If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it one too many times, but there’s nothing quite like a pot-stirring hot take delivered in the middle of a serious dinner conversation. For the select few of you who haven’t the foggiest notion of what a hot take is, its basically a highly contestable suggestion or historically unfavorable opinion that someone brings up in the discussion. I love a good hot take because of how uncomfortable it makes anyone with the misfortune of being on the receiving end. For example, a friend of mine was eating dinner and brought up the fact, in his opinion, that there is nothing we can do to stop the onslaught of capitalism on society, no matter how hard we try. At first glance, a statement like this has no factual backing, and anyone with half a brain cell would know not to engage in discussion with someone who’d bring this kind of stuff up, but sources say the hot take garnered the desired effect.
Have any good hot takes? While you think, here’s what you missed in the news yesterday.
Trust Your Census
As if perfectly timed with my opinions above, significant controversy has been increasing surrounding the ongoing trial over the US Commerce Department’s decision to reintroduce a question about citizenship in the 2020 census. Critics of the attempted decision have insisted that reinstatement of the question will warrant inaccurate census data, given the sheer amount of noncitizen living in the United States, ultimately furthering our country’s issue with fairly representing all peoples. Regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, a federal judge in New York blocked the Trump administration’s proposal to reintroduce the controversial census question. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, the man responsible for rejecting the proposed question, said that “hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will go uncounted in the census if the citizenship question is included. In arriving at his decision as he did, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated the law and the public trust.”
“…By its terms, therefore, the Constitution mandates that every ten years the federal government endeavor to count every single person residing in the United States, whether citizen or noncitizen, whether live here with legal status or without. The population count derived from that effort is used not only to apportion Representatives among the states but also to draw political districts and allocate power within them. And it is used to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal, state, and local funds…Even small deviations from an accurate count can have major implications for states, localities, and the people who live in them — indeed, for the country as a whole.”
–Opinion by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman
Be A Leader, Not An Instagram Follower
For one reason or another, companies that make bot programs also create millions of fake accounts that users, who purchase said service, will gain the following of after they’ve used one of these apps/services. This practice is severely frowned upon in the world of social influence, and most platforms like Facebook (FB), Instagram, and Twitter (TWTR) have banned users for purchasing fake followers to boost the influence of their accounts. In an interesting turn of events, a recent TechCrunch investigation revealed that Instagram hypocritically continues to sell ad space to services that charge clients for fake followers or other apps that automatically follow/unfollow other people to increase followers for the client.
Per the official details of the investigation, TechCrunch found “17 services selling fake followers or automated notification spam for luring in followers that were openly advertising on Instagram (FB) despite blatantly violating the network’s policies.” The findings of the report continued to suggest that the companies responsible for displaying these ads on Instagram’s (FB) platform were well aware that their actions were in direct violation of Instagram’s (FB) policies, and they even went so far as to justify their spam generation.
“What we’re doing is obviously against their terms of service. We’re going in and piggybacking off their free platform and not giving them any of the revenue. Instagram doesn’t like us at all. We utilize private proxies depending on clients’ geographic location. That’s sort of our trick to reduce any sort of liability. It’s a careful line that we tread with Instagram.”
–Gun Hudson, Founder, Macurex
