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Crypto social governance will lead to online freedom

The new era of social media platforms must uphold the values of decentralization, democratization and transparency.
The saying, “Everything in moderation, including moderation,” has taken on new meaning since Facebook outsourced…

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The new era of social media platforms must uphold the values of decentralization, democratization and transparency.

The saying, “Everything in moderation, including moderation,” has taken on new meaning since Facebook outsourced responsibility for content moderation to its Oversight Board following the violent events that occurred at the United States Capitol back on Jan. 6, 2021. First conceived in November 2018 as Facebook’s “Supreme Court” for public appeals, the social media giant’s Oversight Board was officially enacted on Oct. 22, 2020.

In its time since, the Oversight Board has overturned many of Facebook’s own decisions on what is and is not free speech. Some of the board’s rulings include overturning decisions meant to limit hate speech and false pandemic claims. While this all sounds quite formal and matter-of-fact, nuance lurks beneath the surface.

In 2016, an internal Facebook presentation claimed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.” Two years later, another Facebook presentation confirmed that their “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” If Facebook’s own research indicated valid, science-based reasons for reform, why outsource the responsibility to a new “independent” legal structure in the first place?

Related: Social media giants must decentralize the internet... Now!

Less wrong still isn’t right

While it is not my job to wade into the politics of what happened, Facebook should be responsible for developing content recommendation and moderation strategies that do not exacerbate political polarization for profit.

For example, last month Facebook issued a haphazard attempt to model community moderation after Nextdoor, the controversial neighborhood app. While Nextdoor has had fewer moderation problems than Facebook globally, its ongoing localized issues with misinformation, in-fighting and accusations of biased community moderators still set a low bar for private group moderation as a whole. This borrowed band-aid needs serious reconsideration.

In terms of content moderation, Reddit represents a step in the right direction by using a community-based upvote/downvote system on fora like r/wallstreetbets. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman claims that Reddit’s moderation system “has not seen any nefarious behavior” take place in r/wallstreetbets, showing the power of community action.

Related: Robinhood and GameStop proved we need a new financial system

Despite presenting a content moderation system that’s slightly better than that of Facebook, the centralized nature of Reddit still poses a threat to open discourse and the marketplace of ideas. As a result of centralization, Reddit communities are not entirely self-governed or self-regulated. This means that practices such as shadow banning may occur, which can be seen as blatant violations of free speech in certain circumstances.

Social crypto governance

The new era of social media platforms must uphold the values of decentralization, democratization and transparency — all of which are the driving forces behind crypto. Embodying these values, crypto social applications present a powerful alternative to Facebook and Reddit by enabling decentralized decision-making, where no authority can reign supreme and where blind trust is not a prerequisite for participation. They are designed by open-source communities around the globe to improve the status quo for the purpose of social good. These crypto social applications rely on bottom-up and middle-out governance instead of Facebook’s top-down hierarchical power structures. And they do it in the name of crypto social justice.

Related: Is a new decentralized internet, or Web 3.0, possible?

Based on public blockchain technologies, these crypto social applications empower a new era of “don’t trust, verify” — and provide a practical way to do so. Examples of crypto social organizing include decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. These headless organizations operate based on community-derived rules that are employed to vote new features and functionality in and out of use.

Many DAOs feature governance tokens which give DAO members financial incentives to vote on proposed actions. Voting is done by staking your financial claim to a proposed action. If the action passes, the new feature is implemented by the community. If the action fails, staked governance tokens are returned to DAO members. However, if a member acts in a way that breaks the community-set rules, their governance tokens are slashed and voided from having any financial or functional value. These are the basic rules of financially incentivized DAOs. Ideally, some of the same DAO mechanics can be used for content moderation more broadly.

Related: Decentralized technology can help protect democracy around the globe

Self-regulating community moderation

Along with DAOs, another solution to problematic moderation practices can be found in content creation platforms — decentralized, user-owned, crypto-based networks. By joining such platforms, users become their co-owners. This means that the power rests in the hands of consumers as opposed to an out-of-touch corporate board, thus better upholding the rights and responsibilities of the community.

Critically, crypto does not solve all the problems that content moderation has experienced historically. What it provides is a technological basis with which community mechanics can be organized from a bottom-up and middle-out perspective that empowers free speech in safe ways.

Related: Social applications are the next big trend in crypto

While the onboarding process to participate in DAOs has been historically difficult, there are new crypto social applications that seamlessly streamline the experience to improve accessibility. Moreover, by equipping users with pseudonymous usernames, these new onramps can cut off unproductive ad hominem attacks at the source, providing fairer opportunities for all.

Giving people the tools they need to interact civilly and productively opens up opportunities for online inspiration and collaboration. Designing these tools together is what makes DAOs and crypto social both uniquely powerful and just.

In an October speech of 2019 at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg said: “You can’t impose tolerance top-down. It has to come from people opening up, sharing experiences, and developing a shared story for society that we all feel we’re a part of. That’s how we make progress together.” He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Crypto social applications can help right those wrongs.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Jonathan Zerah joined Status Network, an encrypted messenger, in 2017 to lead marketing and communications, spearheading the messenger’s Web 3.0 ecosystem and the challenges it faces in marketing. Before Status, he worked at leading digital agencies crafting campaigns, activations and building digital products for global companies including Nike, Samsung, Audi and Google.

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now…

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.

The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.

Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.

In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.

The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.

When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.

If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.

We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.

My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.

It goes like this:

1) lockdown,

2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,

3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,

5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,

6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,

7) businesses flee the city

8) cities fall into decay, and that results in

9) more surveillance and police state.

The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.

It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.

But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.

It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.

Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.

As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.

The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.

Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.

By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.

The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.

Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.

The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.

The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.

But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.

What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.

As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.

The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.

Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 16:20

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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