Category: Uncategorized

Note: A version of this post was originally published in the daily newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

As Donald Trump’s rhetoric became increasingly disconnected from reality during the election campaign, spreading conspiracy theories about widespread voting fraud (for which there is absolutely no evidence), Twitter and Facebook both took to adding disclaimers, labels, and other warnings on his statements, and in some of the worst cases blocked them from being seen until the president deleted them. But after the storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters, both platforms have banned the president from their services completely, with Twitter spending a considerable amount of time playing Whac-a-Mole blocking other accounts that Trump tried to use to spread his message after his was permanently disabled. And now, a wave of bans against both Trump and his prominent supporters has spread across much of the social web — YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, SnapChat, etc. — as well as payment services and financial intermediaries like PayPal, Venmo, Stripe and GoFundMe.

This kind of de-platforming isn’t unprecedented: It happened to right-wing gadfly Milo Yiannopolous, and then to Alex Jones of InfoWars, and to Gab (a right-wing would-be alternative to Twitter), and to 8chan, a Reddit-style community now known as 8kun. But it’s the first time the nuclear option has been used against a president of the United States. And even as the nation was trying to come to terms with the Capitol riot, the actions taken against Trump were raising questions: his supporters claimed it was an affront to his First Amendment rights (despite the fact that the First Amendment only applies to actions taken by the government). For some critics, the question was why the platforms didn’t act sooner. For others, the concern was more about whether private entities should ever have that kind of power over speech. But as troubling as the president’s de-platforming might be, some of the most dedicated defenders of free speech and individual rights said they agreed with the ban.

Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute said while the platforms should be biased in favor of leaving the speech of political leaders up, “there are limits to this principle. A political leader who uses his account to incite violence is causing harms that can’t be countered by speech.” When the platforms believe a leader is doing so, he says, they’re justified in suspending his account. Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that the removal of a president might seem surprising, but when you look outside the US, “you would see that Facebook has booted off Lebanese politicians and Burmese generals, never mind the millions of others who have been booted by these platforms, often without cause.” Kate Ruane of the ACLU, however, said in a statement that “it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.”

Continue reading “Platform ban of Trump and Parler raises questions about speech and power”

Note: A modified version of this post appeared in the daily newsletter published by the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

Less than an hour after Congress started ratifying the electoral college votes that gave Joe Biden a win in the presidential election, hundreds of camouflage-wearing Trump supporters — egged on by the president’s claims that the election was stolen from him — stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday and forced their way inside. As members of Congress left the Senate and House chambers, taking the electoral college votes with them, rioters in paramilitary gear and wearing QAnon symbols filled the room, taking photos of themselves standing on the dais by the Speaker’s chair, and sitting in her office with their feet on her desk. Amid the melee, a woman was shot, reportedly by police, and later died of her injuries — she was identified as Ashli Babbit, a 14-year veteran of the Air Force. According to CNN, it was the first time the Capitol building had been breached since the War of 1812. By 6 pm, Associated Press quoted authorities as saying the Capitol was secure, and the National Guard was on the scene. One report said shots were fired within the Capitol building at one point, but most of those who occupied the building appeared to have been allowed to leave peacefully, although DC police reported there were about a dozen arrests. Fighting between police and rioters continued near the Capitol through the night.

“We are watching an attempted sedition,” Jake Tapper said on CNN during the occupation. “We are watching an attempt at a bloodless coup in the United States.” Though police deployed smoke explosives to try to halt crowds, the demonstrators managed to push the police line up the steps on the east side of the Capitol. Then a small group broke into the building, according to the Washington Post. One video posted on TikTok appeared to show Capitol police encouraging demonstrators to enter the Capitol, and other videos posted to TikTok appeared to show members of the police taking friendly photos with those who illegally entered the building. Capitol Police briefly ordered evacuations of two buildings — the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building and the Cannon House Office Building, both just across from the Capitol. Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat whose office is in the Cannon building, tweeted: “I just had to evacuate my office because of a pipe bomb reported outside.” Luria also said she heard gun shots near her office.

“This is what you’ve gotten, guys,” Republican Senator Mitt Romney yelled as the mayhem unfolded in the Senate chamber, according to the New York Times live-blog of the events, apparently addressing his colleagues. The Times described “a scene of chaos and confusion seldom witnessed in the history of the capital,” with hundreds of protesters barreling past fence barricades. Just after 3 pm, MSNBC showed a woman being taken out of the Capitol on a stretcher, covered in blood, and a news report later said the woman had died of her injuries. “This is a coup attempt,” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger said on Twitter. Washington Post reporter Aaron Davis said the Defense Department initially refused a request from DC officials to deploy the National Guard, but later relented (the Times said this was authorized by vice president Pence, not by Trump). “Amazing how the national guard gets deployed with the quickness in anticipation of protests when police kill someone but when Trump holds his fascist coup rally the national guard is nowhere in sight,” said Bree Newsome Bass. David Corn of Mother Jones wrote that Trump “is now a terrorist leader.”

Continue reading “Shots fired inside the US Capitol as Trump supporters storm the barricades”

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

It’s not surprising that the announcement last week of an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook has gotten a lot of media attention. Not only is Facebook a company that virtually everyone uses or at least knows about, but mammoth cases like this one (which involves the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states) are extremely rare. There have only been half a dozen or so of this magnitude in the last 50 years, and only the Microsoft case from the late 1990s and possibly the AT&T breakup even come close to this one in size and impact. But once the fanfare of the announcement cools down, the history of such cases shows that what almost inevitably happens is not a swift victory for justice (however one might define that term) but rather a seemingly never-ending period — years, and in some cases decades — of protracted legal wrangling, a process that is almost mind-numbingly boring for most people, satisfying no one apart from the legions of corporate lawyers and academics for whom it provides something close to full employment. And the ending is likely to be a carefully negotiated settlement.

Even more than Microsoft, this case in particular is complicated by the fact that antitrust law was designed as a weapon to go after railroads and oil magnates who controlled access to physical goods with obvious market value, not a corporation whose product costs nothing and yet is used daily by billions of people. On top of that, the last several decades of antitrust court decisions have cemented the idea that the main target of antitrust law is consumer harm, which is traditionally defined as either high prices or the restriction of choice, or both. The former makes no sense in the context of Facebook, and even the latter is a stretch. The FTC’s argument is that harm should be broadly defined to mean a lack of privacy, the sharing of personal data, etc., but that is likely to be an uphill climb. Not that it isn’t true, but the concept has not been established yet in a legal sense, and courts may be skeptical of it (it was initially advanced by legal scholar Dina Srinivasan in a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook”). And the question of whether Facebook has prevented users from exercising freedom of choice also requires the FTC and the states to jump through some large hoops in order to make that case.

The complaint argues that Facebook has a monopoly over a specific market, which it defines as “personal social networking,” i.e. the sharing of information with family and friends. But there is no consensus on whether that is even a discrete market, let alone whether Facebook controls enough of it to matter in a legal sense. A court could decide that TikTok is fundamentally in the same market, or Snapchat for that matter, and between them they have almost half a billion users and significant market strength. And if Facebook doesn’t control a monopoly on anything, then the anti-competitive behavior it has engaged in (of buying Instagram and WhatsApp for example) just becomes the normal kind of competitive behavior that all large technology companies engage in. We may all believe and understand that Facebook is huge and powerful, but that’s not enough to meet the antitrust test — the FTC has to show that it became that way illegally, and/or maintains that position through illegal means.

Continue reading “Facebook and antitrust: A slam-dunk case, or a decades-long fight in the making?”

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

Almost three years ago, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg floated what seemed like a bizarre idea: that the massive, multibillion-dollar corporation he co-founded might create a kind of Supreme Court, which would hear cases involving questionable moderation decisions made by the company. And despite much scoffing and skepticism from Facebook’s critics over the ensuing years, Zuckerberg has done exactly that, setting up a theoretically independent body known as the Facebook Oversight Board, with a charter that prevents the company from meddling in its decisions, and requires Zuckerberg and Facebook to implement any recommendations the board makes, provided they aren’t against the law. Even after the group was created, however, it took some time before it could actually hear cases, for a variety of technical reasons: for example, the company said the board needed specially-equipped laptops so that personal information about users didn’t get exposed to public view. This week, the board finally started doing its work, and the response shows that there is still a lot of skepticism out there about Facebook’s big idea.

Many of those who see the social network as contributing to the problems of political disinformation were hopeful the Oversight Board might be up and running in time for the US presidential election, so it could rule on things like Facebook’s decision not to remove voter-fraud allegations and other conspiracy theories posted by Donald Trump and his followers. Instead, the board’s first cases include:

• A screenshot of tweets by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in which he wrote that “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”
• Photos of a dead child, fully clothed, with text in Burmese asking why there was no retaliation against China for its treatment of Uighur Muslims
• Alleged historical photos of churches in Baku, Azerbaijan, with text saying that Baku had been built by Armenians and asking where the churches had gone
• Eight photographs on Instagram which included female breasts and nipples, with text in Portuguese about breast cancer symptoms
• An alleged quote by Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels
• A video about France’s refusal to authorize hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as treatments for COVID-19

The board said it got more than 20,000 suggestions for incidents that users wanted it to review since October 2020, which gives some indication of just how difficult the job of running Facebook’s Supreme Court will likely be, considering the vast quantities of content that are posted to the social network every day. The board has invited the public to comment on the cases (which have had any personal identifying information removed) over the next week. If it opts to overrule Facebook’s earlier decisions, the company must comply with that ruling, and must also publicly respond to the board. “Facebook has to follow our decision. And that means if they have taken content down, they have to put it back up. But they also have to use this as a guideline for other similar cases,” said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former Prime Minister of Denmark and an Oversight Board member.

Continue reading “Facebook’s Supreme Court starts to hear its first cases”

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

While the president continues to rant and rave about conspiracies he believes have denied him the election, the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to spend its valuable time holding yet another hearing into the alleged misbehavior of Facebook and Twitter. This comes less than a month after the Senate Commerce Committee held a very similar hearing into the two social platforms, a hearing that consisted mostly of members like Senator Ted Cruz making a show of badgering Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The main topic of conversation was why Twitter chose to block users from posting links to a New York Post story that contained unsubstantiated claims about a secret laptop that may or may not have belonged to Hunter Biden (Twitter changed its policy before the hearing, allowing users to link to the story with a warning about its unverified status). This week’s hearing was equally shallow, and equally frustrating.

In part, that could be because the topic of the Senate Judiciary hearing was exactly the same as the Senate Commerce hearing—namely, the blocking and down-ranking of the New York Post story by Twitter and Facebook, and the fact that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the platforms from liability for those kinds of decisions. So a lot of the same arguments were trotted out by many of the same people, including Senator Cruz, who again made a show of badgering Jack Dorsey about whether he would put a warning on a tweet the senator planned to post about alleged election fraud. “I don’t think it’s useful to get into hypotheticals,” Dorsey said, before adding that a warning probably wouldn’t be applied. “Well I’m going to test that, because I’m going to tweet that and see what you put on it,” Cruz blustered.

The fact that Twitter changed its policy not long after it blocked the Post story seemed to take at least some of the wind out of the Judiciary Committee’s sails. It’s a lot easier to get worked up about censorship if you’re talking about actually blocking a link or deactivating someone’s account, as opposed to just adding a small warning. That’s not to say Cruz didn’t try: after asking the question about whether his tweet on alleged election fraud would get a warning, the senator tried to argue that adding a warning makes Twitter into a publisher rather than a platform, and thus renders it ineligible to be protected by Section 230. “You’re a publisher when you’re doing that,” he said. “You’re entitled to take a policy position, but you don’t get to pretend you’re not a publisher and get a special benefit under Section 230 as a result.”

Continue reading “Congress and the platforms: The circus is back in town”