Author: Mathew Ingram

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Facebook’s relationship to speech is complicated. The giant social network routinely takes down hate speech provided it meets certain criteria (although critics say it misses a lot more), along with gratuitous nudity, and other content that breaches its “community standards.” And it hides or “down-ranks” misinformation, although only in certain categories, including anti-vaccination campaigns. But it refuses to do anything about obvious disinformation in political content, including political ads, saying it doesn’t want to be an arbiter of truth. One of the most interesting things about Mark Zuckerberg’s speech Thursday at Georgetown University was listening to the Facebook CEO try to justify these conflicting decisions. The speech, which was livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube and published in the Wall Street Journal, was at times a passionate defense of unfettered free speech, and how it played a crucial role in social movements like the Vietnam War and the civil-rights era.

If nothing else, Zuckerberg’s emotional investment in this idea came through, despite some awkward phrasing (he wrote the speech himself, and wouldn’t let anyone see or edit it because he wanted to “maximize for sincerity,” according to a Facebook source). Zuckerberg warned about a number of countries that are moving to restrict speech, and even trying to censor speech that occurs elsewhere on the internet, and his voice became almost strident as he talked about the repressive regime in China (a market Facebook has repeatedly tried to enter) and the fact that most of the top internet services used to be American, but now six of the top 10 are Chinese. “While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok mentions of these protests are censored, even in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “Is that the internet we want?”

But the Facebook CEO also defended the network’s decision not to fact-check political ads, despite the fact that the Trump campaign has already used its ad campaigns to circulate lies about Joe Biden and his alleged involvement in corruption in Ukraine. “We don’t fact-check political ads, because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying,” Zuckerberg said. “I know many people disagree, but, in general, I don’t think It’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy.” The Facebook founder also noted that similar ads appear on other services, and also run on analog TV networks. “I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100 percent true,” Zuckerberg said, despite having just described how the social network routinely takes down or “down-ranks” misinformation of various kinds.

Continue reading “Zuckerberg wants to eat his free-speech cake and have it too”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

There has been a steady stream of Facebook-related news over the past couple of weeks: First, The Verge published transcripts of two hours of leaked audio from a town hall with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His comments included a reference to Elizabeth Warren and her plans to break up the company, which Zuckerberg called “an existential threat.” For some, these remarks brought up the specter of potential political interference. Would Facebook try to put its thumb on the scale by using the all-powerful news feed algorithm? And while that question was still swirling, the company continued to get blowback on its recent decision to no longer fact-check political ads, triggered in part by a Trump advertising campaign running on Facebook that repeats unsubstantiated claims about Joe Biden.

In an attempt to grapple with these and other issues, CJR convened a series of interviews on our Galley discussion platform with journalists and others who follow the company. First was Casey Newton of The Verge, who got the town-hall audio scoop. Although Zuckerberg’s comments about Warren got a lot of attention, Newton said one of the most interesting things about the town hall was what the questions said about the company’s employees—that they are concerned about a breakup, but also about how they and Zuckerberg are perceived. One of our next interviewees, veteran Recode media writer Peter Kafka, said that for him, one of the most interesting things about the leak is that it happened at all—Facebook has been doing town halls for over a decade, and this is the first time an insider has leaked one. Does that mean employees are growing restless? Perhaps!

I also spoke with Dina Srinivasan, a former advertising industry executive and antitrust expert who wrote an academic paper entitled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook,” which has been cited by several members of Congress who want to break the company up. Her argument is that antitrust law doesn’t have to focus solely on the effect a monopoly has on consumer prices (a difficult case to make for Facebook, since the service is free). Facebook could also be accused of using its monopoly to degrade the quality of its service, she says, by removing privacy protections it promised would never be weakened, and by using customer data without permission.

Continue reading “On Facebook, disinformation, and existential threats”

Note: This is something I originally published on the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

When the news first broke that the MIT Media Lab had a close relationship with deceased billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, some saw it as a momentary lapse in judgment, and there was widespread support for Media Lab director Joi Ito. But then New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow reported that the Epstein relationship was much deeper than it first appeared — including the fact that Ito got a significant amount of money from Epstein for his own personal investments. Much of the earlier support evaporated, and Ito agreed to resign. And there were other spinoff effects as well: Richard Stallman, a free-software pioneer and veteran MIT professor, also resigned, after being criticized for comments he made on an internal email list that downplayed the impact of Epstein’s sexual abuse.

To explore these and other issues, CJR had a series of one-on-one and roundtable interviews — using its Galley discussion platform — with a number of journalists and other interested observers, including WBUR reporter Max Larkin, Slate writer Justin Peters, Gizmodo editor Adam Clark Estes and Stanford researcher Becca Lewis. We talked about why places like the Media Lab often get a free pass from reporters, and why there’s so much technology writing that focuses on the “hero/genius” trope, where the all-knowing founder gets credit for inventing something amazing, even if the thing they invented either doesn’t work (Theranos) and/or they are terrible people in a variety of ways (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.).

Larkin said some inside MIT were frustrated that the Epstein donations got so much attention, when the institution also recently accepted money and a visit from Saudi Arabian leader Mohammad bin Salman, who has been implicated in the vicious killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “One Media Lab alum told me she was, on balance, more appalled by MIT’s ties to the late David Koch than by the ties to Epstein,” said Larkin, since the Kochs had done so much to undermine the Institute’s core values with their support of climate change-denying groups. And Larkin also noted that some defenders of the Epstein donations — including Media Lab founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte — believed in what might be called the “transmutation” argument, namely that taking money from bad people and turning it into funding for creative academic pursuits was a positive thing.

Continue reading “Some lessons from the MIT Media Lab controversy”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t do a lot of off-the-cuff speaking. His public appearances–whether before Congress or at a launch event–tend to be carefully scripted and rehearsed to the point where a cardboard cutout would seem animated by comparison. All of which helps explain some of the excitement surrounding a Verge report this week, consisting of two hours worth of unedited audio and transcripts of Zuckerberg addressing a town hall at Facebook, including questions from the staff. Although the scoop was heavily promoted, the transcripts didn’t contain any smoking bombshells exactly–in fact, Zuckerberg himself promoted the story in a post on his personal Facebook page, which pretty much guarantees there was nothing earth-shattering in the text.

That said, however, a number of observers highlighted one comment they found troubling: when the Facebook CEO was asked whether he was concerned about the company being broken up by government regulators, he responded that he could see federal authorities–and here he mentioned Elizabeth Warren specifically–trying such a gambit, and that if necessary he would oppose it. And then Zuckerberg said: “At the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.” Based on the context of the quote, it seems clear that the Facebook CEO meant he would fight the government’s attempt in the courts. In the full transcript, he prefaces his comment by saying one of the things he loves and appreciates about the US is “that we have a really solid rule of law,” and that he doesn’t think such a case would survive a court challenge (and he is probably right).

On Twitter and elsewhere, however, the reference to Warren and her desire to break up the company was boiled down to the point where it appeared that Zuckerberg sees Warren herself–and her presidential candidacy–as being an existential threat. The Facebook CEO’s comment brought up what some saw as a disturbing scenario. What if you almost single-handedly controlled the world’s largest information distributor, one that hundreds of millions of people rely on for their news, and one that has been implicated in the past in spreading misinformation and propaganda during an election–how might you respond to something that you perceive as an existential threat to your company?

Continue reading “What happens when Facebook confronts an existential threat?”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

While the US obsessed on Wednesday over what technically constitutes impeachment for a sitting American president, some European news publishers may have been focused on something quite different: namely, a decision by Google to play hardball with French media companies when it comes to linking to their content in its search results. As of Wednesday, unless a French publisher specifically says that it wants Google to do so, the search giant will no longer include short excerpts from news stories in its results. Instead, there will just be a headline. It’s not exactly clear how this will look in practice—in an earlier mockup of results with text from news publishers excluded, there was just a big white space where the excerpt and image were supposed to go.

Why is Google doing this? Because the French government recently passed a law that requires the search company to pay publishers if it uses even short excerpts of their content on its search pages. The French law is a local variation of a recently adopted European Union copyright directive known as Article 11, which says that publishers are entitled to compensation for the use of even small chunks of text, a payment some refer to as a “link tax.” This in turn was inspired by similar attempts in other EU countries to get Google and others to pay for excerpts. Germany tried with its Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger law in 2013, and Spain tried with a similar law in 2014. In Germany, a number of publishers had their results removed from Google News when it refused to pay them, but later relented when their traffic collapsed by as much as 40 percent. In Spain, Google eventually removed Spain completely from the Google News index.

Google maintains that its news excerpts send publishers a huge amount of traffic—as the company’s head of news, Richard Gingras, pointed out in a blog post on Wednesday—and that this in turn generates revenue via advertising. Publishers, however, note that ad revenue is falling, in part because Google and Facebook control the lion’s share of the market—which is why Google also likes to highlight the Google News Initiative, through which the company funds research and development (and even the creation of entirely new local news outlets, as it is doing through partnerships in both the UK and US). The News Initiative got its start in 2006, when Belgium was the first country to sue Google for using content from local publishers without their consent. The two sides eventually settled, and Google agreed to fund research and development for the industry, and then offered similar deals to France and other countries.

Continue reading “Google plays hardball with European news publishers”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

A year and a half ago, Mark Zuckerberg floated what seemed like a crazy idea. In an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox Media, the Facebook CEO said he was thinking about creating a kind of Supreme Court for the social network—an independent body that would adjudicate some of the hard decisions about what kinds of content should or shouldn’t be allowed on the site’s pages, decisions Facebook routinely gets criticized for. Imagine, Zuckerberg said, “some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech.” It wasn’t just a pipedream or an offhand comment: for better or worse, Facebook has been hard at work over the past year creating just such an animal, which it is now calling an “Oversight Board.” This week, it took another in a series of steps towards that goal, by publishing the charter that will govern the board’s actions, as well as a document that shows how it incorporated feedback from experts and interested parties around the world, and a description of how the governance process will work for this third-party entity.

As part of the roadshow for this effort, Facebook held an invitation-only conference call with journalists, in which the head of the governance team took pains to describe just how much work the company did to gather as much feedback as possible on the idea. Facebook held six in-depth workshops and 22 roundtables, featuring journalists, privacy experts, digital-rights activists, and constitutional scholars from 88 different countries, along with 1,200 written submissions—all of which sounds very impressive until you remember that Facebook has more than 35,000 employees and revenues of more than $56 billion. And what did the company come up with? The charter describes an independent body that will start with 11 members and eventually number as many as 40, who will hear cases in groups of five. Some cases will be referred by Facebook, while others will come from appeals launched by users whose content has been removed for a variety of reasons.

In an attempt to keep the board as independent as possible, Facebook says it will appoint two co-chairs for the board, who will then be free to select whomever they wish to fill out the rest of the board membership. And Facebook will not compensate board members directly, for fear of the perception of a conflict of interest—compensation will come from a trust that the company will set up (and fund), which will also be run independently. The charter specifically states that members can’t be removed because of specific decisions they make, but can only be disqualified if they breach the code of conduct set out in the charter. But most important of all, Facebook says, decisions made by the board are binding, which means they can’t be overruled by the company unless the changes that would be required to comply actually violate the law, or unless the board recommends something that is technically impossible.

Continue reading “The Facebook Supreme Court will see you now”

Note: This is something I originally published in the daily newsletter sent out by the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Most people are probably familiar by now with the idea that there are “trolls” on the Internet—thanks in part to events like GamerGate, but also to the rise of Donald Trump, the Troll-in-Chief who occupies the White House. Many trolls have an agenda of some kind, as the infamous Russian Internet Research Agency did, while others seem to just get a kick out of creating chaos. As Alfred said to Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “some men just like to watch the world burn.” But regardless, there are some similarities in how trolls work, and how they are able to capture the attention of both regular Internet users—and, in some cases, professional journalists—in order to spread their disinformation far and wide. An attempt to create a taxonomy of trolling tactics is the aim of a new report published by the digital think tank Data & Society, written by Joan Donovan, Director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and senior researcher Brian Friedberg.

The report focuses on a subset of online manipulation that Donovan calls “source hacking.” The report describes this as a set of techniques for hiding the sources of problematic information, in order to permit its circulation in mainstream media—an indirect method for targeting journalists, by planting false information in places they are likely to encounter it. The report breaks down the tactics used by trolls into four categories: 1) Viral Sloganeering, which consists of repackaging reactionary talking points for social media and press amplification; 2) Leak Forgery, which involves prompting a media spectacle by sharing forged documents; 3) Evidence Collages, which are documents (usually images) made up of information or misinformation from multiple sources so as to make them easily shareable, and 4) Keyword Squatting, the strategic domination of keywords and “sock-puppet” accounts in order to misrepresent the behavior of specific groups or individuals.

Donovan and Friedberg use recent case studies to illustrate each of their sub-categories. For example, one of the most successful viral sloganeering success stories was the “Jobs Not Mobs” hashtag from October 2018. The slogan emerged first on Reddit threads, where users came up with visual memes that would help the hashtag spread, including video clips showing decontextualized riots and migrant caravans. “Easily shareable audiovisual material, alongside the deployment of a hashtag, created opportunities for a swarm of participation, and the slogan quickly grew past its point of origin in far-right online hubs,” the report says. The slogan moved to Twitter and Facebook, where automated or bot-like accounts helped it spread even further, and finally the hashtag was used by the president of the United States in a tweet—the Mount Everest of trolling.

Continue reading “Source hacking: How trolls manipulate the media”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Google would really like everyone to know that its video sharing service, YouTube, is on the job when it comes to cracking down on offensive content. To that end, the company put on a full-court press this week announcing that it had removed more than 100,000 videos and over 17,000 channels for violating its hate speech rules between April and June, which is five times more than it removed in the previous three months. The company said it also took down over 500 million comments because they included hate speech. According to a blog post about the crackdown, YouTube’s moderators removed about 30,000 videos last month alone. And how popular were these videos compared to the rest of the content on the streaming service? The company would like you to know that they “generated just 3% of the views that knitting videos did over the same time period.”

In other words, instead of getting actual usable information about something, we get a comparison to something else that we also haven’t been given any details on, in such a way as to provide an illusion of transparency. How popular are knitting videos compared to the rest of what appears on YouTube? We have no idea. But we know that they are just about as popular as 30,000 videos the company removed, which we also know nothing about, other than they breached the site’s terms and conditions. That means we know next to nothing, and that seems to be the way YouTube would like to keep it. As far as the company is concerned, getting upset about people viewing offensive content is like getting upset about knitting videos. YouTube’s community guidelines Enforcement Report is similar: Filled with impressive-looking numbers, but little useful detail.

But even the illusion of transparency is better than what the company usually comes up with when it removes and/or reinstates accounts and videos. Just days before the announcement about the removals, for example, YouTube reinstated two controversial accounts that it had previously removed after much criticism — one belonging to white nationalist Martin Sellner, and another belonging to a British YouTube broadcaster who calls himself The Iconoclast, both of whom have ties to the white supremacist movement, including the shooter who opened fire on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand (and spread video of the shooting on YouTube). Why the sudden change of heart on these two and their use of YouTube’s platform? Are there new criteria being applied? All the company would say was that while many “may find the viewpoints expressed in these channels deeply offensive,” the company had decided the channels in question did not violate its community guidelines after all.

Continue reading “YouTube tries to have its cake and eat it too”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Last week, both Facebook and Twitter removed a number of accounts and pages they said were part of a propaganda effort tied to the Chinese government, aimed at spreading disinformation about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. According to Facebook, Twitter was the first to detect the campaign, and it then alerted its social-networking counterpart about “inauthentic behavior” on its platform. Facebook removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts that it said engaged in a number of deceptive tactics, including posing as news organizations. Twitter, meanwhile, said that it had removed more than 900 accounts originating from China, which it said were attempting to sow political discord, “including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement” (although the owner of at least one account included in that total denied being part of any co-ordinated Chinese propaganda campaign).

In a related move, Twitter said that it would no longer accept advertising and promoted tweets from state-owned media entities such as Xinhua or China Daily. Facebook, however, did not say anything of the sort, although a spokesman said that the company continues to “look at our policies as they relate to state-owned media.” As it stands now, despite the action it took against the Chinese government-funded accounts engaging in inauthentic behavior, Facebook seems to have no problem continuing to promote ads bought by the country’s state media. Xinhua placed four ads on Monday, according to BuzzFeed, saying the police have been “very restrained” in handling the riots, and calling them “heroes” for standing up to the protesters, and other state outlets have been running ads promoting the benefits of the detention and re-education camps China has set up for Uighur Muslims.

Despite its ban on state-owned media, Twitter has also apparently continued to run ads and promoted tweets from China’s state-run media outlets, according to BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac. In its announcement about the ban, the company said that advertisers would have to remove their existing campaigns after 30 days, and that it would not accept any new ones, but the ones BuzzFeed found appeared to be brand new campaigns. Some of them involve harmless positive statements about Chinese culture, but others promote anti-US sentiment, and one says that Hong Kong “used to be a paradise” and is now “engulfed in chaos.” When asked about the campaigns, a Twitter spokesman would not comment other than to point CJR to the part of the company’s previous statement where it said it would take 30 days to remove state-funded ads.

Continue reading “Facebook and Twitter continue to profit from Chinese propaganda”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Journalists who cover Facebook get used to feeling a sense of deja vu, since the social networking behemoth often tends to revisit things it has tried to do once—or even multiple times—in the past. The company says that’s because it is committed to “iterating” (as tech founders like to call it), which means trying the same thing over and over until it comes out right. The idea of employing journalists to curate the news definitely falls into that category. Facebook has said it is planning to roll out a new standalone tab for news, for which it is cutting lucrative deals with a number of leading publishers like The New York Times and Washington Post. And it is also hiring a handful of professional editors to curate the top headlines. But will the social network manage to make this unlikely marriage of humans and algorithms work any better than it did the last time?

Facebook’s previous attempt to curate the news turned into what could only be described as a fiasco. The company hired human editors to help select headlines for its “trending topics” feature, which began in 2014 as an attempt to compete with Twitter as a breaking news platform, run by Facebook’s all-powerful algorithm. All seemed to be going well, until Gizmodo ran a story in 2016 that quoted some of the company’s hired editors admitting that they often deliberately excluded some conservative websites from the trending topics lineup. The truth of the matter turned out to be much more nuanced than the headline portrayed it (as even the editor of the piece later admitted), but the damage was done. Conservatives soon howled that Facebook was biased against them, and the company scrambled to apologize and make amends. The human editors were fired, and eventually the feature was shut down completely.

This was arguably the genesis of the long-standing conspiracy theory that Facebook is biased against conservatives, something that has been raised time and time again by pundits—not to mention the White House and Congress—despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to support it (and in fact significant evidence to the contrary). The idea of a separate news tab has also been tried before, although in a slightly different way. In 2018, Facebook ran an experiment in six countries where it removed news from the News Feed completely, and put it all in a separate tab called Explore. This also failed miserably, as several Facebook executives admitted, and eventually the experiment was scrapped. “People don’t want two separate feeds,” said Chris Cox, who at the time was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s second-in-command. One big problem with the tab: virtually no one ever went there, which (needless to say) left news publishers concerned about the impact on their traffic.

Continue reading “Facebook goes back to the future by hiring journalists for news tab”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

When Verizon announced earlier this week that it was selling Tumblr, the blogging platform Yahoo acquired in 2013 for $1.1 billion, most of the attention focused on the price: according to Axios, the communications conglomerate sold Tumblr for just $3 million (Vox says closer to $2 million). In other words, Yahoo vaporized about 99 percent of the platform’s theoretical value in the six years it owned the company. But apart from this massive bonfire of value, one of the most interesting things about the Tumblr sale was the acquirer: Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. If Tumblr was the Coney Island freak show of the blogosphere, WordPress is the more dependable cousin—the one with a steady job. Could the combination of the two bring back the glory days of independent blogging? Some are clearly hoping that it will, and if anyone has a chance of pulling it off, it’s probably WordPress.

More than 35 percent of the world’s 1 million most popular websites run on the company’s publishing software (about ten times the number that use its nearest competitor). That list includes many leading publishers such as The New Yorker, TechCrunch, the BBC and Variety magazine. But the software behind all of these sites isn’t the product of some massive corporation like Microsoft: founder Matt Mullenweg cobbled it together in 2003, when he was just 19 years old. Even more surprising, the core of WordPress is still open source, meaning anyone can help develop it, and any user can download, install and run it for free. Automattic helps manage the free version, but also sells a for-pay version and related services to large publishers. The company is valued at over $1 billion.

In an interview with The Verge on Tuesday, Mullenweg—who is now CEO of Automattic–makes it clear the purchase of Tumblr wasn’t just an attempt to cash in on a Verizon fire sale. Part of his motivation, he suggests, was to try to bring back some of the magic of the old days of blogging, when the web seemed to be mostly made up of individuals writing on their own websites instead of just posting to a Facebook news feed. And Mullenweg clearly sees the open-source, do-it-yourself ethos of Tumblr and WordPress as an alternative to the centralized control of a social-networking behemoth like Facebook. “I would love for Tumblr to become a social alternative,” he says. “It has the fun and friendliness of some of the other networks we use, but without that democracy destroying…” The sentence is left unfinished, but it’s obvious who he’s talking about.

Continue reading “Could WordPress + Tumblr create an alternative to Facebook?”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Most technology journalists were naive in the early days of the social web, Verge senior editor Casey Newton admitted in a recent interview with CJR, in the sense that most of the coverage of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube focused on their benefits rather than the potential for harassment, abuse, and disinformation. “Yeah, I think we were naive,” Newton said in an interview on CJR’s discussion platform, Galley. “There had never been social networks with billions of users before, and it was difficult to predict the consequences that would come with global scale. The ability for anyone to beam a message instantly to hundreds of millions of people was new in human history, and for a while it wasn’t clear how that power would be used.”

For the most part, said Newton—a former senior writer at CNET and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle—journalists in Silicon Valley covered the social platforms either as success stories or focused primarily on them as business stories, writing about IPOs and valuations. Some reporters and academics focused on the darker aspects of these networks, Newton said, but for most “that narrative was secondary to the question of whether these businesses would survive and thrive.” That all changed with the election in 2016, he said, when it became obvious how easily social platforms could be exploited by foreign states to spread propaganda. “We saw how weak the platform defenses were,” he said. “What had looked like fun distractions turned out to be far more consequential. And we’ve been catching up to those consequences ever since.”

I asked Newton whether he thought Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey should be held personally responsible for not foreseeing some of the issues that have been caused by their platforms. Zuckerberg admitted in an interview last year that for the first 10 years of the company’s life, all he thought about were the positive aspects of connecting billions of people in real time. And as a followup question, I asked Newton whether he thought the government should be regulating and/or breaking up Facebook, Google, and other mega-platforms.

Continue reading “Casey Newton on dismantling the platforms and taking Facebook’s cash”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Despite an almost total lack of evidence to support the theory, alt-right groups and mainstream conservatives alike—including the ones that currently occupy the White House—continue to promote the idea that Facebook, Twitter and Google are somehow biased against them. It’s a conspiracy theory that has cropped up in a variety of ways since at least 2016, and has led to some almost farcical situations, including a Congressional hearing in which the right-wing YouTube hosts known as Diamond and Silk argued that the platforms were censoring them, despite the fact that they had a large and growing following. In a similar way, Donald Trump has repeatedly made the case that Twitter is somehow throttling his reach on the service, despite the fact that the president has more than 60 million followers.

In the latest move in this long and tiresome parade of grievances, sources tell Politico the White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter. This comes just a month after Trump pledged to explore “all regulatory and legislative solutions” to the issue. Those comments were made when the president announced a Social Media Summit, which was supposed to look at the topic of anti-conservative bias. But the event turned into a sideshow featuring a rogue’s gallery of alt-right names, including Diamond & Silk, a meme-maker known as Carpe Donktum, and a reporter from Infowars. None of the social platforms were invited.

Politico’s sources didn’t have any real details about what the proposed executive order might say, or what penalties it might invoke for alleged anti-conservative bias, which suggests that it could be a lot of smoke and mirrors. An unnamed White House official was quoted as saying that “if the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system.” This phrasing calls to mind the Fairness Doctrine, an old FCC requirement that forced broadcast networks to air opposing viewpoints on important political topics. That rule was eventually seen as being in conflict with the First Amendment, and it’s likely that any executive order compelling the social platforms to say or not say certain things would face a similar roadblock from freedom-of-speech advocates.

Continue reading “The myth of social platform anti-conservative bias refuses to die”

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the New Gatekeepers blog at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

Over the August 4th weekend, another mass shooting took place in which the shooter posted material related to his attack — including written “manifestos,” as well as images and in some cases live, streaming video — to the controversial online community 8chan. The gunman in the latest case, who killed 20 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, posted his alleged justification for the rampage on 8chan’s message boards, and so did the killer in the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in March, and the shooter who opened fire on a mosque near San Diego, Calif. in April. Commenters on the 8chan threads for these acts referred to each of the shooters as “our guy,” and in some cases have talked about the killing as a “high score,” the way someone playing a video game would.

Until late Sunday night, 8chan used the services of a company called Cloudflare, which runs a network of powerful internet “proxy” servers that can balance the traffic going to such sites when there is a sudden onslaught of visitors — either because a piece of content has become popular, or because malicious users are directing a “denial of service” attack at the site by hitting it with an automated deluge of traffic. When 8chan’s role in the latest mass shooting came to light, reporters asked Cloudflare whether the company planned to continue providing these services to the site, and Cloudflare said yes, arguing that it isn’t up to the company to decide what kinds of content are appropriate. But by late Sunday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had changed his mind, and said 8chan would be blocked from using the service.

This isn’t the first time this issue has come up for Cloudflare. In 2017, the company went through a similar debate before cutting off neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which routinely promotes racism and white supremacist ideology. Prince finally decided to block the site from Cloudflare’s service, but wrote a long and thoughtful blog post about how he didn’t think his company and others like it —those that provide hosting services and other utilities — should have the power to effectively remove certain websites from the public internet. “Due Process requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary,” Prince said. “Law enforcement, legislators, and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted. Companies should not.” Prince said something very similar in a blog post about 8chan, as well as in interviews, as did legal experts such as Kate Klonick of Yale Law School, an expert in censorship and online misinformation

A provider like Cloudflare can’t block a site from the internet completely, but removing its services means 8chan could be crippled fairly easily by a denial-of-service attack or some other exploit. In effect, it makes the site much less stable, which in turn makes it less likely to have as much reach. And Cloudflare isn’t the only one that has taken action: Google removed 8chan from its search index in 2015, which means that anyone searching for it gets links to Wikipedia entries and news stories about it rather than a link to the site itself. Of course, the content often filters out even when the sites themselves are taken down: the conservative news site The Drudge Report, for example, posted a version of the El Paso killer’s manifesto even though most other sites refused to even link to it. And Gizmodo notes that while Cloudflare may have removed 8chan, the proxy service and other hosting services continue to support a wide range of other objectionable and hate-filled sites. 

As was the case with The Daily Stormer, the removal of service by companies like Cloudflare usually results in a scramble to come up with alternative hosting and DoS protection. Much like the neo-Nazi site, 8chan fairly quickly signed up with a Cloudflare-like provider called Bitmitigate — which is a subsidiary of Epik, a company whose founder bragged about helping to host The Daily Stormer after it was taken offline. But even an internet utility has to rely on other utilities for its livelihood, which in turn makes its content and services vulnerable. In the case of Bitmitigate, a company called Voxility owns the internet infrastructure that allows the caching or proxy service to function, and after its role was pointed out on Twitter (by Alex Stamos, former director of security at Facebook, among others) the company said it had removed Bitmitigate from its service.

In some ways, the responsibility that social networks like Facebook and YouTube have for offensive content is more obvious than it is for a service provider like Cloudflare. Facebook and Twitter and Google not only help to distribute such content, but their content-promoting algorithms make sure plenty of people see it, which is an editorial function like the one newspapers used to fulfill. Cloudflare and similar hosting services are more like the power company, which operates the grid that keeps the lights on, or the phone network that connects users and allows them to call each other. Should the power company be deciding which companies or homes to supply electricity to? Should the phone company be cutting off users who choose to talk about offensive subjects using their network?

None of these analogies are totally accurate, but they help show why providers like Cloudflare have a difficult time removing services even from obvious online cesspools like 8chan, and why questions are often raised when payment processors like PayPal or Visa make it impossible to donate to certain entities (as they did with WikiLeaks). Do we want a utility provider to be making those kinds of decisions? And if not, then who does? And based on what criteria? These are the kinds of questions that 8chan — and the role it has played in mass shootings — have forced us to begin to grapple with.

Note: This is something I originally wrote for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

In December of 2016, in the wake of a firestorm of criticism about online disinformation and Facebook’s role in spreading it during the 2016 election, the social network reached out to a number of independent fact-checking organizations and created the Facebook Third Party Fact-Checking project. When these outside agencies debunked a news story or report, Facebook promised to make this ruling obvious to users, and to down-rank the story or post in its all-powerful News Feed algorithm so fewer people would see it. But even though the project has grown to the point where there are now 50 partner organizations fact-checking around the world, it’s still very much an open question how useful or effective the program actually is at stopping the spread of misinformation.

One of those raising questions is a relatively new Facebook fact-checking partner in the UK, known as Full Fact, a non-profit entity that recently published an in-depth report on the first six months of its involvement in the program. The group says its overall conclusion is that the third-party fact-checking project is worthwhile, but it has a number of criticisms to make about the way the program works. For example, Full Fact says the way Facebook rates misinformation needs to change, because the terminology or categories it applies aren’t granular enough to encompass the various different kinds. It also says that while the company has expanded to fact-check in 42 different languages, Facebook has so far failed to scale up the speed with which it flags and responds to fact checks. According to the group, it fact-checked just 96 claims in six months (and was paid $171,800 under the terms of its partnership contract).

One of the group’s other concerns is more fundamental: namely, that Facebook simply doesn’t provide enough transparency or clarity on the impact of the fact-checking that groups like Full Fact do. How many users did the debunks or fact-checks reach? How many clicked on the related links from the info pane? Did this slow or even halt the spread of that misinformation? Facebook doesn’t divulge enough data to even begin to answer those questions. Its only response to the Full Fact report and its 11 recommendations was to tell the group that it is “encouraged that many of the recommendations in the report are being actively pursued by our teams as part of continued dialogue with our partners, and we know there’s always room to improve.” There was no response to the criticism about a lack of data.

Continue reading “Facebook’s 3rd party fact-checking program falls short”