The Weekly Weird #40

Hitler on TikTok, Hillary hates haters, Britain hates hate more than [the worst thing], the UN's new global surveillance convention, the Philadelphia Beef Bandits

Welcome once again to your Weekly Weird, where we wantonly waggle our eyebrows in the face of the foolishness fomenting furiously around the globe!

Some quick preamble stuff:

• Episode 121 is out now, with Sanne Van Oosten (rhymes with toastin’), a data expert at Oxford University who walks me through her discovery that racial and gender bias in voting preference doesn’t seem to exist (according to her meta-analysis).

• Another troubled individual was found within shooting distance of Donald Trump, and, of course, the chorus of concern over heated rhetoric almost immediately degenerated back into bandying about and excusing that same heated rhetoric.

• The Rule of Three dictates that I have a third item in this list, so here it is.

Let’s get to it!

Hitler On TikTok

According to Media Matters, the internet is having a frien-aissance with Der Fuhrer. AI-augmented (and altered) speeches by ol’ Adolf have been turning up on TikTok, translated into English, set to surprisingly chilled beats, and his racist ravings have inspired the denizens of social media’s most problematic app to take a softer stance on him and his legacy.

Sad face emoji heart emoji for ‘uncle A’. What a perfect summary of the depths to which public discourse has fallen in the Internet Age. Remember when TikTok broke out the aubergine¹ emojis for Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America? What’s next, ‘simps for Stalin’? No, don’t check, they definitely already exist².

Hitler is being called “the painter” in code, making searches for his speeches even stranger.

From Media Matters:

Media Matters has identified numerous videos with these English-language Hitler speeches posted as far back as April 7, 2024. However, since early September, videos with these audios have been proliferating across the platform. TikTok has since removed some of the videos that Media Matters identified, but only after some had earned hundreds of thousands, or even over a million, views.

One video, which had earned roughly 120,000 likes and over 1 million views prior to removal, featured an excerpt from a speech Hitler gave on the 19th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch (a failed coup d’etat by the Nazi Party in November 1923) and portrayed an image of Hitler standing with his back turned to the camera with the text: “Just listen.”

The AI interpretation of what Hitler would sound like in English is very close to the impression offered by stand-up comic Frank Sanazi, who performs covers of Sinatra songs as TikTok’s favourite “painter”, with lyrics to match.

Some accounts are even aimed solely at whatever audience AI Hitler caters to:

Media Matters also identified several accounts dedicated to posting these Hitler audios.

One account with 20,500 followers and over 3.8 million cumulative views across 12 videos posts videos with these Hitler speeches, a silhouette of the German mass murderer, and the text “Growing up is realizing Who the villain Really was.”

One explicitly antisemitic video, blaming a “small rootless international clique” who are “at home both nowhere and everywhere who do not have anywhere a soil on which they have grown up” for “turning the people against each other,” has received over 1.6 million views. The excerpt seems to come from a speech Hitler gave at the Siemens-Schuckert plant in Berlin in 1933. At the time of writing, this account was still up. 

Yes, that Siemens. If that’s a shocker, wait until you find out how Volkswagen got started.

To lighten the mood, here’s a funny (and very, very unauthorised) test commercial for Volkswagen that got the director in a tremendous amount of trouble.

Media Matters sign off their exposé of TikTok’s romanticisation of the most famous uni-testicular human in history with a suitably breathless invocation of the need for censorship:

As AI becomes increasingly popular for content generation, novel forms of disinformation that promote hateful ideologies and misrepresent historical facts will follow. Social media platforms must be aware that this technology is being used to cause harm and take proactive measures to prevent it from proliferating on their platforms.

There’s the kicker. Is any of this actually a real issue, or just more ginned-up hysteria over “uncensored” social media to justify more intrusion into what people can and cannot say online?

Media Matters, after all, has form in engineering a scandal they claim to be reporting on. X is in the process of suing them for one such example, in which Media Matters inspired an advertiser boycott by claiming that X was presenting far-right extremist material alongside ads for major companies.

From The Hill’s description of the case:

The allegations in the lawsuit read like a textbook on advocacy journalism. Media Matters is accused of knowingly misrepresenting the real user experience by manipulating the algorithms to produce the pairing alleged in its story.

The complaint accuses Media Matters of running its manipulation to produce extremely unlikely pairings, such that one toxic match appeared for “only one viewer (out of more than 500 million) on all of X: Media Matters.” In other words, the organization wanted to write a hit piece connecting X to pro-Nazi material and proceeded to artificially create pairings between that material and corporate advertisements. It then ran the story as news.

Indeed, two defendant employees of Media Matters did not deny that they were aware of the alleged manipulation and that they were seeking to poison the well for advertisers in order to drain advertising revenues for X. 

We are definitely seeing a global push for censorship of social media, and the internet more broadly, cloaked in the language of harm, safety, and mis/dis/malinformation. Media Matters ‘discovering’ AI Hitler on TikTok conveniently has the same gist and stated policy aim as a number of other stories from media outlets right now, as well as letters and statements from the UN, the EU, and various national governments.

For some historical flavour, here is the opening from Peter Vanderwicken’s excellent 1995 essay in Harvard Business Review titled Why The News Is Not The Truth:

The U.S. press, like the U.S. government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.

The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively.

Thirty years on, one wonders at how the media/government situation seems to have gotten so much worse, and yet stayed the same.

Speaking of a lot of institutions and high-profile individuals saying the same thing right now, all of which takes aim at other people saying things they don’t like…

Hillary Hates Haters

Hillary Clinton, America’s least-self-aware election ‘denier’ and definitely a hard-ass mother-in-law, made a splash this week by going on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC and calling for Americans engaged in “propaganda” to be prosecuted civilly and criminally.

The specific quote can be found from 7:56:

From the transcript (emphasis mine):

So, I think it's important to indict the Russians, just as Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016³. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda.
 
And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States. They're not going to be going to a country where they can be extradited or even returning to the United States, unless they are very foolish.
 
So I think we need to uncover all of the connections and make it very clear that you could vote however you want, but we are not going to let adversaries, whether it is Russia, China, Iran, or anybody else, basically try to influence Americans as to how we should vote in picking our leaders.

Hillary’s desire to “uncover all of the connections” is admirable. After all, we don’t want foreign money sloshing around in American politics, potentially influencing those who hold high office or even just creating the perception of possible foreign influence that could be construed as ethically questionable.

To that end, let’s briefly revisit this 2015 Washington Post story called Foreign governments gave millions to foundation while Clinton was at State Dept. (emphasis mine):

The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

Most of the contributions were possible because of exceptions written into the foundation’s 2008 agreement, which included limits on foreign-government donations.

The agreement, reached before Clinton’s nomination amid concerns that countries could use foundation donations to gain favor with a Clinton-led State Department, allowed governments that had previously donated money to continue making contributions at similar levels.

The new disclosures, provided in response to questions from The Washington Post, make clear that the 2008 agreement did not prohibit foreign countries with interests before the U.S. government from giving money to the charity closely linked to the secretary of state.

Finding that after watching the video of Hillary on Maddow took precisely five seconds using the search term “clinton connection to foreign money in election”.

Why didn’t a respected party propagandist journalist like Rachel Maddow, with the resources and team she has, manage to dig that out when interviewing Clinton? One would think that questioning a former Secretary of State and presidential candidate about their own acceptance of foreign money while in office right after they propose criminal sanctions against ordinary US citizens “who are witting and willing and those who are unwitting” in their sharing and parroting of foreign propaganda would make for a rather interesting moment of television, no?

A sitting Secretary of State would be unswayed by “millions of dollars from seven foreign governments” but Craig from Ohio should be “criminally charged” for stanning Putin on his Tumblr page?

Unassailable logic.

Speaking of which…

Britain Hates Hate More Than [The Worst Thing]

A tale of two tiers now, from the Sceptr’d Isle that brought you the BBC, creepy fetishes, and the concept of the stiff upper lip.

Exhibiting all three of the above this week was former BBC News anchor Huw Edwards, who was convicted on three counts of ‘making indecent images of children.’ The charges cover Edwards’ receipt via WhatsApp of 41 still and moving images of children aged 12 to 15, as well as Category A images of a child between the ages of 7 and 9.

It is worth mentioning for clarity that under British law, ‘making’ includes receiving or viewing, and does not necessarily indicate that the defendant produced the images, which evidence shows Edwards did not do.

In the Sentencing Remarks, the Court took a prize for stating the obvious:

[H]aving enjoyed a very successful career in the media, it is obvious that until now you were very highly regarded by the public for your dedication and professionalism, you were perhaps the most recognised news reader / journalist in the UK. It is not an overstatement to say your long-earned reputation is in “tatters.”

The Daily Mail’s version:

Edwards…appeared in court after being sent 41 indecent images of children by convicted paedophile Alex Williams.

The 63-year-old had wired thousands of pounds to Williams, who sent him porn, some of which he called 'amazing'. 

The disgraced broadcaster had also told the convicted paedophile 'go on' when asked if he wanted 'naughty pics and vids' of somebody described as young.

Edwards wrote 'yes xxx' when he was asked by Williams if he wanted sexual images of a person whose 'age could be discerned as being between 14 and 16'. 

He was also sent two pornographic videos of a child aged between seven and nine-years-old.

After cataloguing the mitigating factors brought up in Edwards’ defence, including his sense of inferiority at being “the most recognised news reader / journalist in the UK'“ despite never having gone to Oxford, which left him feeling like an outsider at the BBC, the presiding judge pronounced a sentence of 6 months, suspended for 2 years:

The sentence of the court is therefore as follows

• Count 1 – Possession of 7 indecent images of children , Cat A – 6 months Imprisonment suspended for 2 years with 2 requirements a. To compete a Sex Offender Treatment Programme Requirement lasting 40 days b. 25 Rehabilitation Activity Requirement ( RAR) sessions

• Count 2 - Possession of 12 indecent images of children , Cat B- No separate penalty

• Count 3 - Possession indecent of 22 images of children , Cat C – No separate Penalty

This compassionate and open-minded approach to punishing the possession of child pornography stands in stark contrast to the UK’s well-documented draconian stance on anything even approaching the thinnest semblance of the line of what is commonly called ‘hate speech’.

For example:

• The man, 61, who chanted ‘who the f*** is Allah’ and was imprisoned for 18 months

• The 53-year-old wife from Cheshire sent down for 15 months for a distasteful Facebook post about blowing up a mosque

• The man who got 10 weeks in prison for a racist rant in a private Snapchat group (with another man getting a 6 week sentence for sharing it)

• The 19-year-old girl who received a community order for posting lyrics including the n-word “from Snap Dogg's I'm Trippin'“ which she shared on Instagram “to pay tribute to a boy who died in a road crash.”

• The YouTuber Count Dankula, who was convicted of being “grossly offensive” for filming himself teaching a pet pug to give a Nazi salute. He avoided prison by paying a fine of £800.

The last one on the list is in many ways the ur-offense, as it happened six years ago and was, at the time, considered a red line by many free speech advocates who predicted a dark era in Britain if such prosecutions were allowed to continue and multiply. The usual chorus of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” and “slippery slope fallacy” drowned out those concerns, and, well, here we are.

See also Andrew Doyle’s short Spiked doc The Curious Case of the Nazi Pug, made at the time:

This article from Gript, about the Huw Edwards case but also more broadly about the tendency towards lenient sentencing of paedophiles in Britain and Ireland, is worth a read as well.

From Gript:

In some senses, Edwards is being treated more harshly in the media on account of his public profile. He is far from alone in consuming the material he consumed, and his suspended sentence is par for the course for such activity in both jurisdictions on these islands.

John McGuirk, the author of the article, proceeds to give examples of other egregious offences that drew little to no meaningful legal penalties, but I’ll spare you those here. Suffice it to say that Huw Edwards is not the only person to dodge prison for a paedophilia-adjacent crime.

All of this is to point out the bitter irony that, in the UK, someone who “loves” children is treated better under the law than someone who “hates” adults, even if neither offence involves the defendant putting hands on anyone or even actively encouraging anyone else to do so. With mitigating factors taken into account, like a lack of prior offenses, a high stress living situation, poor mental health, familial obligations that would put a loved one at risk if a custodial sentence is given, it remains the case that saying or writing something of which the police, the Court, the government, or an anonymous complainant disapproves has a track record of drawing actual weeks and months of prison time, while soliciting images of children seems to be treated with much more pronounced understanding and leniency.

So the message from Britain’s justice system is that as long as you don’t hate the kids, it doesn’t matter what you do to them?

Meanwhile…

The UN’s New Global Surveillance Convention

Receiving way less coverage in the news than other stories of significantly less import is the August release of the draft United Nations convention against cybercrime, published by the snappily-named Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes.

It’s almost like centres of power and influence go out of their way to make important things sound boring so that we don’t get curious about them.

The subtitle of the draft convention is Strengthening international cooperation for combating certain crimes committed by means of information and communications technology systems and for the sharing of evidence in electronic form of serious crimes.

That all sounds good, right? We don’t want serious crimes to go unpunished, and we definitely want international cooperation. Right?

Oh wait, some countries are really sketchy and have a totally different idea of what constitutes a serious crime. Who’s behind this?

The convention was instigated by Russia, China, Iran, and other freedom-loving nations four-square behind the ideals of individual liberty and boisterous public debate.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 2022, when this convention began its long road to enactment:

Failing to prioritize human rights and procedural safeguards in criminal investigations can have dire consequences.  As many countries have already abused their existing cybercrime laws to undermine human rights and freedoms and punish peaceful dissent, we have grave concerns that this Convention might become a powerful weapon for oppression. We also worry that cross-border investigative powers without strong human rights safeguards will sweep away progress on protecting people’s privacy rights, creating a race to the bottom among jurisdictions with the weakest human rights protections.

Fast forward to the now-accepted draft and Epicenter Works in Austria were blunt in their assessment of the convention:

One of the most dangerous surveillance treaties in the world was adopted with a standing ovation. An additional protocol could further facilitate the persecution of political opponents.

The EFF sent a letter to the Ad Hoc Committee overseeing the convention in February of this year, raising additional concerns (emphasis mine):

The proposed treaty’s failure to exempt good faith security research from the expansive scope of its cybercrime prohibitions and to make the safeguards and limitations in Article 6-10 mandatory leaves the door wide open for states to suppress or control the flow of security related information. This would undermine the universal benefit of openly shared cybersecurity knowledge, and ultimately the safety and security of the digital environment.

A non-exhaustive list of other issues raised by the EFF in their February letter:

• Article 6 “risks criminalizing essential activities in security research, particularly where researchers access systems without prior authorization, to identify vulnerabilities.”

• Article 10 “could criminalize the legitimate use of tools employed in cybersecurity research, thereby affecting the development and use of these tools.”

• Article 22 could mean that “security researchers discovering or disclosing vulnerabilities to keep the digital ecosystem secure could be subject to criminal prosecution simultaneously across multiple jurisdictions.”

• Article 28(4) “empowers authorities to compel “any individual” with knowledge of computer systems to provide any “necessary information” for conducting searches and seizures of computer systems. This provision can be abused to force security experts, software engineers and/or tech employees to expose sensitive or proprietary information. It could also encourage authorities to bypass normal channels within companies and coerce individual employees, under the threat of criminal prosecution, to provide assistance in subverting technical access controls such as credentials, encryption, and just-in-time approvals without their employers’ knowledge.”

Tanja Fachathaler, a civil society observer of the Ad Hoc Committee’s negotiations and a policy advisor at Austria’s Epicenter Works, was interviewed by Netzpolitik about the dangers of this new convention (translated into English by Google):

It is to be feared in the future that Russia, but also other countries under the guise of combating cybercrime, will silence opposition figures or journalists with the blessing of the United Nations.

The International Press Institute even took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post in August, against the convention and its implications for journalists:

Fachathaler elaborated on why the convention constitutes a win for Russia and other repressive regimes:

Russia has masterfully managed to get a large number of countries, especially developing countries, on its side. From their point of view, it naturally makes sense to have easier access to data on servers in the USA, for example, as well as to receive technology and knowledge transfer in the fight against computer crime. The arguments against Western supremacy and for aid in developing countries were difficult to counter.

The fear of the West was also too great that if the negotiations failed, Russia would present a draft contract to the General Assembly as it intended and that it would be adopted there by vote – without the possibility of reaching a compromise through negotiations…

No lesser pillar of the international cybersecurity apparatus than Microsoft came out against the convention, in no uncertain terms (emphasis mine):

The treaty does not yet have a defined scope and allows for clandestine access to secured systems, secret real-time surveillance, in perpetual secrecy, coupled with inadequate safeguards. While surveillance and intelligence collecting are part of the national security activities of states, this should not be supported and, de facto blessed, by a UN treaty under the guise of combating cybercrime.

How bad is it?

More from Microsoft:

As we have previously stated, a cybercrime convention should apply to crimes unique to cyberspace and not cover any crime simply because it has an ICT⁴ element. The scope of this treaty remains too broad. Applying this Convention to other offences without defining those offences would effectively override the applicability of existing international human rights online, paving the way for abuse by authoritarian regimes to increase online censorship, preventive content take-downs, and government surveillance with minimal guardrails.

Sure, that sounds pretty unpleasant, but seriously, what could possibly be in the text of this convention that makes things so much worse?

Article 28(4)…allows any state – including states who have conducted cyberattacks against critical infrastructure – to compel a company or government agency employee with special knowledge of a computer system to hand over e.g. access credentials and other sensitive information to third states, all in secret, forever.

A UN treaty that undermines cybersecurity for everyone, makes cybercriminals’ jobs easier, and compromises online trust and safety should be unacceptable for the international community of states.

The draft will go up before the UN General Assembly for ratification this month, where it needs forty nations to agree in order to bring it into force as an official UN convention.

Fachathaler was unequivocal in her opinion of whether ratification is a good idea or not (emphasis mine):

On the part of civil society, we have repeatedly demanded that the contract should not be accepted without significant improvements. These improvements have not been made. As a result, the following must now continue to apply: We urge states not to ratify this treaty.

Well, yeah.

To cheer you up…

The Philadelphia Beef Bandits

A group of men (dare I say gourmands?) were apprehended on the New Jersey Turnpike when they “attempted to steal boxes of meat from a tractor trailer.” The arrests marked the end of a two-month police investigation dubbed “Operation Beef Bandit”.

The gourmet gang may be the perpetrators of up to nine other as-yet-unsolved heists involving “the theft of meat, alcohol, seafood and other high-value items.”

The Philly Voice has more:

In August, thieves swiped about 350-400 pounds of tuna from a refrigerated trailer truck at Samuels Seafood Co. In September, six men in masks stole another three pallets of seafood from Seventh Street and Packer Avenue. Police also reported cargo thefts of snow crab, beef, salmon and bourbon in the city earlier in the summer and spring.

Sounds like someone was planning quite a party.

Chad (yes, really) reports for 6ABC Philadelphia:

It’s no wonder that the thieves were eventually caught. As you’ll see at 1:21 in the video, the detective on the case was Jack Ryan.

Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.

That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. Thanks as always for reading.

Outro music is The Kiffness with Eating the Cats ft. Donald Trump, a musical parody of a political debate satirising the terrible tendency of the media and politicians to obsess over marginal squabbling points while avoiding a meaningful discussion of anything approaching genuine importance.

Stay sane, friends.

Miaow.

1. 🍆, named ‘eggplant’ by Americans, made symbolic of tumescence by common usage.

2. And have done for decades, as shown by long-standing support for Stalin and the Soviet regime across the Western world for three generations plus. Did we even need the internet to make people sympathise with terrible ideas and actions? Maybe this has been an all-too human problem all along…

3. Rebutted by Aaron Maté on X: “To make her argument against free speechj [sic], she invokes the Russiagate scam that itself was the product of her campaign's own propaganda. Speaking of which, the case that she invokes here -- Mueller charging some Russians for social media activity -- led to Mueller dropping the case after the Russian company showed up to fight the case in court.”

4. i.e. Information Communications Technology