Plus: Get 4/20-friendly with Paul Downs. View in your browser Share | Subscribe In the April 20 newsletter, Robert Mays considers what might happen after Los Angeles drafts its quarterback, Allison P. Davis says it’s high time for a Paul Downs moment, and Kate Knibbs debuts to put Facebook’s smackdown of The Shade Room in context. Getty Images Quarterback Chaos Theory: Following the Fallout From the Rams-Titans Megadeal By Robert Mays After last week’s trade for the no. 1 pick, we now know how the Rams are getting their quarterback. While we still don’t know who that’ll be, the monster deal created plenty of other questions near the top of the draft. Does this change Cleveland’s thought process? The Browns’ strategy should be “quarterback, no matter what” only if they view Jared Goff and Carson Wentz as the two best players in the draft. There’s no sense in taking a QB just to take one. Provided the Browns don’t want the other quarterback, the second pick becomes super valuable to whatever team does. Whether that’s Philadelphia, San Francisco, or someone else, Cleveland gains a bit more leverage. It would be typical Browns luck if the Rams jumped them to snag the guy Cleveland really wanted, but negotiating power over the rest of the NFL isn’t a bad alternative. Who spent the weekend celebrating? Coachella was only the second-biggest party in Southern California last weekend. It had nothing on what must’ve gone down in Tom Telesco’s office. Quarterbacks going first and second would leave the Chargers GM with his pick (Jalen Ramsey? Myles Jack?) of the non-signal-caller lot. Really, any team that wasn’t planning on taking a quarterback is thrilled. With the Rams moving up and the Titans moving down, Jacksonville, Baltimore, and Miami now have one less team threatening to take whoever their man is. Who spent the weekend seething with rage? Goff visited with San Francisco on Monday, and if Chip Kelly was hoping the Cal quarterback would fall to no. 7, I can’t imagine he had a fun couple of days. The same goes for Dallas if it was eying Goff or Wentz. A supply-and-demand issue with quarterbacks could also mean increased volatility (read: stupidity), as teams try to deal up for guys like Paxton Lynch and Connor Cook. The Jets, who’ve already worked out Lynch, may have been hoping he’d fall to them at 20. Now, it feels like another version of the 2011 Blaine Gabbert–Christian Ponder nightmare might be upon us. How far will Laremy Tunsil fall? Thanks to an already-stacked Cowboys line, Doug Free’s contract containing guaranteed money for 2017, and 2015 third-round pick Chaz Green waiting on the bench, my Tunsil-to-Dallas fan fiction likely won’t become a reality. But I can’t imagine that he'll drop much further. Neither of Jacksonville’s left tackles has financial guarantees after this season, and selecting Tunsil could rectify the Luke Joeckel mistake from 2013. Baltimore is a possibility if the Ravens think pending free agent Ricky Wagner might be too costly next offseason. If the Niners do want to trade the soon-to-be-unretired Anthony Davis, as Peter King reported, Tunsil would help them fix their disastrous situation at right tackle. The absolute floor is probably the Bucs at no. 9. They could use an upgrade on the edge and could easily slide 2015 second-rounder Donovan Smith to the right side. Of course, the Cowboys could make this easy and just do the right thing at no. 4. Getty Images Get High (Like, Really High) With Paul Downs By Allison P. Davis Ilana Glazer’s three-part, highest-holiday Comedy Central special, Time Traveling Bong, has a specific audience baked in; the bordering-on-offensive takes and extra-adult jokes seem written expressly for Broad City’s stoned-est fans. But even the least 4/20-friendly viewers will appreciate the way Glazer’s bizarre little event unlocks the underappreciated appeal of actor/writer Paul Downs. Fans of Broad City know Downs from his role as Trey, Abbi’s scattered and spandexed boss at the gym. (He’s also a writer on the show, and on this special.) His bits have always been funny, but it’s taken three seasons for the show to move him from sexually ambiguous punch line to weird, but still sweet, love interest — a role he deserves. Time Traveling Bong lets him show off a third side: the post-Apatow stoner. The overtly druggy riff on Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which debuts today, hands Downs a bong, pairs him with Glazer, and lets him hoist his freak flag, well, really high. And then that titular bong takes Downs and Glazer from ancient Greece to the Salem witch trials to the civil rights era. The comedy goes broad enough to let Downs do his strange, wonderful, and fairly uncategorizable thing. He’s a neurotic stoner, aware but not woke, and a maybe-pansexual bro (both his lack of a sex life and his sexual fluidity are running jokes). Downs checks all the boxes I didn’t even know needed checking: Sort of weird to look at, but in an oddly appealing way? Check. The jittery antithesis of the stoner-slacker? Check. (Thank goodness.) And offscreen, a feminist comic writer? He’s cowriting an all-female 21 Jump Street spin-off with his girlfriend and writing partner, Lucia Aniello. That’s a check. So I’m calling it now: By next 4/20, we’ll be in the midst of a Paul Downs takeover — though you probably won’t remember I predicted it. The Shade Room Why Facebook Put The Shade Room in the Dark By Kate Knibbs Earlier this week, Facebook removed celebrity gossip aggregator The Shade Room for violating its community standards. The Shade Room is not abusive or pornographic. If you feel unsafe reading The Shade Room, you might be Iggy Azalea. But everybody who likes reading words online should feel wobbly about this, because it’s an obvious example of the power that Facebook wields as a media publisher. The Shade Room started as an Instagram page, and while it can be juicy, it’s often deeply mundane. The account featured a couple of posts this week about the death of 90-year-old Everybody Loves Raymond star Doris Roberts, for example. BuzzFeed’s Doree Shafrir wrote about The Shade Room’s ascendance last year, identifying how using Instagram helped it succeed. “There were other websites about black celebrities, to be sure, but The Shade Room was the first to launch on the platform — Instagram — where many of its readers spent much of their time,” Shafrir wrote. “It aggregated from existing sites like TMZ or Bossip but gave gossip a social media spin: It actually did detective work on Instagram to figure out who was dating whom, who had broken up, who was in a fight.” The Shade Room will live on. Instagram is still its primary platform, and it has its own website. However: Facebook owns Instagram. It’s not clear why Facebook decided to penalize The Shade Room on one platform and not the other, especially since the content is similar on both. But I have a guess. With the debut of Facebook Live, Facebook is giving everyone a convenient tool for broadcasting copyrighted material, and it is bracing for infringement claims. The company released a digital rights manager tool this month to help people make complaints when other users lift their content. This is clearly a priority, and since The Shade Room lifts images from other sources — sometimes without attribution — the timing of the takedown makes sense. If Facebook were debuting a streaming feature for Instagram, The Shade Room would be in even more trouble. Facebook’s community standards are a set of guidelines designed to keep Facebook “safe.” They lay out Facebook’s approach to moderating abuse, intellectual property rights, and nudity, and they are couched in vague language that could apply to almost anything posted. “You may not publish the personal information of others without their consent,” one diktat reads. The most literal interpretation of this: You can’t post someone else’s phone number or address. But there’s nothing stopping Facebook from interpreting this to mean: You may not post gossip about someone else. We already know that content moderation is haphazard. Other media sites have dealt with Facebook bans. In 2011, Facebook pulled Ars Technica’s page for IP infringement, but that turned out to be a bunk claim. “They didn’t issue a proper DMCA takedown, where you’re supposed to say what the infringing material is,” managing editor Eric Bangeman told me. “It was irritating at the time it happened, and it’s something that shouldn’t have happened because it was a fraudulent claim, but we survived.” Of course, that was before Facebook became the traffic spigot it is today. More recently, Facebook has banned some legal marijuana vendor pages for violating community standards while allowing others, even though authorized vendors of legal drugs are not prohibited. Facebook considers photos of women's areolae and childbirth dangers to its community, but not a video of horses drowning. (Warning: That’s literally a video of horses drowning.) Facebook’s amorphous sense of good taste determines whether you can run a page pseudonymously or not. “We may ask Page owners to associate their name and Facebook Profile with a Page that contains cruel and insensitive content, even if that content does not violate our policies,” one section reads. It decides how cruel you get to be. This is all completely within Facebook’s rights as a publisher. If Facebook decided to, it could ban all content except upsetting illustrations of Ron Paul and Rand Paul sexy parties. It could rewrite the community standards one day to note that mentioning Fairuza Balk’s performance in The Craft warranted swift and immediate expulsion. The Shade Room takedown shows that Facebook has no problem cutting off popular media companies. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that repeated copyright violations prompted the takedown, but didn’t specify which posts in particular broke its rules. But the thing is: Facebook doesn’t have to explain itself. 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