribution locations. The Canadian book system provides a relatively good framework for its authors and publishers to deal with the horrors of the free market, in a spirit of cultural and economic protectionism. But in the current configuration, booksellers seem to be abandoned.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Make the less visible visible</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it is not simply a matter of defending a blurred Canadian identity.<b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> It is also a matter of making a diversity of identities visible.</b> Think of the Racines bookstore in Montréal North, which highlights the culture and history of racialized authors. Or, the bookstore L’Euguélionne, which, by settling in the gay village in Montréal and adopting a cooperative structure, has made it its mission to offer a wide selection of literature on women and LGBPT2QIA groups.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An independent bookstore is therefore a meeting place for people from the neighbourhood but also, possibly, for affinity groups. Bookstores can be, in some contexts, sources of resistance. André Schiffrin states in L’argent et les mots – the third volume of a trilogy essential to understanding the effects of cultural globalization – that the number of New York bookstores has been divided by 10 since the post-war period.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Capitalism has its own rhythm, but also its own specific geography. Urban space is profoundly transformed by financial capitalism. Urban spaces are becoming expensive, and the closure of cultural spaces is, metaphorically and by extension, a reduction in the space for ideas and expression.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]The Conversation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Julien Lefort-Favreau, Assistant Professor, French Studies, Queen’s University, Ontario</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">diversity?</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">mitchell the nation amazon</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As a result of the economic shifts that Amazon is helping to propel, the country is being divided into <b>a starkly unequal geography. Only a handful of metro areas are gaining significant numbers of good jobs from Big Tech. And as the formation of new businesses declines, they’re also being consolidated into fewer places: In contrast with previous recoveries, when new firms were widely dispersed, half of all businesses started between 2010 and 2014 were located in just five metro areas. Even winning cities are marked by disparity</b>: In Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, the median home value now exceeds $700,000, while the unsheltered homeless population doubled over 10 years. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which Amazon’s cashier-less supermarkets and nondescript bookstores populate better-off neighborhoods, while other communities become increasingly barren of commercial activity.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the left-behind towns and neighborhoods, the </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">despair</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> that has set in stems from more than just economic hardship. There is a pervasive sense of powerlessness that is toxic to democracy. In 1946, the sociologist C. Wright Mills and the economist Melville J. Ulmer published a detailed study of several matched pairs of cities. The cities in each pair were similar in all respects except for one main difference:</span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> One city’s economy was composed of many locally owned firms,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> while the other’s was largely controlled by absentee corporations. The cities that possessed a degree of local economic power had a bigger middle class and a greater variety of jobs, Mills and Ulmer found. But their most important findings had to do with </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">civic health. The cities with a robust local economy invested more in public infrastructure and services, and their residents were involved in community affairs in greater numbers.</span></b></font></div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sil Vly FAILS eg</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;">
</p></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ref</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-assholes-inside-twitters-10-year-failure-to-s" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-assholes-inside-twitters-10-year-failure-to-s</a></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On <span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">May 22, 2008,</span> Ariel Waldman ran out of options. Waldman, then a community manager and blogger, had signed up for Twitter in March 2007 and in months had become one of the platform’s 100 most followed accounts. She was, by her own account, “<a href="http://arielwaldman.com/2008/05/22/twitter-refuses-to-uphold-terms-of-service/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">addicted</a>” to the service.</font></div><div class="subbuzz subbuzz-text
xs-mb4 xs-relative " data-module="subbuzz-text" id="mod-subbuzz-text-1" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 2rem !important; position: relative !important; margin-top: 0px !important;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But soon after, the abuse began — for no reason other than that Waldman was a woman writing articles that occasionally touched on sex and technology. In June 2007, a stalker posted some of her private information in a string of threatening tweets. Waldman contacted Twitter, which banned the user in question from the public timeline. But over the next eight months, the targeted abuse and stalking intensified.</span> By March 2008, exhausted and disillusioned by a torrent of tweets calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” and publicizing personal information like her email address, Waldman reached out to Twitter again, this time to the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. After a series of phone calls to the company went nowhere, Dorsey and Twitter went silent. So in May, Waldman <a href="http://arielwaldman.com/2008/05/22/twitter-refuses-to-uphold-terms-of-service/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">went public</a>, detailing her ordeal in a blog post, which caught fire in media circles.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Twitter, then still a startup, was fresh off a buzzy SXSW debut,</b> and Waldman’s post was an unfamiliar bit of bad press, depicting Dorsey in particular as an unsympathetic, even cowardly, chief executive. “Jack explained that they’re scared to ban someone because they’re scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it,” Waldman wrote. While Twitter founder Biz Stone <a href="http://www.wired.com/2008/05/tweeter-takes-o/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">issued a formal acknowledgment</a>of the problem, arguing that “<a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/what_is_twitters_stance_toward_abuse" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content</a>,” Dorsey was silent. Co-founder Ev Williams was more critical, <a href="https://twitter.com/ev/statuses/817807577" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">posting tweets</a>that cast doubt on Waldman’s claims and <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/05/twitters-controversy-over-terms-of-service/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">halfheartedly apologizing</a> with a simple “our bad.” Waldman was crushed. “Prior to my coming out, I had great relationships with them and considered some of them my friends,” Waldman told BuzzFeed News this month of the fallout. “I took it very personally. It sucked.”<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>More than eight years after Waldman’s ordeal, harassment on Twitter is rampant — so much so that it has become <a href="http://www.getlittlebird.com/blog/data-62-of-the-people-donald-trump-rted-this-week-follow-multiple-white-supremacist-accounts" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">a primary destination</a> for <a href="http://womenactionmedia.org/cms/assets/uploads/2015/05/wam-twitter-abuse-report.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">trolls</a> and <a href="http://www.alternet.org/unbelievable-harassment-black-women-face-daily-twitter" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">hate groups</a>. </b>So much so that its CEO declared, “<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-memo-taking-personal-responsibility-for-the" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years</a>.” So much so that <a href="https://uk.news.yahoo.com/news/adele-quits-twitter-newborn-son-receives-death-threats-103514469.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">numerous</a> <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/08/media/new-york-times-jon-weisman-twitter/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">high-profile</a> <a href="http://www.essence.com/2016/08/08/normani-kordei-quits-twitter-racist-abuse" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">users</a> <a href="http://www.people.com/article/iggy-azalea-quits-twitter-cellulite-criticism" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">have</a> <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/lena-dunham-quits-twitter-828129" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">quit</a> <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/ghostbusters-star-leslie-jones-quits-twitter-amid-racist-abuse-481684" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">the</a><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/columnist-quits-social-media-threats-rape-5-year-old-article-1.2728374" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">service</a>, citing it as an unsafe space. Today, Twitter is a well-known hunting ground for women and people of color, who are targeted by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, and trolls, often just for showing up. Just this summer, actor Leslie Jones was driven off Twitter after a <a href="http://fusion.net/story/327103/leslie-jones-twitter-racism/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">barrage of racist comments and death threats</a>, only to return after a personal reassurance from Dorsey himself.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Last week, Normani Kordei of the pop group Fifth Harmony also stepped away from the service after suffering years of “<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/08/08/fifth-harmony-normani-kordei-driven-off-twittern-racist-abuse/88392496/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">horrific and racially charged</a>” tweets. Despite its integral role in popular culture and in social justice initiatives from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, Twitter is as infamous today for being as toxic as it is famous for being revolutionary. <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/sources-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-secretly-censored-abusive-r" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">And unless you're a celebrity — or, as it turns out, the president of the United States of America — good luck getting help.</a></span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>According to 10 high-level former employees, the social network’s long history with abuse has been fraught with inaction and organizational disarray. </b>Taken together, these interviews tell the story of a company that’s been ill-equipped to handle harassment since its beginnings. Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but — to use the Silicon Valley term of art — a fundamental feature</span>. U...</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I<span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" inherit="inherit" font-weight="font-weight">f you want</span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> to fully understand Twitter’s abuse problem, a good place to start is at Google, years before the first tweet was ever sent. While working at Blogger, the wildly popular Google-owned publishing tool, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and Jason Goldman — all of whom went on to found or work at Twitter — were faced with what now feels like a familiar predicament.</span></font></p></div><div class="subbuzz subbuzz-image
xs-mb4 xs-relative subbuzz-image--outset-both" data-module="subbuzz-image" id="mod-subbuzz-image-1" style="font-size: small; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; margin-bottom: 2rem !important; position: relative !important;"><div class="subbuzz subbuzz-text
xs-mb4 xs-relative " data-module="subbuzz-text" id="mod-subbuzz-text-2" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 2rem !important; position: relative !important;"><div id="9410783" class="subbuzz-anchor" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Like Twitter, Blogger had grown quickly as a broadcast tool, becoming home to a wide spectrum of voices, no small number of which were loud and obnoxious and objectionable.</b> But rather than censor the unsavory blogs, Williams and company saw an opportunity to build a platform committed to free expression and the democratic spirit of the internet. That decision was fought internally, pitting Goldman against Sheryl Sandberg, at the time head of Google AdWords, in what <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/the-silent-partner?utm_term=.ragXL9wagJ#.yayV5n7EeG" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">Goldman called</a> “a straight-up turf war.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Goldman won. Working with Alexander Macgillivray, a die-hard free speech advocate who was then a Google attorney, Blogger made a core principle of the universal right to publish, despite outside criticism. </span>“We don’t get involved in adjudicating whether something is libel or slander,” Goldman <a href="http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/1114/128.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">told <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Forbes</i></a> in 2005. The passage that followed reads like it could be written about Twitter today: “In squabbles between anonymous bloggers and victims Google sides with the attackers, refusing to turn over any information unless a judge orders it to open up. 'We’ll do it if we believe we are required to by law,' [Goldman] says."<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Less than a year later, when Williams and Stone founded Twitter along with Dorsey, they brought along Goldman and continued largely where they’d left off. “We worked hard at the outset of Twitter to maintain freedom of speech with clear limits,” Stone told BuzzFeed News in a recent email. “This stemmed from my time at Google working on the same issues with Blogger.” But as Waldman’s case exemplifies, even early on, Twitter’s “freedom of speech with clear limits” found critics who saw those limits as opaque and arbitrary.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>And while Blogger’s free speech problems were novel, small-scale, and often abstract, Twitter’s follower model and public reply system proved thornier to manage.</b>There’s a big difference between people saying hurtful things on the easily moderated comment section of a hard-to-find blog and people showing up in your mentions spewing hate speech. “The product quirks were secondary ... to free speech,” one former employee said of the company’s early days. “The Blogger brain trust’s thinking was set in stone by the time they became Twitter Inc.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In the summer of 2009, the company’s values were validated when Twitter was lauded for its role in giving voice to Iranian election protesters.</b> By the time the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/06/17/DI2009061702232.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">State Department asked Twitter</a> to delay scheduled maintenance on its servers in order to keep protest communication lines open during the election, Twitter’s reputation as a powerful broadcast tool was solidified. Just weeks later, the company hired Macgillivray away from Google as its first general counsel. “What was once lauded as a virtue has now become the company’s Achilles' heel.” “Here you have a great, influential lawyer who philosophically believed you don't shut down a platform because of controversial speech,” one former employee who worked during Macgillivray’s tenure told BuzzFeed News. “That ethos was bought into by everyone in the company. Hard.” 2011 brought the Arab Spring and more international acclaim for Twitter as a platform for revolutionaries. That same year, Twitter <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1716100/why-twitter-was-only-company-challenge-secret-wikileaks-subpoena" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">fought secret government order to provide user information for WikiLeaks</a>. According to a source, Macgillivray and Stone spent months working on a blog post that would be published during the WikiLeaks controversy, titled “The Tweets Must Flow.” It was Twitter’s boldest commitment to free speech to date. “There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam,” the post read. “However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule — we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content.” Not long after, Twitter executives began publicly touting that “Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech party,” a phrase sources attribute to Macgillivray.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This maximalist approach to free speech was integral to Twitter’s rise, but quickly created the conditions for abuse.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Unlike Facebook and Instagram, which <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/facebook-explains-what-it-bans-and-why/" target="blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">have always banned content</a> and have never positioned themselves as platforms for free speech, Twitter has made an ideology out of protecting its most objectionable users. That ethos also made it a beacon for the internet’s most vitriolic personalities, who take particular delight in abusing those who use Twitter for their jobs. This spring, the <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">Just Not Sports</i>podcast posted video of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tU-D-m2JY8" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none solid rgb(34, 34, 34); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: inherit;">sports fans reading</a> a sampling of the hateful tweets that the sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro received while writing and reporting. The video amassed over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Its message: This level of depravity is commonplace on Twitter.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“What was once lauded as a virtue has now become the company’s Achilles' heel </b>— it’s the axis around which all this shit with harassment rotates,” a former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. Nearly all former employees BuzzFeed News spoke to in the course of reporting this story said the same thing. “The whole ‘free speech wing of the free speech party’ thing — that's not a slogan, that's deeply, deeply embedded in the DNA of the company,” Twitter’s former head of news, Vivian Schiller, said. “The people that run Twitter ... are not stupid. They understand that this toxicity can kill them, but how do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line? I would actually challenge anyone to identify a perfect solution. But it feels to a certain extent that it's led to paralysis.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A senior engineer who left the company before its 2013 IPO echoed Schiller’s point. “You have this opposition between defending the user’s experience and not shutting down speech all while there's this big, toxic mass of people that are abusing,” the source said. “That tension has now, I think, in the past few years, flipped on its head. It’s clear something needs to be done.”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Looking back on Twitter’s early years, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">multiple former senior employees cite Twitter’s disproportionately white, male leadership — a frequent, factual critique of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most influential tech companies — as creating an environment where building tools to combat harassment was a secondary concern</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. “The original sin is a homogenous leadership,</span>” one former senior employee told BuzzFeed News. “This is part of what exacerbated the abuse problem for sure — because they were often tone-deaf to the concern of users in the outside world, meaning women and people of color."</font></p></div><hr class="subbuzz subbuzzsection-divider subbuzzsection-divider--thin
xs-block xs-mb4 xs-col-11" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: content-box; height: 0px; overflow: visible; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); border-image: initial; width: 726px; margin-bottom: 2rem !important; margin-top: 0px !important;" /><div class="subbuzz subbuzz-pullquote xs-relative col xs-col-12 xs-z1 xs-mb4 md-text-center" data-module="subbuzz-quote" id="mod-subbuzz-quote-2" style="box-sizing: inherit; width: 792px; word-break: break-word; text-align: center !important; margin-bottom: 2rem !important; position: relative !important; z-index: 100 !important;"><div id="9411759" class="subbuzz-anchor" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="pullquote js-subbuzztitle-text" style="text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.1em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The original sin is a homogenous leadership.”</b></font></div><div class="js-hover-share-bar" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit;"><div class="js-inline-share-bar" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><hr class="subbuzz subbuzzsection-divider subbuzz__section-divider--thin
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xs-mb4 xs-relative " data-module="subbuzz-text" id="mod-subbuzz-text-4" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin-bottom: 2rem !important; position: relative !important;"><div id="9410783" class="subbuzz-anchor" style="box-sizing: inherit;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 600;">Talk to enough</span> Twitter insiders and one thing becomes painfully evident: The company’s understanding of its platform hasn’t always been clear to employees, even at senior levels — a problem that has made it difficult to understand how to police harassment. One source recalls that, when asked, Jack Dorsey refused to answer exactly what kind of tool Twitter <i style="box-sizing: inherit;">was.</i> “He said, ‘Twitter brings you closer,'” the former employee recalled. “And I said, ‘To what?’ and he replied, ‘Our users always finish that sentence for us.’ And to me, I thought,<u> <span style="box-sizing: inherit;">Well, it’s going to be really difficult to set policy in place if we can’t define what this thing is</span>."</u></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; text-align: left; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><u>...</u></font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/tucker-carlson-e-pluribus-unum-diversity"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/tucker-carlson-e-pluribus-unum-diversity</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Friday, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson provoked outrage with a segment in which he questioned the value of diversity as a "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/09/10/face-it-tucker-carlson-your-anti-diversity-segment-was-racist/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">strength</a>" in American society.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Monday, Carlson doubled down, and inexplicably, he chose to cite "E Pluribus Unum," the original de facto motto of the United States, as proof of his thesis that<b> diversity is bad.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"'Out of many, one,' a country in which our differences mean less than our common identity as Americans," Carlson said. "For centuries, this was the source of our national strength. Then, a few decades ago, that changed. With no vote or even an acknowledgement, our <b>elites</b> jettisoned the old motto and adopted a new one: 'Diversity is our strength.'"</font></span></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 20px;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The new slogan seemed to have the opposite meaning from the ones the founders wrote," he continued. "Our differences, they begin telling us, are now the single most important thing about us. The less alike we are, the better. Now, it's possible that is true, that disunity somehow makes us stronger. What's striking is that nobody has ever bothered to explain exactly how." [vid?] Carlson's argument makes no sense whatsoever. For one thing, "E Pluribus Unum" has nothing to do with our racial or ethnic identity; it simply <a href="https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/27807.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none;">means</a> that from the original thirteen states, one nation is forged. This is driven home by the fact that the motto is thirteen characters long.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For another, Carlson can't seem to provide a source for when exactly America changed its motto to "diversity is our strength," because it never did (Congress did, however, establish "In God We Trust" as the official motto during the <a href="https://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-6" style="text-decoration-line: none;">second Red Scare</a>).</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the other hand, America has always been a nation of immigrants, and the obsessive desire of certain elements of the population to keep the nation as homogenous as possible has lead to far more <a href="https://www.infoplease.com/us/history/major-race-riots-us" style="text-decoration-line: none;">misery, public strife, and violence</a> than anyone arguing we should all simply coexist.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Carlson has increasingly used his time slot to express overt racism. His show has promoted white nationalist conspiracy theories about <a href="https://www.alternet.org/south-africa-condemns-trumps-tweet-racist-farm-attack-conspiracy-theory" style="text-decoration-line: none;">South African farm attacks</a>, and his frequent guest Mark Steyn has argued that Hispanic schoolchildren aren't American because "<a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/1/19/16909300/tucker-carlson-immigration-arizona-border-mark-steyn" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the border has moved north</a>."</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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