{"id":8829,"date":"2019-10-10T17:52:11","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T17:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialpanic.org\/?p=8829"},"modified":"2019-10-10T17:52:11","modified_gmt":"2019-10-10T17:52:11","slug":"social-media-3-years-ago-google-shut-down-the-blog-email-and-all-services-of-a-prominent-statistician","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/2019\/10\/10\/social-media-3-years-ago-google-shut-down-the-blog-email-and-all-services-of-a-prominent-statistician\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media: 2 years ago, Google shut down the blog, email and all services of a prominent statistician"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is scary. In 2017, Google shut down all services provided to Salil Mehta<\/a>, concerning his mathematics web site. Mehta was a U.S. Treasury executive under the Obama Administration, a consulting advisor on polling statistics to the Trump campaign, is author of a best selling statistics textbook and editor of a peer reviewed statistics journal,\u00a0 and an adjunct professor of statistics at Georgetown and Columbia:<\/p>\n

While responding to a New York Times editor about a Sunday print article<\/a> I was referenced in, my Gmail suddenly stopped. Received an access denied screen, followed by a cold message<\/a> that I violated terms of service. Appeals were unsuccessful, only verifying I was done. A decade of work gone. My blog read by millions, my university pages, all other properties that I had. Why? On a call with Google friends, they were nervous. Likely my website<\/a> contents were problematic. It was the wrong \u201csocial climate\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But unlike us mere peons:<\/p>\n

\u201cMehta was lucky. The public outcry and press attention prompted Google to manually review his case\u2026 It could have turned out differently. Without his impressive credentials and far-reaching network, Mehta never would have found out why his Google account was shut down. He wouldn’t have been able to access his correspondence or restore his blog, which he says has been read by the likes of Elon Musk and Warren Buffett.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the problem remains pervasive as “artificial intelligence” software systems score all of our content – and make mistakes – or may be just intentionally censor those the big tech companies want to silence:<\/p>\n

Accounts are flagged as all good or all bad, as opposed to individual content that might need to be removed. Hence only conservatives get quickly purged. Other times independent statisticians, historians, academics, policy makers, activists, and others are dumped on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: Social media shutdown: 1-year later | Statistical Ideas<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In effect, Google, Facebook and Twitter are the totalitarian governments of the 21st century arbitrarily and without recourse, shutting down any speech they choose to censor. Because Mehta is well known and read by many influential people, the outcry caused Google to restore his account.<\/p>\n

In this environment, free speech will exist only the powerful and well connected. The rest of us will simply vanish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2017, without warning or recourse, Google shut down all services associated with Salil Mehta, a professor of statistics, editor of a statistics journal, author of a best selling book on statistics, a former Obama administration official and later, a polling statistics adviser to the Trump campaign. His offense? He ran a blog about mathematics! Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the totalitarian governments of the 21st century, stifling speech their algorithms choose to flag. Unlike us peons, Mehta is well connected and a huge outcry caused Google to reinstate his account. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,32,34,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-civil-rights","category-mind-control","category-other","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}