Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Amazon, Target, Starbucks, and Comcast to divest from police foundations. Police foundations are a two-pronged menace: they fund our burgeoning police state, and they show up state, local and federal governments for failing to fund police in the first place! If we're going to have police -- and ideally, as I've said before, we will have them doing far fewer jobs -- then we ought to fund them properly, and not use tricks like asset forfeiture, the 1033 program, and police foundations to paper over that lack of funding. Police foundations, being private non-profits, also fund police departments with very little or no public oversight, which means police departments can spy on citizens and fire rubber bullets on protestors without anyone accountable to the people having actually signed off on that! Which also gives our worst public servants an unearned sense of relief, I suppose. Need I mention that corporate influence on police is a) undesirable and b) no substitute for making corporations pay their share of taxes? The only people who should be influencing police are the people police officers serve. So it's time to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR again.
Meanwhile, Facebook somehow seems to outsource its third-party fact-checking function to the worst far right-wing "news" organs, and The Daily Caller (founded by Tucker Carlson because of course it was) is just one of them. Guess what else The Daily Caller does? It tries to raise money for our President's re-election effort! Think Snopes, Factcheck.org, or PolitiFact are raising money for Joe Biden right now? (If you responded OF COURSEZ TEH LIBRUL MEDIAZ DOEZ TEH THINGZ!!!!, please navigate away from this page. And maybe see a therapist about your rage issues.) I take issue with outsourcing your fact-checking function to some big media corporation to begin with -- millions of people are looking for jobs as we speak, and my experience tells me most of them have much better BS detectors than they get credit for having! -- and I also take issue with isolating "fact-checking" as if it's some special function of a news organ rather than that news organ's reason for existence. Nonetheless, I don't want obviously biased news organ telling me what a fact is. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop using The Daily Caller as a "fact-checker."
Finally, YouTube has decided (as of the end of September) to remove the feature that enables users to add features such as closed captioning and translated subtitles to videos; this Community Contributions feature sure is a fresh breath of 2007, when (regardless of whatever else was going on in the world!) it seemed like any of us could use the internet as a force for good, even if that good was merely helping deaf folks and foreign-language speakers enjoy the same videos we're all enjoying. But Google (YouTube's owner, sigh) claims it's removing the feature because it "was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse," and I figured spam and abuse would be the real reason, but you know how you counter spam and abuse? You be like Wikipedia and you hire enough people to effectively monitor the feature for spam and abuse! Just like, you know, if you want to do fact-checking, you hire enough people to check the facts, not outsource it to some corporation or throw up your hands at how hard it is. Anyway, Change.org helps you tell Google not to remove the Community Contributions feature from YouTube. If you like, you can tell them to manage it better, too.
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