As I write this post, I'm reminded of a text variation from German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I remember when Trump fumed over one of his social media posts getting tagged with a reference to some fact checker source. I thought he overreacted because the platform didn't remove his post or redact his message, and to be honest, he had to know people or organizations could refute anything that he published, including fact checkers. The platform didn't require others to click on rebuttal references.
Now personally I would not have done what Facebook and others have done, which is to pick and choose who is the fact checker. In my experience, the fact checkers I've known (Kessler, WaPo "Pinocchio", Snopes, FactCheck.org, etc.) have a mostly left-leaning perspective. with a vested side in the argument. I'm not going to flesh all this out in detail, but let me give a good example of what I'm referring to: election fraud. Before I go further, don't misinterpret what I'm about to say. This has nothing to do with Trump's invalid assertions of fraud in the 2020 election. I've been quite clear that the outcome was largely consistent with state election polls; Trump had poor approval numbers going into an election after a pandemic-induced economic collapse. No, the concerns I had dealt with liberalized ballot distribution under the pandemic with inadequate internal controls and chain of custody issues. Just to give one example of the things I worry about: how do you know the ballot you dropped off or mailed was actually processed at your precinct? Maybe some political operative knowing the political leanings of your local area stole or physically damaged ballots to an unreadable state. (Now my Maryland county did provide confirmation of receipt of my mailed ballot.)
The point is according to most mainstream media fact checkers (and I haven't cross-checked with the above fact checkers) election fraud doesn't occur, at least in any material, statistically significant sense. This basically assumes we have adequate internal controls and our tools to control for fraud are comprehensive, valid, and reliable. So what I'm seeing, and we repeatedly heard this as red states recently passed election reform laws post-2020, this was all pushing-on-a-string stuff over a non-existent problem. Never mind that much of this "evidence" was not collected under liberalized pandemic voting processes. And platform "moderators" are ready to intervene on behalf of those opposing reform, which they regarded as a euphemism for "voter suppression"
I have previously blogged over my experiences dealing with student academic dishonesty. In one case, I caught one Asian foreign student who had serially plagiarized under me and two other MIS junior professors. He literally copied and pasted unattributed paragraphs in a near-random mix using multiple sources. In the case of the second junior professor the cheater used articles from an IEEE sourcebook I required for graduate system analysis (and this was after I had personally counseled him over plagiarism, which he dismissed as an American cultural notion). I had UWM senior faculty and administrators accusing me of sabotaging their foreign student program. What all my cheating students had in common was trying to figure out how I caught them (so they wouldn't get caught a second time). [I happen to have a good, detailed memory. It's like I have a sense of déjà vu in rereading something, even from years back.] So let's just say if someone developed a method of voter fraud that works, he may want to use it in the future and has no incentive to publicize his methods.
Another example I also published earlier in the blog. At UH, I had a cubicle in a doctoral student suite. For some reason, an MBA student occupied the cubicle next to mine. It turns out he was taking managerial finance under the same finance professor I had had. I have 2 math degrees but those multiple choice exams he gave were killers, and I had to work my butt off to earn that A. My neighbor asked for help but to be honest he just didn't grasp course concepts. The simplest types of problems, like net present value, he couldn't handle despite multiple examples I worked out for him. He thanked for me for my help, but I remember thinking he didn't have a prayer of passing the upcoming test. So I warily asked him, days later after his test, how it went. "Great; I scored a 96." Say what? Had I even scored that high on one of the prof's exams? How in the world? It turns out my prof recycled old exam questions, and some small group of students was selling exams/keys. They didn't market it to all course students for fear of blowing the curve and/or tipping off the professor and killing their market niche.My neighbor explained that he was done in less than 5 minutes, gave 1 or 2 wrong answers on purpose and waited 30 minutes before turning in his exam, so he wouldn't tip off the professor. I was struggling ethically how to deal with this; what he did was cheating, but I had no proof beyond what he told me in confidence.
So one day I passed by the finance professor in the hallway and stopped him. "Did you know they're selling copies of your old exams?" He blew me off: "How industrious of them!" I then, on behalf of all of us who earned our grades the right/hard way, sarcastically suggested, "Why don't you have one of these geniuses come to the blackboard and show the rest of the class how they worked out the solution?" A few weeks later, the professor stopped me in the hall and said, "I see what you meant." He implied he was going to change up testing.
If you talked to faculty or administrators at the 3 universities I taught, they would insist that cheating is a rare phenomenon of isolated instances. But I couldn't simply dock a student on suspicion; there were due process constraints, I had to provide evidence, I was under time constraints. In the case of the cheating Asian students (the perpetrator in my class did it on a group project), I had pieced together all of the sources except one (a fairly compelling case but I'm a perfectionist). The UWM library was completely uncooperative; they refused to call in the book, despite my faculty privileges, they couldn't get me the volume through inter-library loan in a timely fashion, they refused to disclose the student who had checked out the book. So I had to call in the group based on incomplete evidence. One of the students (crying) fell on his sword literally within a minute or two, confessing and begging for mercy.
Homework could be more difficult because of circumstances. One example I experienced while I was a UTEP professor teaching database. I wanted them to dump all the rows or records for a relational database table using IBM Structured Query Language. I think it had something like 19 columns. Technically there are many possible solutions, but the easiest, most obvious solution was: select * from mytable; where the wildcard * represents all table columns. So this one student is a wise guy: he writes select column7, column16, column3, colunm12,... from mytable; In other words, I get a random ordering of 19 columns; I've got to ensure that he enlisted all 19 columns, no typos (and the column names were different). It was a pain in the ass to grade, and he knew it. So I go on grading and maybe 6 or 7 assignments later, I get select column7, column16, column3, colunm12,... from mytable; Déjà vu. Exactly the same, the only students who spelled out column names in the query. So I busted the 2 students,and don't talk to me about the corrupt bastard Dean of Students (there's more to the story, including the fact the now panicked coed in question had listed me as a reference without my knowledge or consent, and it was my first semester at UTEP). Now is it possible one or more students copied select * from mytable; from each other? Of course, but it was an expected answer. I didn't go into grading the assignments checking to see if they complied with the academic honesty listed in my course syllabus. It was the unexpected that tipped me off.
Now I apply the same due diligence when it comes to writing or reviewing academic papers. In fact, even before then. One of my UH professors asked me to proofread her 1983 article in the Communications of the ACM, a top journal in my discipline. I discovered her references section was out of sequence. I still remember one was a link to Likert scales. (One of my research interests is psychometrics.) So I came back to her with feedback on her misnumbered references, and she said, "Too late; Susan [my best friend's spouse] already came back with her feedback, and I sent in the galleys." So to this day I wince when I look at the published article with the messed-up references section.
I carry the same discipline when I publish in the blog, Twitter, or Facebook. I have been known to delete and republish Tweets with typos. I probably cite more posts in Tweets than your typical Twitter users. Now I don't personally vet a number of sources like George Will, but I've spent hours on the web researching all sorts of things, like market monetarism. I've personally debunked hundreds of urban myths and Internet memes (my mom used to forward all sorts of myths and the like; I even emailed her on how to use Snopes).
I don't really fit into the stereotypes progressives have of conservatives or libertarians. e.g., on evolution, climate change, and COVID-19. I had more nuanced takes, e.g., the evidence behind alarmism, CDC promoting the use of cloth masks in public policy, even when better quality masks were available, security theater. In-person voting being super-spreader events. I spent hours on CDC websites, reading abstracts or articles from the NEJM. I have criticized Ron Paul, everyone's favorite libertarian, when he goes off the deep end on the Deep State or blowback rants..
I don't think Twitter has directly censored me for content; most of their suspensions have been over wording/tone. The issue I have is with disparate treatment of libertarians, and I know of at least a couple of leftist trolls who have directly called me a Russian bot. The Babylon Bee's suspension (over mocking the USA Today naming an HHS trans woman "Woman of the Year") was chilling because I write a number of humor tweets (including ad libs to Babylon Bee tweets).
But what was really the motivation of this post has to do with Facebook. I've been less active on Facebook the last couple of years; in the past, I've posted several comments I would republish in my now weekly social media digests. More recently I've mostly reposted some memes I found interesting or amusing, maybe an occasional personal post. I think over the last 2-3 months, I've had at least 3 reposts censored over stupid stuff. I don't mean like Trump complained about, a tag attached to the post. I mean they are completely obscuring the meme with a censorship mask. It's stupid, and it's offensive.
I finally snapped over the last one. Elon Musk has a certain style to his tweets, and after his Twitter acquisition tweets came at least 2 fake mocking Musk tweets, one over targeting the IRS as his next acquisition (to dissolve it) and the other a US Catholic bishops conference (in order to restore sacred music). I found both of them humorous, reposting with an LMAO comment. (I think the second I explicitly noted might be a fake tweet; they haven't censored it--yet). I don't know why anyone would take the buyout of a government agency seriously. Censoring jokes are a step too far.
