A scarf knitted by a German woman to document her frustrations with frequent train delays has sold for €7,550 (£6,720) on eBay, as the country’s biggest railway company announces plans for a punctuality tsar.

The “rail delay scarf” came to prominence when Sara Weber, a journalist, posted a photo of it on Twitter earlier this month. Her mother, a commuter in the Munich area, knitted two lines a day in 2018 to represent how long she was delayed for, she explained.

The scarf is colour-coded: grey wool meant her delay had been less than five minutes, pink signified delays of between five and 30 minutes, while red meant she was delayed for more than 30 minutes or had been delayed both ways.

“In the spring, everything was OK. Lots of grey and pink,” Weber wrote. “Then for a while it was all red: rail replacement traffic throughout the summer.”

The scarf, approximately 1.5 metres (4.9ft) long, represented many Germans’ frustrations with train delays, despite their country’s reputation abroad for efficiency and punctuality.

As farms have found themselves scrutinized for their practices, there’s been a legislative desire to cover questionable actions under the protective garb of opacity. Ag lobbyists have successfully pushed for laws criminalizing the exposure of facts. As a bonus, they’ve also secured legislation labeling animal rights activists and others concerned about farm animal well-being as “terrorists.”

The victories have been short-lived. Anyone not completely consumed by self-interest would recognize the laws violate the First Amendment by preventing fact-gathering or dissemination of observations by those who’ve bluffed their way onto farms precisely to uncover abusive practices. Courts are overturning these laws, but that’s not stopping anyone from writing new ones just as unconstitutionally sound. Fortunately, a recent federal court decision [PDF] adds to the ammo opponents of these laws can use to bring them down. (via Courthouse News Service)

Iowa’s “ag gag” law was a direct response to criticism of farm practices – criticism driven by undercover investigations by journalists and activists posing as farm employees. State legislators had a host of bad reasons for the law – all of them dancing around the actual reason: to prevent criticism of farm practices.

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The court says that even if it buys the government’s arguments for the enactment of the law, it’s stated reasons (which ignore the desired side effect of preventing the public from learning about the industry producing its food) aren’t enough to justify this intrusion on First Amendment rights.

Chinese microblogging service Weibo aims to discourage fake comments and reposts on its platform by limiting its count of the total number of interactions such as shares to 1 million.

The platform will show a maximum figure of “1 million+” when reposts and comments exceed that amount, the company wrote in a report. The social media platform said the effort aims to “build a virtuous ecosystem for content and connections,” and applies to all accounts except those owned by government bodies and media outlets. The system will come online at the end of January.

The move takes aim at the country’s “water army,” shuijun in Chinese, referring to paid posters who flood social media platforms with reposts, biased comments, rumors, and gossip. It also targets click farms, which feature thousands of smartphones that inflate interaction metrics.

Kids aren’t losing themselves in their devices, but potentially finding themselves. What’s more, they’re doing exactly what generations of kids have long done: Immersing themselves in the toys and objects of the moment that reflect the society they inhabit, and which will help prepare them for the future.

“Even though bots are abstract entities, we might think of them as having free speech rights to the extent that they are promoting or promulgating useful information for the rest of us,” Sacharoff says. “That’s one theory of why a bot would have a First Amendment free speech right, almost independent of its creators.” Alternatively, the bots could just be viewed as direct extensions of their human creators. In either case – whether because of an independent right to free speech or because of a human creator’s right – Sacharoff says, “you can get to one or another nature of bots having some kind of free speech right.”

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Sacharoff believes that the issue of bots and their potential First Amendment rights may one day have its day in court. Campaigns, he says, will find that bots are helpful and that their “usefulness derives from the fact that they don’t have to disclose that they’re bots. If some account is retweeting something, if they have to say, ‘I’m a bot’ every time, then it’s less effective. So sure I can see some campaign seeking a declaratory judgment that the law is invalid,” he says. “Ditto, I guess, [for] selling stuff on the commercial side.”

In First Amendment cases, a court would consider whether there is a compelling reason to limit the scope of a person’s speech. In the case of electioneering social-media bots, the sanctity of elections would probably suffice, Sacharoff says. But then a court would weigh whether the anti-bot law is too broad or even effective. “If you can accomplish the same goal some other way, or if this law doesn’t accomplish the goal, then the court will say, ‘We’re going to strike it down. Sure this is a good, worthy goal, but this law just doesn’t advance it.’” Sacharoff says. “So it will be very fact specific.”