Bill Clinton needs some social media help. So we asked an expert.

Bill Clinton. (AFP PHOTO / Frederic J. BROWNFREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

About a month ago, I thought to myself, Hmm, Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in an era of omnipresent cameras and social media seems risky. Honestly. I did.

You probably don't believe me because, sure enough, Clinton got caught seemingly checking out a woman last month as she was taking a selfie. Then, earlier this week, a photo of Clinton with the daughter of a prominent New York Republican got a lot of traffic -- particularly once the girl's mother was cropped out.

Apparently Bill Clinton hung out with @JCats2013 (and family!) the other night. pic.twitter.com/Kbf5aRUm1k
— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) December 16, 2014

These are very different cases that reinforce a common theme: Hillary Clinton might be a mile ahead of the competition, but reminding people of some of the more adult goings-on last time the Clintons lived in the White House isn't going to do her much good. Should Clinton not pose near décolletage? Should he not attend events where cameras are allowed?

To help develop some guidelines, we spoke with social media consultantJulie DeNeen by phone. DeNeen has been consulting on social media for about two years -- not super long if you're a consultant on, say, geology, but comprising a decent chunk of the existence of tools like Instagram and Snapchat.

Tip 1: You can't undo it.

"I think the thing that is most important to remember is that once it's there, it's there forever," DeNeen said of posts to social media. "Even if it's deleted, it's there forever."

This sounds counter-intuitive, but, especially for someone like Bill Clinton, it's true. Clinton has 2.69 million followers on Twitter. If everyone looks at his tweets for one second a day, that still means that 30,000 people are watching every second. Anthony Weiner only had 60,000 followers and when he accidentally posted a Risqué Image, it was spotted and saved before he could take it down. There is a 0 percent chance Clinton could post something somewhere and not have it been seen.

"I think the media in general likes to jump on these issues," DeNeen said.

Which is true! But so do all of the people in the United States who would rather not see another President Clinton. And that's a lot more people.

Tip 2: Use your family as a moral compass, but use common sense.

Here's DeNeen's advice in general. "Don't put anything on the Internet that you don't want your kids to see," she said. Don't have kids? "Don't put anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want your boss or your parents to see."

Clinton probably doesn't care if Chelsea sees the picture of himself with Andrea Catsimatidis, the woman in the second photo. He poses for these pictures thousands of times a year. And what's he going to do, say no?

Still: "That probably wasn't a smart move on his part," DeNeen said.

Clinton has ... a reputation. And with scrutiny and judgment being reintroduced by his wife's inevitable campaign, it probably makes sense for him to be more selective in his posing partners.

Tip 3: But, be authentic.

"The culture values authenticity, so in some ways it can help celebrities when they don't always pose in perfectly manicured photos of themselves," DeNeen said.

Sure enough, Clinton earned online praise for dipping his head into someone's photograph of a mopey child. Hillary Clinton, of course,stumbled into meme celebrity last year when a candid shot of her on a plane caught on. Just the Clintons being the Clintons, and people loved it.

Tip 4: But not, like, too authentic.

"He likes women! We all know this. It's a well-known fact," DeNeen said, moderating her enthusiasm about Clinton being himself. "If you want to change that image, you have to actually change your behavior -- not just on social media."

Which brings us to our final point, circling back to that tricky first photo of Clinton caught in the woman's selfie.

Tip 5: You can't control what other people post.

"When you're Bill Clinton, you can control your own accounts," DeNeen said, "but everyone has a cell phone."

You can't ban photos everywhere -- although Hillary Clinton has barred photos at events in the past. People don't always realize how a photo is going to look until it's published, as was probably the case in the Catsimatidis example. The problem is that, for Clinton, he should always expect to be about to be in a photograph. "With cameras everywhere, somebody is going to catch him doing something less than perfect," DeNeen said.

"When you have that level of power, you have to work that much harder to appear as if you're not lusting after young women," she added. "It may feel unfair, being held to a higher standard, but tough" .... and then she said another word that starts with an "s."

But I would rather not have my kids read it, so we'll just end here.

Source 

Read More

#CrimingWhileWhite: White people confess crimes on Twitter to highlight police racial bias

Social media campaign comes after months of racial tension in the US

White people have taken to Twitter to expose US police prejudice, confessing they got away with crimes that African Americans would probably not.

Posting using the hashtag #WhitePeopleCriming, some people are confessing to serious crimes such as grand theft auto, others smaller driving violations, and some recounting times when black friends were disproportionately scrutinised or punished.

This social media campaign comes following three high-profile incidents of police violence against black men — Eric Garner who was killed by a chokehold by New York City police officer in July,Michael Brown who was shot 6 times by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed in Cleveland late last month.

Garner was caught illegally selling cigarettes, 18-year-old Brown had robbed $50 cigarellos from a shop, and Rice had been playing with a pellet gun — all crimes (or, in Rice's case, not a crime) that white people would not likely be killed over, the Twittersphere is arguing.

This campaign stands in contrast to the findings from a Pew Research poll in which twice as many black Americans than white Americans think the Michael Brown shooting says something about larger racial issues in American.

70 per cent of black respondents said police do not treat people of different races the same, whereas the majority of white respondents say police are "good" about race.

Here are some of the best #WhitePeopleCriming:

Drunk driving speed demon

I was pulled over doing 88 in a 45 after having 3 beers. I was breathalyzed and did not pass, but I got no ticket or dui #CrimingWhileWhite
— Anthony Carmen (@nthonyCarmen) December 3, 2014

Boyfriend swears at cops

White BF told cop who stopped him for speeding to "f**k off." Let go with a warning and a "good night." #crimingwhilewhite
— Anne B (@abroshar) December 3, 2014

Tween carjacker

At 13 I stole a car with my friends & drove it 2wks before we got busted. Only one charged was black. #CrimingWhileWhite
— Cecily Kellogg (@Cecilyk) December 4, 2014

'Illegal alien' gets the blame

In high school I got in a 3 car wreck that might have been my fault. The cop told me it was the "illegal alien's" fault. #CrimingWhileWhite
— Elizabeth (@oceana_roll) December 3, 2014

Stop and search profiling

My 13yo son and his friends were loitering at Walgreens recently. Only his black friend got searched for shoplifting. ~ #CrimingWhileWhite ~
— Dave Hoover (@davehoover) December 4, 2014

How the police will respond to #CrimingWhileWhite

Police are really upset about the #CrimingWhileWhite phenomenon, but they've decided to let everyone off with a warning.
— Frank Conniff (@FrankConniff) December 4, 2014

Source 

Read More

Free speech and social media little to 'like'

FIGHTS over free speech in America don’t always produce the loveliest poster children. Gone are the days when intellectuals had to turn to the first amendment as a shield against prosecution for distributing anti-war pamphlets or publishing socialist tracts. In recent decades, fights over the boundaries of protected speech have been waged mainly by racists, anti-Semites, pornographers, dogfight videographers, cross-burners and their kin.

The most recent crusader for free speech makes some of these characters look rather tame. Anthony Elonis, whose case the Supreme Court took up on Monday, is challenging his 2011 conviction and prison sentence for a series of Facebook posts a jury determined were “true threats” against his estranged wife, which are not considered protected speech. (As Garrett Epps explains at the Atlantic, the court's conception of a "true threat" isn't a warning that necessarily materialises but an act that has the potential to cause panic or disruption, whether or not the person intends to carry out the threat.) In one post, a 27-year-old Mr Elonis wrote:

If I only knew then what I know now...I would have smothered your ass with a pillow. Dumped your body in the back seat. Dropped you off in Toad Creek and made it look like a rape and murder.

Charming, yes. It gets better:

There's one way to love ya, but a thousand ways to kill ya,

And I'm not going to rest until your body is a mess,

Soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.

Hurry up and die bitch.

We should forgive Justice Antonin Scalia for saying to an agreeable Michael Dreeben, the government’s lawyer, that “this language is not worth a whole lot anyway, right?” Freedom of speech is enshrined in the first amendment to facilitate robust debate and discussion essential to democratic self-government. It serves as a bulwark against government encroachment on individual expression. It offers a safe harbour against laws or officials seeking to punish dissenters or silence unpopular views. So it’s hard to fathom what value the Founding Fathers would see in Mr Elonis’s vivid threats. The petitioner’s wife, Tara, certainly did not care for this form of personal expression. She secured a protection-from-abuse order against Mr Elonis in 2010, prompting him to craft still more abusive Facebook posts, against her and against schoolchildren and an FBI agent. This cascade led to the criminal charges, the conviction and 44 months in prison.

In reaching its verdict in the trial, the federal jury was asked to consider whether Mr Elonis’s posts would be viewed by a reasonable observer as serious plans to inflict harm. This is the test in use in most of the country, but two federal districts and some states opt for a subjective standard asking whether the person expressing himself actually intended the statement as a threat to cause another person harm. In his brief to the justices and in the hearing on Monday, Mr Elonis denied ever intending harm. He penned the posts, he claims, as “therapeutic” exercises to handle his angst in the wake of being abandoned by his wife. The missives may have been rather crude and bloody-sounding, but they were just words—harmless and worthy of constitutional protection.

The exchange on Monday was lively, with multiple views bandied about on which characteristics and what level of knowledge should be attributed to a hypothetical "reasonable person". Everyone seemed to be grasping for a definition of what kind of language may be clearly seen as threatening, either through intent or interpretation. Several justices paused to admit confusion about what each lawyer was really arguing. The jurist who stepped in to clearly sketch the possible lines of argument was, as usual, Elena Kagan. Here is her exchange early on with John Elwood, Mr Elonis’s lawyer:

JUSTICE KAGAN:  Mr Elwood,...I'm trying to figure out what exactly the level of intent you want is. So one, the very, very highest level might be I affirmatively want to place this person in fear; that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. All right? There's a step down from that which is: I don't want to do that; I'm just fulfilling my artistic fantasies, whatever you want to call it; but I know that I am going to place this person in fear. All right?  Is that what—which intent do you want?

MR ELWOOD:  The second...That if you know that you are placing someone in fear by what you are doing, that is enough to satisfy our version of—

JUSTICE KAGAN:  How about you just take it a step down more but not get to the government's. How about if you don't know to a certainty, but you know that there is a substantial probability that you will place that person in fear, which is what I take it we would usually mean when we talk about recklessness?

This “recklessness” standard, whereby someone could be convicted as long as he knew that his speech would be frightening, even if he didn’t actually intend it as a threat, garnered little support from either attorney. Mr Elwood said it would offer no protection for mouthy teenagers “shooting off their mouths or making...ill­-timed, sarcastic comments which wind up getting them thrown in jail.” On the other side, Mr Dreeben worried that a recklessness test “basically immunises somebody who makes [a threat] and then can plausibly say later, 'hey, I was dead drunk, I realized that I just called in a bomb threat and the police had to respond and an elementary school had to be evacuated and I knew what I was saying but I was too drunk'” to understand that someone might take it seriously. Samuel Alito was clearly unsympathetic to Mr Elonis’s claims; he called the abusive husband’s I’m-just-venting-and-composing-rap-lyrics defence a “roadmap for threatening a spouse and getting away with it.” But few of the other justices gave a clear indication of how they might vote. 

Late in the hearing, Justice Kagan again offered a clarion explanation of what is at stake in Mr Elonis’s first-amendment challenge:

JUSTICE KAGAN: Mr Dreeben, you are asking us to go down ­­you know, it's not purpose, it's not knowledge of causing fear, it's not a conscious disregard of causing fear, it's just that you should have known that you were going to cause fear, essentially. And that's not the kind of standard that we typically use in the First Amendment...[W]e typically say that the First Amendment requires a kind of a buffer zone to ensure that even stuff that is wrongful maybe is permitted because we don't want to chill innocent behavior.

This is the core of the matter. As nasty as Mr Elonis’s Facebook posts may have been, the question is what happens in future cases when the government seeks to punish people for venting or trying their hand at some gangsta rap on their Facebook pages. What, Chief Justice John Roberts asked, distinguishes Mr Elonis’s diatribes from Eminem’s multi-platinum records, in which he speaks in excruciatingly violent terms about what he'd like to do to his wife? The main distinction, according to Mr Dreeben, is that Eminem’s lyrics are delivered “at a concert where people are going to be entertained.”

There is a plausible argument to be made that domestic violence prosecutions would be hindered by a ruling that protects Mr Elonis’s antics, but this isn’t the only consideration the justices must weigh. Why should abusive speech that entertains an audience enjoy constitutional protection while Mr Elonis’s amateurish attempts to mimic Eminem be judged beyond the pale? It is a tough question the justices will speak out on a few months down the line.  

Source

Read More

Supreme Court struggles with defining, prosecuting threats on social media.

Jeff Dion of the National Crime Victim Bar Association speaks with reporters after arguments in the case of Anthony Elonis, who was convicted in 2010 of threatening his wife via social media, at the Supreme Court building Dec. 1. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

As the chief justice of the United States name-checked Eminem and speculated about ­rap-
obsessed teenagers, the Supreme Court struggled Monday with how to draw a digital-age distinction between illegal threats and violent speech that is nonetheless protected by the First Amendment.

The court’s first foray into examining speech made on social media featured rap lyrics and Facebook “likes” but relied on ancient legal concepts about intent and negligence.

The justices seemed reluctant to accept the government’s position that a threat exists whenever the speech in question would make a reasonable person fearful. But there did not seem to be a consensus on what more prosecutors should be required to prove.

The attorney for Anthony Douglas Elonis, a Pennsylvania man convicted of Facebook threats directed toward his estranged wife, a kindergarten class and an FBI agent, said his client should not have been convicted without prosecutors showing that he intended for his crude and violent Facebook posts be taken seriously.

That immediately troubled Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at her customary spot on the bench five days after a heart stent procedure.

“How does one prove what’s in somebody else’s mind?” she asked. “This case, the standard was would a reasonable person think that the words would put someone in fear, and reasonable people can make that judgment. But how would the government prove whether this threat in the mind of the threatener was genuine?”

John P. Elwood, representing Elonis, said several states already require such proof, which he acknowledged made prosecution more difficult. In Elonis’s case, Elwood said, his client went out of his way to characterize his postings as “art” and fiction, and not to be taken seriously.

Source

Read More