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

Last October, Facebook warned a group of social scientists from New York University that their research — known as the Ad Observatory, part of the Cybersecurity for Democracy Project — was in breach of the social network’s terms of service, because it used software to “scrape” information from Facebook without the consent of the service’s users. The company said that unless the researchers stopped using the browser extension they developed, or changed the way that it acquired information, they would be subject to “additional enforcement action.” Late Tuesday night, Facebook followed through on this threat by blocking the group from accessing any of the platform’s data, and also shutting down the researchers’ personal accounts and pages. In a blog post, the company said it was forced to do so because the browser extension violated users’ privacy. “While the Ad Observatory project may be well-intentioned, the ongoing and continued violations of protections against scraping cannot be ignored,” Facebook said.

The NYU researchers responded that they have taken all the precautions they can to avoid pulling in personally identifiable information from users — including names, user ID numbers, and Facebook friend lists — and also pointed out that the thousands of users who signed up to help the Ad Observatory Project installed the group’s browser extension willingly, to help the scientists research the impact of the social network’s ad-targeting algorithms. “Facebook is silencing us because our work often calls attention to problems on its platform,” Laura Edelson, one of the NYU researchers, told Bloomberg News in an email. “Worst of all, Facebook is using user privacy, a core belief that we have always put first in our work, as a pretext for doing this.” Edelson also said on Twitter that the Facebook shutdown has effectively cut off more than two dozen other researchers and journalists who got access to Facebook advertising data through the NYU project

Unauthorized access to private user data is a sensitive topic for Facebook. In the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, a political consulting firm acquired personally identifiable information on more than 80 million people from a researcher who gained access to it through a seemingly harmless Facebook app. The resulting furor eventually led to a $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for breaches of privacy, and the company promised it would never share the personal information of its users with third parties without stringent controls. The ripple effects of the FTC order — combined with the subsequent passing of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR — led to severe restrictions on the social network’s API (application programming interface), which other web services and software use to exchange data with the social network. And many of those restrictions also affected researchers like those at NYU.

Continue reading “Facebook shuts down research, blames user privacy rules”

We all know that fashions were different in earlier times, but who knew something as simple as when someone chose to wear a hat could cause a massive riot, leading to dozens of arrests and injuries? That’s what happened in New York City in 1922, during the infamous “Straw Hat” riots, which started when gangs of hooligans began attacking anyone wearing a straw hat, and lasted for more than a week. Why did they start attacking people wearing these hats? Because at the time, it was considered unseemly or even ridiculous to wear such a hat after September 15th. For some reason that year, the ridicule turned to violence. The New York Times reported:

“Gangs of young hoodlums ran riot in various parts of the city last night, smashing unseasonable straw hats and trampling them in the street. In some cases, mobs of hundreds of boys and young men terrorized whole blocks. A favorite practice of the gangsters was to arm themselves with sticks, some with nails at the tip, and compel men wearing straw hats to run a gauntlet. Sometimes the hoodlums would hide in doorways and dash out, ten or twelve strong, to attack.”

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

A recurring theme in political circles is the idea that giant digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube engage in bad behavior—distributing disinformation, allowing hate speech, removing conservative opinions, and so on—in part because they are protected from legal liability by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says they aren’t responsible for content posted by their users. Critics on both sides of the political aisle argue that this protection either needs to be removed or significantly amended because the social networks are abusing it. Former president Donald Trump signed an executive order in an attempt to get the FTC to do something about Section 230, although his efforts went nowhere, and Section 230 also plays a role in his recent lawsuits against Facebook, Google, and Twitter for banning him. President Joe Biden hasn’t pushed anyone to do anything specific yet, but he has said that the clause should be “revoked immediately.”

One of the most recent attempts to change Section 230 comes from Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has proposed a bill that would carve out an exception for medical misinformation during a health crisis, making the platforms legally liable for distributing anything the government defines as untrue. While this may seem like a worthwhile goal, given the kind of rampant disinformation being spread about vaccines on platforms like Facebook and Google’s YouTube, some freedom of speech advocates argue that even well-intentioned laws like Klobuchar’s could backfire badly and have dangerous consequences. Similar concerns have been raised about a suite of proposed bills introduced by a group of Republican members of Congress, which involve a host of “carve-outs” for Section 230 aimed at preventing platforms from removing certain kinds of content (mostly conservative speech), and forcing them to remove other kinds (cyber-bullying, doxxing, etc.).

To talk about these and related issues, we’ve been interviewing a series of experts in law and technology using CJR’s Galley discussion platform, including Makena Kelly, a policy reporter for The Verge covering topics like net neutrality, data privacy, antitrust, and internet culture; Jeff Kosseff, an assistant professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, and author of “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, a history of Section 230;” Mike Masnick, who runs technology analysis site Techdirt and co-founded a think tank called the Copia Institute; Mary Anne Franks, professor of law at the University of Miami, and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative; James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell Tech; and Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University.

Continue reading “Section 230 critics are forgetting about the First Amendment”

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

The fact that Facebook can distribute dangerous amounts of misinformation around the world in the blink of an eye is not a new problem, but the social network’s ability to do so got more than the usual amount of attention during the past week. President Joe Biden told reporters during a White House scrum that Facebook was “killing people” by spreading disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and in particular about the efficacy of various vaccines. As Jon Allsop reported in the CJR newsletter on Wednesday, Biden backtracked somewhat on his original statement after some pushback from the company and others: Facebook said that the country needed to “move past the finger pointing” when it comes to COVID disinformation, and that it takes action against such content when it sees it. Biden responded that his point was simply that Facebook has enabled a small group of about a dozen accounts to spread disinformation that might be causing people to avoid getting vaccinated, and that this could result in an increase in deaths.

Biden appears to have gotten his information about this “disinformation dozen” from a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which came out recently with research showing that the bulk of the disinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines appears to come from a handful of accounts. The implication of the president’s comment is that all Facebook has to do is get rid of a few bad apples, and the COVID disinformation problem will be solved. As Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times put it, however, Biden “reduced the complex scourge of runaway vaccine hesitancy into a cartoonishly simple matter of product design: If only Facebook would hit its Quit Killing People button, America would be healed again.” While Biden’s comments may make for a great TV news hit, solving a problem like disinformation at the scale of something like Facebook is much harder than he makes it sound, in part because it involves far more than just a dozen bad accounts. And even the definition of what qualifies as disinformation when it comes to COVID has changed over time.

As Jon Allsop described yesterday, part of the problem is that media outlets like Fox News seem to feel no compunction about spreading “fake news” about the virus in return for the attention of their viewers. That’s not a problem Facebook can fix, nor will ridding the social network of all hoaxes about COVID or vaccines make much of a dent in the influence of Fox’s hysteria — which information researcher Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkstein Center for Internet and Society has argued was much more influential during the 2016 election than any social-media network. But even that’s just the tip of the disinformation iceberg. One of the most prominent sources of COVID and vaccine disinformation is a sitting US member of Congress: Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, is a member of one of the most famous political families in US history, and his anti-vaccination conspiracy theories put him near the top of the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “disinformation dozen” list. What is Facebook supposed to do about their repeated misstatements?

Continue reading “Facebook’s disinformation problem is harder than it looks”

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

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 created a significant amount of turmoil for Facebook, including accusations of improper data stewardship involving Cambridge Analytica, and a number of awkward appearances before Congressional committees, where founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about the social network’s role in spreading disinformation related to everything from the 2016 election to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building. According to a new book by two New York Times reporters, Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, the fallout from these events didn’t just cause external problems. It also reportedly created a rift between the Facebook CEO and his second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer and a former Google executive, who was hired in part for her Washington connections. “Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Partnership Did Not Survive Trump,” said the Times headline on an excerpt from the book, which is entitled “Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.”

In particular, the book alleges that Zuckerberg took control of almost all matters related to Trump, including how to handle his posting of hate speech and disinformation, matters that would previously have been handled by Sandberg — and decisions she reportedly disagreed with, but didn’t want to bring up with the Facebook founder. The company, not surprisingly, denies any and all reports of a rift between the two most powerful people at the top of the company. “This book tells a false narrative based on selective interviews, many from disgruntled individuals, and cherry-picked facts,” Dani Lever, a Facebook spokesperson, told Insider in a statement. “The fault lines that the authors depict between Mark and Sheryl and the people who work with them do not exist. All of Mark’s direct reports work closely with Sheryl and hers with Mark. Sheryl’s role at the company has not changed.”

The alleged friction between Zuckerberg and his second-in-command isn’t the only turmoil the company is dealing with as a result of its handling of Trump, according to the book. Frenkel and Kang report that there is a significant amount of dissent within the ranks of the company’s employees as well, especially over the social network’s failure to act quickly to stop the flow of disinformation from the president’s account. Kang told NPR’s Fresh Air podcast that one of the most fascinating things about doing the reporting for the book — which the authors said involved more than 400 interviews — was talking to employees who “kept trying to raise the alarm, saying ‘This is a problem. We are spreading misinformation. We are letting the president spread misinformation and it’s being amplified by our own algorithms. Our systems aren’t working the way we predicted and we should do something.'”

Continue reading “New details on the friction Trump caused inside Facebook”

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

Three months ago, Facebook announced that it planned to offer a platform for writers and journalists to publish subscription newsletters, a product very similar to that offered by Substack, the venture-funded startup that has helped make subscription email newsletters a hot topic in journalistic circles over the past year. Last week, Facebook officially launched its new platform, known as Bulletin, along with a slate of high-profile writers, including author Malcolm Gladwell and sports reporter Erin Andrews. A blog post from Campbell Brown, the company’s VP of global news partnerships, and Anthea Watson Strong, product manager for news, said that Facebook has partnered with “a small, diverse group of voices… some of whom are up-and-coming writers looking to find and build their audience, while others already have “a long history of work and a sizable following.”

In addition to Gladwell and Andrews, the content creators who have partnered with the company so far include Jessica Yellin, a former White House correspondent for CNN; Ron Claiborne, a former ABC News correspondent; Mitch Albom, sportswriter and author of such books as Tuesdays With Morrie; and Tyler Cowen, a high-profile economist and founder of the blog Marginal Revolution. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a Facebook Live audio session held as part of the Bulletin launch that he also hopes to convince local journalists to use the platform in the future. “Part of what I think we can try to do here is make a real investment in local news,” he said.

How the company will decide which local journalists to include was not disclosed, but Facebook said earlier this year that it intends to spend $5 million “to support local journalists interested in starting or continuing their work on our new platform for independent writers.” The company opened up an application process at the time, and said successful applicants would be paid a multi-year licensing fee, and receive other monetization tools and services, but would have to commit to engaging with their audience “through Facebook tools such as Groups, live discussions, and other features.”

Continue reading “Facebook launches Bulletin, its would-be Substack killer”

My mother was a woman with many hidden depths. She often came off as flighty or shallow, I think, because of her love of beautiful clothes or her fondness for acting, or her taste for perhaps a bit more wine than was really necessary, but she had a core of steel ( which she got from her mother Ruth), and that allowed her to take on challenges that would have scared off lesser mortals — including setting off for the Seychelles islands in her retirement years, to help my father beat back the jungle around a would-be BnB, where she learned how to cook fruit bat, among other things (which involves throwing them against the wall to tenderize them, apparently).

After growing up in Toronto in relative luxury on South Drive, with her younger sister Kathy and little brother John, doing all the up-and-coming Toronto society things like debutante balls and being raised largely by nuns, Linda fell in love with a young man she met as part of the theatre group at the University of Western Ontario — as she told the story, she would often go back to his apartment and do the dishes while he called his fiancee, who eventually fell by the wayside, defeated by the charms of this blonde bombshell with the big vocabulary and the cats-eye glasses.

Although her family might have preferred to see her marry a doctor or lawyer, Linda decided to marry a penniless farm boy from Saskatchewan who had just joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot. Despite — or perhaps because of — their differences, they became an inseparable team, he the director telling everyone where to stand and what to say (or which country and province to move to next) and she the young ingenue, playing the role of Air Force officer’s wife, party hostess, mother, and later grandmother, aunt, and walking encyclopedia.

Continue reading “My mother, Linda Miles Ingram”

The movie clip above, from the Museum of Modern Art, may look like something from an HG Wells-style science fiction movie made at the turn of the century, but it is actually a clip of a functioning suspended railway in Germany built in the late 1800s. Originally called the Einschienige Hangebahn System Eugen Langen (the Eugen Langen Monorail Overhead Conveyor System), it is now known as the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn or Wuppertal Suspension Railway. Not only that, but it is still running — although the cars have been upgraded multiple times since it was built. It moves 25 million passengers every year.

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

For several months, those who follow politics and those who are more interested in social technology have both been waiting with bated breath for a decision on whether Donald Trump would continue to be banned from posting to his account on Facebook. The former president’s account was blocked after the social network decided he used the site to foment violence, resulting in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, and then the decision was sent to the company’s so-called Oversight Board for review. The board — a theoretically arm’s length group of former journalists, academics, and legal scholars, including the former Prime Minister of Denmark, the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, and a former US federal circuit-court judge — handed down its ruling on Wednesday. The board decided that Facebook was right to have banned Trump from the network for fomenting violence, but said the company had no official policy on its books that allowed it to ban him (or anyone else) permanently, and told Facebook to come up with one if it wanted to do this in the future. This appeared to please some people partially, but almost no one completely.

For some critics, including the so-called Real Facebook Oversight Board — a group that includes former CIA officer and former Facebook advisor Yael Eisenstat, Facebook venture investor Roger MacNamee, and crusading Phillippines journalist Maria Ressa — the board’s decision on Trump just reinforces the fiction that the Oversight Board has any power whatsoever over the company. Although Facebook has gone to great lengths to create a structure that puts the board at arm’s length and theoretically gives it autonomy, the board was still created by Facebook and is funded by Facebook. It also has a fairly limited remit, in the sense that it can make decisions about whether content (or accounts) should be removed or not, but it has no ability to question or influence any of Facebook’s business decisions, or the way its algorithms function, how its advertising strategy works, and so on. The board may have advised Facebook that it should have a policy about how to deal with government leaders who incite violence, but if the company decides not to create one, or not to implement it, the board can do nothing.

On a broader level, some critics argue that all of the attention being paid to the Oversight Board and its Trump decision — not to mention the references to it being Facebook’s Supreme Court — play into the company’s desire to make it seem like a worthwhile or even pioneering exercise in corporate governance. For some at least, it is more like a sideshow, or a Potemkin village: it looks nice from the outside, but behind the facade it’s just a two-dimensional representation of governance, held up by sticks. Shira Ovide of the New York Times wrote: “Facbook is not a representative democracy with brances of government that keep a check on one another. It is a castle ruled by an all-powerful king who has invited billions of people inside to mingle — but only if they abide by opaque, ever-changing rules that are often applied by a fleet of mostly lower-wage workers.”

Continue reading “Facebook Oversight Board punts on Donald Trump ban”