Link Roundup April 2019

In A Hot Labor Market, Some Employees Are 'Ghosting' Bad Bosses

Ghosting is a learned behavior, Challenger says. After all, employers ghost applicants all the time and can fire workers without two weeks' notice.

Bouman an overnight celebrity. Then internet trolls descended.

Becca Lewis, a research affiliate at nonprofit research institute Data & Society who studies extremism on YouTube, said this was another example of YouTube’s algorithm “rewarding engagement and time spent on the site to maximize advertising revenue” instead of facts.

Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly.

Administrators for some Wikipedias, such as the English-language site, can also declare a “topic ban,” a socially enforced tool in which other editors are responsible for making sure the guilty user is not involved in editing articles that mention prohibited subjects. Violating a topic ban can result in a sitewide ban. The new tool, which the foundation calls “partial blocks,” allows administrators to restrict users from editing particular pages on which they have proved to be a problem. Those developing the tool hope it will be used more liberally to block editors from specific topics without entirely barring users who are productive in other areas of the site.

Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.

The congressional move would codify the status quo. Under an existing memorandum of understanding with the industry group, the IRS pledges not to create its own online filing system and, in exchange, the companies offer their free filing services to those below the income threshold.

Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.

But if there are more people speaking up, there may be more people than ever being fired for doing so. It’s hard to quantify the number of people who face retaliation like Jen did — she never filed a complaint with a government agency, and her NDA silences her. But retaliation remains the most frequent charge filed with the EEOC, and three-quarters of sexual harassment charges filed with the commission include a charge of retaliation.

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

The Existential Crisis Plaguing Online Extremism Researchers

Other approaches, like media literacy programs, may be ineffective, and place too much responsibility on users. Both sets of tactics ignore messier, less quantifiable parts of the problem, like the polarized digital economy where success is predicated on attracting the most eyeballs, how rejecting “mainstream” truths has become a form of social identity, or the challenges of determining the impact of disinformation.

Middlesex and Suffolk DAs sue ICE

Ryan, Rollins, and the organizations are asking the court to order federal immigration enforcement officials to stop searching for people with civil immigration violation warrants on court property. They claim ICE’s actions are a violation of the Tenth Amendment, which upholds state’s rights.

The Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings. Why?

It is not an accident that these systems would arrive in otherwise low-tech, disadvantaged communities like Atlantic Plaza Towers. Previously part of Mitchell-Lama, a state-run affordable housing program for middle-income families begun in the 1950s, the complex sits on the border of East New York, a real-estate frontier where the city and developers are investing lots of money. Tenants, many of whom have lived there for decades, look around and see change and imagine what landlords are envisioning. At a tenants’ association meeting on Wednesday night, residents expressed the feeling that changes made to the buildings were not intended for them but rather for new types of residents to come, when certain apartments became eligible for market-rate rents.

Google Walkout Organizers Say They're Facing Retaliation

Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. “While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,” she wrote.

TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be

Two officers interviewed by ProPublica said the machines’ alarms are frequently triggered by certain hairstyles. “With black females, the scanner alarms more because they have thicker hair; many times they have braids or dreadlocks,” said a TSA officer who works at an airport in Texas and asked not to be named. “Maybe, down the line, they will be redesigning the technology, so it can tell apart what’s a real threat and what is not. But, for now, we officers have to do what the machine can’t.” A government report in 2014 found that the machines also “had a higher false alarm rate when passengers wore turbans and wigs.”

Republican discussed violent attacks and surveillance with rightwingers

In response to a request in the chat for background checks on Spokane residents, Shea volunteered to help, going on to name three individuals – including an organizer for the liberal group Indivisible, and a college professor.

Videos appear to show armed militia detaining migrants at US-Mexico border

Several videos taken at the border in New Mexico this week appeared to show men belonging to a group that calls itself the United Constitutional Patriots approaching migrant families and children, ordering them to sit down, calling federal agents on them, and at one point potentially misrepresenting themselves by saying “border patrol” as they approached.

The Google AI Ethics Board With Actual Power Is Still Around

This council is run by Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer. The other members are Urs Hölzle, Google's infrastructure chief; Jeff Dean, head of AI; Jacquelline Fuller, vice president for Google.org; Maggie Johnson, vice president of education and university programs; and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, a leading AI research firm owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc.