A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.
Edit: Interesting investigation on the Brooklyn professor, although I have to disagree on the notion as expressed below.
The success in spinning the WP articles at the height of the Salazar war, where even federal judges were getting removed, would indeed thrill the Lannan Foundation (even though Lerner’s self-confessed violation of multiple WP policies, repeat ban evasion, sockpuppeting, and IP hopping are all clearcut violation of the CFAA, which is a federal criminal act, BTW, and if they did any advocacy for Judge Lamberth, or for/against any other politicians involved, then they may have crossed the red line for a 501(c)3 which is allowed to advocate politics but not do anything that is for/against specific candidates on pain of forfeiting nonprofit status, and I imagine all sorts of interesting consequences like perjury on the Form 990s).
If CFAA is used to prosecute the Brooklyn professor for violating the terms of services pertaining to ban evasion or sockpuppetry, many dangerous slippery slopes are going to be created as other tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok and Snapchat will find incentive to abuse it to the fullest. On Reddit there exists a federated environment where volunteer-moderators controls subreddits instead of staffmembers; most of them had no specialized training and are prone to so-called “powertripping”.
Here’s a gedankenexperiment. You post off the cuff remarks on topical subreddits that doesn’t have alternatives elsewhere on Reddit, and a mod bans you for no or spurious reasons because they don’t agree with you, or something. You appeal it to mods and Reddit but to no avail as the former proceeds to mute you. You let it slide for now until one day you got a neccessity to post there again, maybe seeking help, or maybe countering someone who was posting disinformation there after seeing no other commenters on there yet. Congratulations! You just technically violate the CFAA!
So what then? Getting disproportionately punished by Reddit and the USG like what happened to Aaron Swartz? Many of you may have now forgotten that Aaron Swartz committed suicide because of disproportionate lifetime punishments in the form of felonies after simply downloading some files from JSTOR past usage quotas? The Internet is going to be a CCP-style dystopia if such an argument is allowed to pass in the court. That argument advocating for disproportionate punishment is what costed Aaron Swartz his life.
A journalist has uncovered two dozen Weinstein type scandals on Wikipedia perpertrated by admins and users which could do far larger reputational damage against Wikipedia movement itself if published in the media. The damage though, might made what FTX did to EA look like peanuts.
https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment
Edit: Interesting investigation on the Brooklyn professor, although I have to disagree on the notion as expressed below.
If CFAA is used to prosecute the Brooklyn professor for violating the terms of services pertaining to ban evasion or sockpuppetry, many dangerous slippery slopes are going to be created as other tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok and Snapchat will find incentive to abuse it to the fullest. On Reddit there exists a federated environment where volunteer-moderators controls subreddits instead of staffmembers; most of them had no specialized training and are prone to so-called “powertripping”.
Here’s a gedankenexperiment. You post off the cuff remarks on topical subreddits that doesn’t have alternatives elsewhere on Reddit, and a mod bans you for no or spurious reasons because they don’t agree with you, or something. You appeal it to mods and Reddit but to no avail as the former proceeds to mute you. You let it slide for now until one day you got a neccessity to post there again, maybe seeking help, or maybe countering someone who was posting disinformation there after seeing no other commenters on there yet. Congratulations! You just technically violate the CFAA!
So what then? Getting disproportionately punished by Reddit and the USG like what happened to Aaron Swartz? Many of you may have now forgotten that Aaron Swartz committed suicide because of disproportionate lifetime punishments in the form of felonies after simply downloading some files from JSTOR past usage quotas? The Internet is going to be a CCP-style dystopia if such an argument is allowed to pass in the court. That argument advocating for disproportionate punishment is what costed Aaron Swartz his life.