Last week YouTube announced that it will no longer remove videos that say the presidential election in 2020 was fraudulent, stolen, or otherwise illegitimate. The Google-owned video platform wrote in a blog post that it keeps two goals in mind when it develops policies around content, one of which is to protect users, and the other to provide “a home for open discussion and debate.” Finding a balance between the two is difficult when political speech is involved, YouTube added, and in the end, the company decided that “the ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society.” While removing election-denying content might curb some misinformation, the company said, it could also “curtail political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of real-world harm.”

YouTube didn’t say in its blog post, or in any of its other public comments about the change, why it chose to make such a policy decision now, especially when the US is heading into another presidential election in which Donald Trump, the man who almost single-handedly made such policies necessary, is a candidate. All the company would say is that it “carefully deliberated” about the change. It’s not the only platform to decide that the misinformation guardrails it erected after the Capitol riots in 2021 are no longer required. Twitter and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, dismantled most of their restrictions related to election denial some time ago.

Twitter announced in January of 2022 that it would no longer take action against false claims about the legitimacy of the election. At the time, a spokesperson told CNN that Twitter had not been enforcing its “civic integrity misleading information” policy, under which users could be suspended or even banned for such claims, since March of 2021. The spokesperson said the policy was no longer being applied to election denial because it was intended to be used during an election or campaign, and Joe Biden had already been president for over a year at that point. Twitter added that it was still enforcing its rules related to misleading information about “when, where, or how to participate in a civic process.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “The tech platforms have surrendered in the fight over election-related misinformation”

In 2021, the Australian government proposed a law called the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which forced large tech companies such as Google and Meta to negotiate payment deals with news publishers. In response, Meta not only blocked users in Australia from seeing news content on Facebook but prevented them from posting links to any news stories, regardless of where they were published. The platform also blocked pages belonging to hospitals and emergency services, which Meta described as a mistake but insiders alleged was a deliberate negotiating tactic. Fast forward two years, and Meta says that it is now prepared to block news in Canada in response to a bill in that country that is based on Australia’s bargaining code. (I wrote about the bill back in March.) Although Meta is not currently blocking all news from its platform in Canada, it is blocking access for what it described as a small percentage of users—and if the law is passed, the company said that it intends to “end the availability of news content in Canada permanently.”

In a statement earlier this month, Meta described Canada’s bill, which is called the Online News Act, as “fundamentally flawed legislation that ignores the realities of how our platforms work [and] the value we provide news publishers.” In a more in-depth statement last fall, Marc Dinsdale, the company’s head of media partnerships in Canada, said that the bill is unacceptable, in part, because it “misrepresents the relationship between platforms and news publishers.” The legislation is based on the presumption that Meta unfairly benefits from its relationship with publishers, Dinsdale wrote, “when in fact the reverse is true.” Meta says that its internal data shows that posts with links to news articles make up less than three percent of what people see in their Facebook news feeds, and that the majority of links to news content are posted by the publishers themselves.

Rachel Curran, the head of public policy for Meta Canada, said that users will be included in the current news-blocking test on a random basis, and will only be informed that they are blocked from sharing news if they try to post a link to a news story. According to a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the number of news publishers whose content will be affected by the test will not be made public, with inclusion in the test also randomized. “We believe that news has a real social value,” Curran told the Canadian Press news agency. “The problem is that it doesn’t have much of an economic value to Meta. So we are being asked to compensate news publishers for material that has no economic value to us.” In the past, Meta said that it cared about funding journalism. As I noted in a recent piece for CJR, it seems to have changed its mind.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Meta ramps up threats to block access to the news”

From Judita at Bored Panda: “While most people probably think of clams and mussels as a part of some fancy dinner, it appears they have a much higher significance in some places. For example, the water quality in Warsaw, the capital city of Poland, is monitored by… well, yes, clams. The city of Warsaw gets its water from a river and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city’s water supply automatically. Apparently, the mollusks first undergo an acclimatization process after being caught and brought to the laboratory. During that time, scientists also determine the natural opening of their shell—clams leave a slight opening and feed by filtrating water. Within one hour, one clam can filter and thus analyze the quality of 1.5 liters of water.”

The story behind the Chicago newspaper that bought a bar

From Andy Wright at Topic.com: “By 1976, reporter Pam Zekman was well-acquainted with the everyday corruption that permeated Chicago. Zekman was part of a four-person Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team at the Chicago Tribune, where she had gone undercover in a nursing home, for a collections agency, in a hospital, and at a precinct polling place, exposing wrongdoings ranging from medical malpractice to election fraud. When Zekman was poached by a rival paper, the feisty Chicago Sun-Times, she proposed a daring project that would go down in the annals of journalism history as both a feat of reporting and a focal point for ethics debates still raging today.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “In Warsaw, clams help protect the city’s water supply”

Last week, Twitter hosted a live interview with Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who used the platform’s audio feature, known as Twitter Spaces, to launch his presidential campaign. Instead of being a triumph for both the company and DeSantis, the event was an unmitigated disaster: the first twenty minutes or so were mostly dead air—punctuated by occasional comments from Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, who was to interview DeSantis alongside David Sacks, an investor and DeSantis donor—before the Space restarted with what appeared to be a dramatically smaller number of listeners. Twitter and the DeSantis campaign both tried to portray the technical problems as a sign of how many people were trying to participate in the event, but Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton reported, in their Platformer newsletter, that the problems were more likely the result of Musk’s staffing cutbacks. The team working on Twitter Spaces once had as many as a hundred employees. It now has around three.

Glitches aside, some observers saw the event as the latest in a series of moves, on Twitter’s part, to position itself as the network of choice for the American right, the most significant of which arguably came last month when Tucker Carlson announced that he would bring his show to the platform. (Technically, he remains under contract with Fox News, which ousted him in April in the aftermath of its defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for reasons that remain unclear.) “There are not that many platforms left that allow free speech,” Carlson said in a video. “The last big one remaining is Twitter.” Reports circulated that Musk had discussed the move with Carlson prior to his announcement, though Musk denied cutting any kind of deal, insisting that Carlson will be “subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators” and that he hoped “many others, particularly from the left,” would join the party. In addition to the Carlson and DeSantis moves, the Daily Wire, a right-wing operation staffed by commentators including Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, announced that it will be bringing its slate of podcasts to Twitter.

When he took over Twitter last April, Musk said that he wanted to make it a non-partisan space for “free speech,” unlike the left-leaning network that he said it used to be. In order for Twitter to earn the trust of the public, he said, “it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally”; he later added that his acquisition was “not a right-wing takeover.” And yet evidence soon mounted that he was moving the platform inexorably to the right. Shortly after he acquired the company, the idea that Musk personally was a political moderate became “untenable,” Philip Bump wrote for the Washington Post, noting that Musk “endorsed Republicans in the midterm elections, suggested that Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted, and elevated baseless conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi” (the husband of Nancy, the former House speaker, who was beaten with a hammer by an intruder to his home in October). Musk also repeatedly engaged with fringe far-right voices on Twitter and allowed both disinformation and hate speech to proliferate, Bump noted.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Is Twitter the new Fox?”

On Monday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta, Facebook’s parent company, more than a billion dollars for breaching the European Union’s data-privacy rules, and ordered the social network to stop sending data that it has collected from European Facebook users to the United States. The fine is one of the largest to have been levied since the EU adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, a data-privacy law more commonly known by the initials GDPR, in 2016. The Irish decision calls into question not just Facebook’s data-collection apparatus—and the multibillion-dollar business model that it supports—but the similar data-handling and monetization practices of almost every other global social network and online service. Nick Clegg, the head of global affairs for Meta and a former deputy prime minister of the UK, said that the ruling risks carving the internet “into national and regional silos.”

Despite the apocalyptic tone of its response, Meta’s data-handling practices won’t have to change any time soon. The ruling offers a grace period of five months before the company has to take action; Meta has also said that it plans to appeal the decision and ask for the order to be stayed in the meantime, a process that could drag on. In part, that’s because the ruling is just the latest salvo in a longer-running battle over how data should be handled by global businesses like Meta—one that dates back to when the GDPR was first being developed. 

As part of the negotiations over the regulation, the US and the EU came up with a bilateral agreement known as the Privacy Shield, also known as the “adequacy decision,” which required that the transfer of personal data could only take place if the receiving country “ensures an adequate level of protection.” What this entails has been the subject of much debate, not least because the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights enshrines the right to both a “private life” and the “protection of personal data.” In the summer of 2020, after several years of cooperation under the Privacy Shield arrangement, the EU’s Court of Justice—or ECJ which is based in Luxembourg—ruled that the framework of the agreement was “no longer a valid mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States.” At the time of the ECJ’s decision, more than five thousand companies relied on the Privacy Shield agreement to do business with the EU, including Google and a number of other large technology providers.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Facebook, the EU and the future of data privacy”

In February, Axios reported that Jimmy Finkelstein, a former co-owner of The Hill and the Hollywood Reporter, had raised significant financing for a new media startup called The Messenger, which, Axios reported, had to that point “tried to avoid the spotlight, hiring dozens of executives and raising tens of millions of dollars mostly in secret.” Finkelstein also put some of his own money into the startup, Axios reported, having sold The Hill to Nexstar for a hundred and thirty million dollars; The Messenger’s early hires, meanwhile, included Dan Wakeford, an entertainment journalist and former editor in chief of People, and Neetzan Zimmerman, who was credited with boosting The Hill‘s social traffic and engagement.

In March, Finkelstein participated in a splashy profile in the New York Times and said that his new site would open with a hundred and seventy five journalists, then grow to a total of five hundred and fifty by next year, with revenue of more than a hundred million dollars. On the editorial side, according to the Times, Finkelstein planned to foster “an alternative to a national news media that he says has come under the sway of partisan influences.”

The Messenger’s claims that it would chart a new, unbiased path were greeted with some skepticism in the media industry, as with his growth estimates. Actually, some skepticism is a massive understatement. The New York Post, citing “industry insiders,” wrote that The Messenger risked becoming a “money pit helmed by old-school executives with delusional ambitions.” Max Tani, a media reporter at Semafor, wrote that he couldn’t figure out how the site would achieve the kinds of numbers Finkelstein had in mind, given that it would be “for a general-interest news website in a tough ad market on the diminished, post-Facebook web.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “The Messenger is a news startup, but it feels like a blast from the past”

If you’ve spent any time on social media in the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard about BlueSky, a new social platform that was jump-started by Jack Dorsey in 2019, when he was the CEO of Twitter. The service recently opened up to a larger number of invitation-only beta testers, and some prominent Twitter users have set up accounts there, including Senator Ron Wyden, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, billionaire Mark Cuban, and popular accounts such as Dril. Some BlueSky fans believe the social network has the best chance of replacing Twitter, which has been lurching from crisis to crisis under new owner Elon Musk. But do we really need a replacement for Twitter? And if so, will this new platform somehow be able to reproduce just the positive aspects of Twitter, or will it wind up recreating all of the negative aspects too?

Dorsey first mentioned BlueSky in 2019, with a tweet saying that Twitter planned to fund “a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.” Dorsey noted that in the early days of Twitter, the network allowed external developers and services to plug in to its systems easily and extend them, to the point where “many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard,” much like email. For a variety of reasons, Dorsey added, “we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter.” That process has continued since Musk took control, and Twitter now charges anyone who wants to plug in to the network thousands of dollars (although Musk recently announced that emergency services will not have to pay).

Dorsey said he was inspired to take an open-source, distributed approach to a social network in part by reading a piece that Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote for the Knight First Amendment Institute. In that essay, entitled “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech,” Masnick argued that in response to concerns about hate speech and other forms of harassment online, many social networks focused on increased moderation and other attempted solutions, but many of these “will make the initial problems worse or will have other effects that are equally pernicious.” Masnick suggested that instead of being closed platforms owned by single entity such as Twitter or Facebook, social networks should be open protocols, allowing users to choose, just as they can choose a different email client or web browser.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Is BlueSky the next Twitter, and if so would that be a good thing?”

If you’re driving through Britain, you might see giant concrete blocks with concave openings. What are they? Acoustic mirrors. More than 100 years ago, these mirrors were built along the coast of England, with the intention of using them to detect the sound of approaching German zeppelins. Invented by William Sansome Tucker, and operated at differing scales between around 1915 and 1935, the acoustic mirrors were able to signal an aircraft from up to 24 kilometers away, giving enough time to allow British defence to prepare for counterattack. The concave structures responded to sound by focusing the waves to a single point, where a microphone was positioned. Not only were they able to announce the arrival of an aircraft, but they could also determine the direction of attack of the plane to an accuracy of 1.5 degrees. Their development continued until the mid-1930s, when the invention of radar made them obsolete.

This internet service provider’s security keys are generated by a wall of lava lamps

You might think that the best security keys would be generated by computers, but in the case of CloudFlare, which caches and distributes data for thousands of large companies, you would only be half right. Computers, being logical devices, struggle with generating randomness, so CloudFlare uses real objects to generate “entropy,” which in cryptography means unpredictability. Encryption keys need to be unpredictable, or else an attacker can try to detect patterns. That’s where lava lamps come in, because they’re an inherently random variable. CloudFlare has two other randomness generators that are being built: The first, in the company’s London office, is known as the “Chaotic Pendulums,” and features giant grandfather-clock style pendulums, and the second, under construction in the company’s Austin office, is called “Suspended Rainbows.” Entropy is generated via patterns of light that are projected on walls, the ceiling, and the floor.

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The giant “acoustic mirrors” that once protected Britain”

In March of 2020, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit created by entrepreneur Brewster Kahle, launched a new feature called the National Emergency Library. Since COVID-19 restrictions had made it difficult or impossible for people to buy books or visit libraries in person, the Archive removed any limits on the digital borrowing of the more than three million books in its database, and made them all publicly available, for free. The project was supported by a number of universities, researchers, and librarians, but some of the authors and publishers who owned the copyright to these books saw it not as a public service, but as theft. Four publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit. The Internet Archive shut the project down, and returned to its previous Controlled Digital Lending program, which allows only one person to borrow a digital copy of a book at any given time. But the lawsuit continued, with the publishers arguing that any digital lending by the Archive was copyright infringement.

Last week, Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the publishers and dismissed every aspect of the Archive’s defense, including the claim that it is protected by the fair use exception in copyright law. Koeltl wrote that fair use protects transformative versions of copyrighted works, but that the Archive’s copies don’t qualify. The Archive tried to make the case that its digital lending is transformative because it “facilitates new and expanding interactions between library books and the web,” the judge noted. But he added that an infringing use does not become transformative simply by “making an invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts.” A Google book-scanning project was found to be protected by fair use in a 2014 legal decision, but Koeltl pointed out that Google used the scans to create a database that could be searched, and thereby increased the utility of the books, rather than distributing complete digital copies. Any “alleged benefits” from the Archive’s lending “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,” Koeltl wrote.

The scanning and lending of digital books is just one part of what the Internet Archive does. Founded in 1996, Kahle said he hoped the Archive would become a modern version of the ancient Library of Alexandria, and provide “universal access to all knowledge,” he told TechRadar. The Archive has created digital copies of more than seven hundred billion webpages, which are available for free through a service called the Wayback Machine. It has also archived millions of audio files, video games, and other software. A number of libraries, including some that have partnered with the Internet Archive, have offered a version of controlled digital lending for some time, based on the theory that limiting digital borrowing to a single copy of a book is similar to what libraries do with physical books. But publishers and authors were critical of it even before the current lawsuit—in 2018, the Authors Guild called the Archive’s lending program “a flagrant violation of copyright law”—and, until now, the legality of this model has never been tested in the courts.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “When is a library not a library? When it’s online, apparently”

Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. Aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate settles over store windows like dazzling frost. It flashes like hot, molten gold across the nail plates of young women. It sparkles like pure precision-cut starlight on an ornament of a North American brown bear driving a car towing a camper van. Indeed, in Clement Clarke Moore’s seminal Christmas Eve poem, the eyes of Saint Nicholas himself are said to twinkle like aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.

An updated history of a viral Internet video

In July, Defector published a story about an ancient internet video called “Basketball (so funny you’ll pee your pants).avi,” based on extensive archival research and interviews with the people involved. The video was filmed at The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Penn., in the mid-90s, during a basketball game against Delco Christian. It features a Shipley player heaving the ball across the length of the court, where it collides with a small child. Footage of the freak accident was submitted to America’s Funniest Home Videos, and eventually made its way across Web 1.0 video sites and peer-to-peer networks. It is one of the earliest viral videos on the internet. But recently, the story got a lot more complicated all of a sudden.

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The weird science behind what we call “glitter””

One June morning in 2017, an Albanian American real-estate broker named Viktor Gjonaj parked outside a strip mall in Sterling Heights, a small suburb on the outskirts of Detroit. He hurried into the claim office of the Michigan Lottery. Gjonaj, who is 6 foot 5, loomed over the front desk and announced that he had won the Daily 4 lottery draw, worth $5,000. But Gjonaj did not have one winning ticket. He had 500. Skeptical lottery officials checked his tickets carefully. Each was genuine and contained the four winning numbers, but it was extremely unusual for someone to play the same numbers 500 times in one day. There were other red flags. Most people who present themselves at lottery claim centers are ecstatic, yet this winner waited for his prizes with the impatience of someone picking up dry cleaning.

The man who wants to make a do-it-yourself euthanasia machine

In a workshop in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke—“Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide” to some—is overseeing the last few rounds of testing on his new Sarco machine before shipping it to Switzerland, where he says its first user is waiting. This is the third prototype that Nitschke’s nonprofit, Exit International, has 3D-printed and wired up. Number one has been exhibited in Germany and Poland. “Number two was a disaster,” he says. Now he’s ironed out the manufacturing errors and is ready to launch: “This is the one that will be used.” A coffin-size pod with Star Trek stylings, the Sarco is the culmination of Nitschke’s 25-year campaign to “demedicalize death” through technology. Sealed inside the machine, a person who has chosen to die must answer three questions: Who are you? Where are you? And do you know what will happen when you press that button?  Here’s what will happen: The Sarco will fill with nitrogen gas. Its occupant will pass out in less than a minute and die by asphyxiation in around five.

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He won $30 million playing the lottery, and then he lost everything”

Last week, The Wire—an independent news outlet based in India—reported that Amit Malviya, the social-media manager for India’s ruling BJP party, was able to remove images from Instagram without having to go through the normal moderation channels. As evidence, The Wire published an internal Instagram report that appeared to corroborate its reporting, with timestamps for when the images were removed, and a note that the usual moderation process wasn’t required because they were flagged by Malviya. When Meta, the parent company of both Instagram and Facebook, denied that this was possible, The Wire published a second story, including a screenshot of what it said was an email from Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta. In the email, Stone seemed upset about the leak of the original report, and asked his staff to put the journalists who published The Wire‘s initial story on a watchlist.

In a response to that story, Guy Rosen, chief information security officer at Meta, wrote that the email from Stone also appeared to have been fabricated. The Wire then published a third story, in which it described the technical method it used to verify the email, and included a video showing the process. The story also had screenshots of emails sent by two unnamed internet security experts, who said they had reviewed a copy of the Stone email and the process The Wire used to verify it, and they were convinced that it was genuine. Some reporters, however, noted that the emails from the experts were dated in 2021, not 2022. Devesh Kumar, the Wire reporter who handled the verification story, said this was a simple mistake due to a glitch in his operating system.

in an interview with Platformer, Casey Newton’s technology newsletter, Jahnavi Sen, deputy editor of The Wire, said someone from the site met with one of the original sources for the report about Instagram, and that this source verified their identity by providing a number of documents, including their work badge and pay slips. Kumar told Platformer that when The Wire approached its original source about the Instagram takedowns, the source send a copy of the internal report within 20 minutes. When The Wire reached out to a different source, they said they didn’t know anything about the Instagram report, but “they had insight into the discussions happening internally. Seven minutes later, the source responded with the email allegedly from Stone.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Meta, The Wire, and some fabricated emails”

For the past several years, critics on both sides of the political spectrum have argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube too much protection from legal liability for the content that appears on their networks. Right-wing critics argue that Section 230 allows social-media companies to censor conservative thinkers and groups without recourse, by removing their content (even though there is no evidence that this occurs), and liberal critics say the platforms use Section 230 as an excuse not to remove things they should be taking down, such as misinformation. Before the 2020 election, Joe Biden said he would abolish Section 230 if he became president, and he has made similar statements since he took office, saying the clause “should be revoked immediately.”

This week, the Supreme Court said it plans to hear two cases that are looking to chip away at Section 230 legal protections. One case claims that Google’s YouTube service violated the federal Anti-Terrorism Act by recommending videos featuring the ISIS terrorist group, and that these videos helped lead to the death of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old US citizen who was killed in an ISIS attack in Paris in 2015. In the lawsuit, filed in 2016, Gonzalez’s family claims that while Section 230 protects YouTube from liability for hosting such content, it doesn’t protect the company from liability for promoting that content with its algorithms. The second case involves Twitter, which was also sued for violating the Anti-Terrorism Act; the family of Nawras Alassaf claimed ISIS-related content on Twitter contributed to his death in a terrorist attack in 2017.

The Supreme Court decided not to hear a similar case in 2020, which claimed that Facebook was responsible for attacks in Israel, because the social network promoted posts about the terrorist group Hamas. In March, the court also refused to review a decision which found Facebook was not liable for helping a man traffick a woman for sex. While Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the decision not to hear that case, he also wrote that the court should consider the issue of “the proper scope of immunity” under Section 230. “Assuming Congress does not step in to clarify Section 230’s scope, we should do so in an appropriate case,” Thomas wrote. “It is hard to see why the protection that Section 230 grants publishers against being held strictly liable for third parties’ content should protect Facebook from liability for its own ‘acts and omissions.’”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Section 230, the platforms, and the Supreme Court”

On July 12, in a lawsuit in Delaware’s Chancery Court, Twitter accused Elon Musk of failing to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company, an offer he initially made in April. Musk subsequently filed a countersuit, in which he alleged that Twitter was not telling the truth about some aspects of its business, including the number of fake and automated accounts on the service. Although the case won’t be heard until October 17, some evidence has been filed in court, as a result of motions by Twitter or Musk. In one such motion that was filed last week, Twitter’s legal team claimed Musk has not turned over all of his text messages related to the deal, as required by the court. In particular, Twitter’s lawyers said there are “substantial gaps… corresponding to critical time periods,” including the period in which Musk was allegedly reconsidering the purchase.

As part of its submission, Twitter entered several pages worth of text messages it had received from Musk, including some from technology investors who appeared to be desperate to get a piece of the Twitter deal. “You have my sword,” Jason Calacanis, an angel investor and entrepreneur, said in one text message, in what seemed to be a reference to the movie Lord of the Rings. Antonio Gracias, another investor and a former member of the Tesla board of directors, told Musk in a message that free speech is “a principle we need to defend with our lives or we are lost to the darkness.” Other texts to Musk included suggestions about what the sender believed were the best ways to fix what’s wrong with Twitter (Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, argued that it would be best if he ran the company). One unnamed texter, identified only as TJ, exhorted Musk to “buy Twitter and delete it” and “please do something to fight woke-ism.”

In a column for The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel argued that the texts with Musk “shatter the myth of the tech genius.” The unavoidable conclusion, he says, is just how “unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.” According to one former social-media executive who spoke with Warzel, “the dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb.” Another common reaction, this executive said, is to ask: “Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.” In one text, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, says he is in for “a billion … or whatever you recommend;” in another, Marc Andreessen, a top Silicon Valley venture investor, says $250 million is available “with no additional work required.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Elon Musk, and the desire to believe in tech saviors”

In June, BuzzFeed News published an investigative report based on leaked audio from more than 80 internal meetings at TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app. Emily Baker-White of BuzzFeed wrote that the recordings—along with fourteen statements from nine TikTok employees—showed that China-based employees of the company “repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US users of the video-sharing app between September 2021 and January 2022.” As Baker-White pointed out, this directly contradicted a senior TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing, in which the executive said that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decided who would have access to US customer data. The reality illustrated by BuzzFeed’s recordings, Baker-White wrote, was “exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.”

That proposed ban never materialized, although Trump did issue an executive order banning US corporations from doing business with ByteDance. Joe Biden struck down the order, but concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership remained. Biden asked the Commerce Department to launch national security reviews of apps with links to foreign adversaries, including China, and BuzzFeed’s reporting about TikTok’s access to US data fueled those concerns. According to the Times, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, met with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, last year, and expressed concern about China’s impact on US industrial policy, including Beijing’s influence over TikTok. Sullivan reportedly said he shared those concerns.

On Monday, the Times reported that the Biden administration and TikTok had drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns posed by the app. The two sides have “more or less hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its owner, ByteDance, to sell it,” the Times wrote, while adding that the Biden government and TikTok’s owners were “still wrangling over the potential agreement.” According to the Times, US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco has concerns that the terms of the deal are not tough enough on China, and the Treasury Department is skeptical that the proposed agreement can sufficiently resolve national security issues. The Biden administration’s policy towards Beijing, the Times wrote, “is not substantially different from the posture of the Trump White House, reflecting a suspicion of China.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

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