Category: Uncategorized

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

Two weeks ago, Google started showing users in Australia a popup message, warning that some of the company’s services might be impaired as a result of a proposed content-licensing law, which would require large digital platforms to pay publishers in return for linking to their articles. At the time, Facebook said it had no public comment on the proposed law, but that changed rather dramatically on Monday: the company’s senior executive in charge of Australian operations published a statement saying if the law goes ahead, Facebook will block publishers and people in Australia from sharing any local or international news on the social network or its photo-sharing service, Instagram. The statement said that the proposed legislation “misunderstands the dynamics of the internet and will do damage to the very news organisations the government is trying to protect.” The competition authorities who came up with it, Facebook said, “ignored important facts, most critically the relationship between the news media and social media and which one benefits most from the other.”

After Google released its own open letter to Australian users—or rather, two of them, since the head of YouTube in Australia also published one talking about how the law would affect the video-sharing service—the Australian government quickly posted a response, accusing the search giant of misstating the facts about the legislation and how it would impact Google’s services. And it did the same with Facebook on Monday, publishing a statement that said the company’s threat to block users in that country from sharing news was “ill-timed and misconceived.” The government release went on to say that the draft legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, is designed to ensure that Australian news businesses, including independent and regional media, “can get a seat at the table for fair negotiations with Facebook and Google.” The statement also noted that Facebook already pays some publishers for their news, and added that it hoped “all parties will engage in constructive discussions” while the draft law is going through the legislative process.

Continue reading “Facebook threatens to block Australian news if law goes ahead”

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

Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of a new kind of corporate power, one built on an almost unprecedented level of digital surveillance of users, fueled by the demands of the global advertising industry—a phenomenon that Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Google, Facebook, and Amazon have built businesses that are worth trillions, yet the functioning of their algorithms remains entirely opaque to both users and regulators. How should we deal with this problem? Is there a way to dismantle these massive platforms without losing the benefits they bring, or will breaking them up cause more problems than it solves? To answer these and other related questions, CJR spent this week conducting a “slow interview” on its Galley discussion platform with author and freedom-of-information activist Cory Doctorow, whose latest book is called “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.” In addition to writing science-fiction novels, Doctorow is also a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University in the UK, where he is a visiting professor.

Both in his book and in our interview, Doctorow argues that Zuboff and others are right to be afraid of massive corporations like Google and Facebook, and their ability to track our every move online, or insert themselves into every conversation or transaction, because monopolies smother competition and innovation. But he says the idea that these digital behemoths can influence our thoughts or behavior through the power of their algorithms or ad targeting methods is mostly bunk. “Every person who’s claimed to have built a system of effective, long-term persuasion was either kidding themselves or the rest of us,” he says. The advertising industry loves to claim that it can trigger purchases and other behavior by using certain images or playing on human emotion, but most of that is flim-flam, says Doctorow, and the efforts of the digital platforms are likely not much more successful. Even Facebook’s notorious sociological experiment from 2010, in which it tried to encourage users to vote by offering an “I Voted” sticker, had an impact of less than 0.5 percent.

Continue reading “How can we fight back against surveillance capitalism?”

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

Not that long ago, the jumble of conspiracy theories and magical thinking known as QAnon was seen by many—if they even knew of it at all—as a sideshow confined to the darker corners of the internet, alternative communities like 4chan and 8chan, where people with a screw loose muttered to each other about the “deep state” and other cryptic phrases. Fast forward just a few years and there are more than a dozen people running for Congress who have expressed some form of support for QAnon theories, and the president and members of his family have retweeted accounts on Twitter that are part of the QAnon ecosystem. How did we get here, and what if anything should we be doing about this dangerous ideology? Do journalists help or harm those efforts when they cover QAnon, and if so how should they be treating it? To answer these and other related questions, we’ve been using CJR’s Galley discussion platform to talk with a number of journalists and other experts who specialize in QAnon and the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation online.

“Am I surprised by QAnon’s rise? No,” said Parker Molloy, editor-at-large at Media Matters for America. “Anyone who’s been following media’s overly credulous coverage of right-wing conspiracies for the past several years could see this coming. Media cannot lift people with fringe beliefs into the mainstream, reward them, and then shake their heads wondering how those fringe beliefs became mainstream.” Molloy and others warn that the Q movement is adept at using media tactics to recruit new members. “Over the weekend there were a number of ‘Save The Children’ rallies that were essentially QAnon rallies, ostensibly about fighting child trafficking,” Molloy said. But many local news outlets “were more than happy to take their stated motivations at face value and without much scrutiny at all. Responsible reporting would have identified these rallies as QAnon-inspired, would have clearly stated that movement’s ties to terrorism, murder, and a number of other crimes.”

One risk as Q becomes more mainstream, says New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel, is that Q “will become a shiny object in the press and a lot of people who haven’t been paying attention to the movement will cover it poorly and sand down the edges of what is really a dangerous and fringe set of beliefs.” Warzel said he hasn’t written much on QAnon in part because “I was trying to be mindful about giving oxygen to this movement,” but that his feelings changed when NBC reported on the number of Facebook groups devoted to Q. “I’d been feeling that the movement had long-since reached critical mass but this felt like proof.” Will Sommer of the Daily Beast said that when he is thinking about reporting on a QAnon story, “I like to consider how much a real-world effect this is having. If it’s just a dumb internet belief, it’s not worth my time, my readers’ time, or the possibility that I’d be amplifying it. But once things start having an effect in the real world, I think it’s worth writing about.”

Continue reading “What should we do about QAnon now that it is mainstream?”

Note: I originally wrote this for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Over the past year or so, the TikTok video-sharing app has become one of the hottest mobile services, especially with younger users. But it has also become one of the largest political footballs in recent memory, thanks to an executive order that Donald Trump issued in early August, banning TikTok and a chat app called WeChat. Why? Because they are both owned by Chinese companies: TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance, which also runs a news aggregation app called Toutiao, and WeChat is owned by Tencent, a holding company that controls a variety of media and entertainment services, including the online game League of Legends. In his vaguely worded order, Trump barred any American firm from having “dealings” with either TikTok or WeChat as of September 20, because he said they “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” The order cited legal authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act, and it immediately sparked a race to acquire TikTok’s assets before the September deadline, with Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart all in the running.

Those plans hit a rather large roadblock this week, however, after the Chinese government issued new restrictions on the sale or export of artificial-intelligence software. Why would that impact the TikTok sale? Because the “secret sauce” for the app is the algorithmic recommendation engine that decides what videos to show new users, and analysts say if ByteDance is prevented from including it as part of a sale, then interest in the acquisition could dry up—or at least interest in an acquisition in the $30 billion range, which is what the company is said to be asking a buyer to pay. The Wall Street Journal reported that “a person close to the talks” compared TikTok without its algorithms to a fancy car with a cheap engine, while another person close to the sale talks said that not getting the algorithms would be a surprise, and “was skeptical that the deal would proceed without them.” Dan Primack, who writes about mergers and acquisitions for Axios, said selling TikTok without the algorithms would be “akin to McDonald’s selling a Big Mac without the meat.”

When Trump issued his executive order (which TikTok launched a lawsuit over), it was widely seen as a slam-dunk for whoever won the bidding for the company, albeit one based on a questionable legal foundation—the forced sale of a massively successful mobile app, delivered into the hands of any US company that could come up with the right deal. It may have caused a brief surge of emotion in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as well, since he just added a TikTok-like feature to his Instagram video-sharing service, and any roadblock for a major competitor could be seen as a good thing. Database-software giant Oracle joined the bidding, along with a number of private equity firms, and Microsoft teamed up to make a bid with Walmart. A retail chain might seem like an odd fit for a mobile video-sharing app known for appealing to dancing teens, but analysts say the company could expand its reach to new customers and also move into the area of social commerce.

Continue reading “China throws a wrench into TikTok acquisition plans”

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

Google users in Australia started seeing a warning pop up on their search pages this week: a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark inside it, and a message that said “The way Aussies use Google is at risk.” Those who clicked on the popup were taken to an open letter from Mel Silva, managing director of Google Australia, which warned users about a new Australian law that Silva said “will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube.” According to the Google executive, the proposed legislation, known as the News Media Bargaining Code, “would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk.” Silva said that the new law would force Google to “give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses—news media businesses—over everyone else” because the code would require it to notify publishers about changes to its algorithms. The head of YouTube in Australia also wrote his own post suggesting that paying big publishers for content would mean less money for other creators on the service.

The Australian government didn’t waste much time firing back. The country’s competition commission, which drafted the law after months of investigating anti-competitive behavior by Google and Facebook, released a letter accusing the search company of misstating the facts. According to the commission, Google’s statement contained “misinformation” about the proposed law: the company would not have to charge anyone for free services, it said, and would not be required to share any user data with news businesses unless it chose to do so. The proposed code would “allow Australian news businesses to negotiate for fair payment for their journalists’ work that is included on Google services,” it said, and would “address a significant bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook.” Free TV Australia, an industry body that represents the country’s over-the-air networks, called Google’s letter and marketing campaign “a cynical ploy” designed to “mislead and frighten” Australians.

So where does the truth lie in this back-and-forth? One thing that seems obvious is that Google sees what’s happening in Australia as a line in the sand, and is fighting with whatever tools it has, including a PR campaign involving its users, to soften the proposed legislation (discussion continues on the law until August 28, the commission has said). Just before the code came out, Google announced that it was going to pay publishers in certain countries, including Australia, but those payments have reportedly been suspended. The search giant also fought against legislation requiring it to pay publishers in Spain, Germany, and France, but it may be even more determined in Australia: the regulations in those other countries are based on copyright law, whereas Australia’s is a product of antitrust, which has the potential to affect Google in much more serious ways than copyright (US regulators are also currently investigating the search company for anti-competitive behavior). For its part, Facebook seems to be keeping its head down and saying as little as possible.

Continue reading “Google plays hardball in Australia over new publisher payment law”

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

Stocks and bonds may be weak, but we’re still in a raging bull market for one commodity, and that is disinformation, thanks in large part to the fact that President Donald Trump creates and distributes so much of it himself, both through his Twitter account but also in his official statements and his increasingly rare briefings from the White House. Trump’s promotion of fringe conspiracy theories—like the one he repeatedly tweeted about involving former Congressional candidate Joe Scarborough and the death of a former campaign worker, or a video about a supposed cure for COVID-19 from a doctor who believes that some diseases are caused by demons—and similar behavior by Trump supporters and advisors, including his son Donald Jr., has arguably helped to fuel the continued growth of a digital disinformation ecosystem. It ties together “dark web” sites like 4chan and right-wing outlets like Breitbart, but also relies on giant digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube, and mainstream news outlets like Fox News, as engines of dissemination.

One sign of how large and potentially influential this ecosystem has become in just the last four years is the growth of the so-called QAnon conspiracy theory cult, something that seemed like a bad joke not that long ago—an often bizarre hodge-podge of beliefs involving a plan by the “deep state” to take down some or all of the government, Satanic child sex-abuse rings run by the rich and powerful in Washington, and even the existence of space aliens who walk among us. The idea that an anonymous government operative known only as Q would leave coded messages posted on 4chan discussion boards or in Reddit threads, containing details about the government’s plans to foil a supposed coup, might have been laughable just a few years ago, but now there are candidates for Congress who openly share some of these beliefs, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican primary runoff in Georgia’s 14th district this week, and was congratulated by the president. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene said in a YouTube video.

This week, NBC News reported that an internal Facebook investigation found thousands of groups and pages devoted to QAnon conspiracy theories, with millions of members and followers, according to internal company documents that were obtained by the network. The ten largest of these groups identified by Facebook reportedly contain more than one million members, and the total from all of the QAnon groups is about three million. It’s not clear how much overlap there is among membership of the groups, according to NBC, because most of them are private. Two unnamed Facebook staffers told the network that the company is considering a platform-wide crackdown on QAnon content that would be similar to the way it handles anti-vaccination content, which is to reject advertising from such groups, and exclude them from search results and recommendations (Twitter recently did something similar). A report by The Guardian says the paper found one hundred and seventy QAnon groups and accounts on Facebook and Instagram with more than four and a half million followers.

Continue reading “The QAnon conspiracy cult is growing and the media is helping”

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

A group of veteran journalists who work for the Voice of America sent management a letter of protest Monday denouncing the new chief executive of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and a number of other similar media outlets. In the letter, the staffers allege that comments made by Michael Pack, a Trump appointee who took office in June, “endanger the personal security of VOA reporters at home and abroad, as well as threatening to harm U.S. national security objectives.” As David Folkenflik reported at NPR, the comments in question came during a podcast produced by the conservative website The Federalist, and included Pack saying the agency was “a great place to put a foreign spy,” as well as joking about deporting his own employees and turning off the air conditioning or banning masks at VOA headquarters in order to help him “drain the swamp.” Pack also questioned whether the agency’s broadcasters were adhering to standards of balance. “Whatever CNN or any other network does is one thing,” he said on the podcast. “I have found egregious examples of flouting of those standards.”

In the Federalist interview, Pack also suggested that he has had to take strong action since he was appointed because of security lapses that occurred at the agency prior to his arrival. But his predecessor in the role of USAGM chief executive, John Lansing—now the CEO of National Public Radio—said that this is untrue. “Pack’s insistence that there were issues related to security in hiring at VOA is merely a smokescreen to avert attention from his blatant attempt to interfere with the legislatively mandated independence, or ‘firewall’, protecting the journalists of VOA from government interference,” Lansing told Folkenflik (a note on the NPR story said that because of Lansing’s previous job, neither he nor any other senior NPR executive reviewed the Pack story prior to publication). The letter from VOA staffers—including two White House correspondents, foreign correspondents based in Africa and Islamabad, and national security reporters—said that Pack’s allegations about security lapses at the agency were as baseless as the “Red Scare” conspiracy theories that targeted the Voice of America and other entities during the 1950s.

Since Pack took over the agency, he has made a series of dramatic restructuring moves, including forcing out the chief financial officer and the general counsel of the USAGM in mid-August, both of whom were placed on administrative leave and had their security clearances revoked. A statement from the agency that was sent to Politico and the New York Post at the time said these removals were meant to “restore respect for the rule of law in our work” after a review found lax vetting of journalists. But both of the executives said Pack’s actions were in retaliation for their whistle-blowing about what has been happening at the agency since he took over. Chief financial officer Grant Turner told a reporter for Voice of America that his removal was punishment for speaking up about “patterns of gross mismanagement” under Pack, as well as violations of the legal firewall that is supposed to protect USAGM journalists from political interference, and general counsel David Kligerman said he was sidelined “in retaliation for attempting to do my job in an apolitical manner and to speak truth to power.”

Continue reading “VOA turmoil continues as staffers protest new CEO’s remarks”

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

On Saturday, protests in Portland, Oregon turned violent after a convoy of Trump supporters drove into the city, the backs of their pickup trucks filled with American flags and in some cases people carrying weapons (although supporters said many of them were paintball guns). Late Saturday night, police and independent journalists on the scene reported that a man was shot and killed after clashing with protesters. While his name has not been officially released, Trump supporters on Twitter identified him as a Trump loyalist, and witnesses reported he was wearing a hat with the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a far-right group based in Washington that has disrupted Black Lives protests and fought with anti-fascist groups in the past (the head of the group later confirmed to the New York Times that the man who died was a member of Patriot Prayer.) Just hours later, Donald Trump posted a storm of tweets about the protests, in which he retweeted criticism of Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler—a Democrat—including comments that suggested Wheeler was guilty of war crimes and had “blood on his hands.”

Trump’s rhetoric on the Black Lives Matter protests, not just in Oregon but in other states as well, has been ramping up as the election draws closer, painting what he clearly hopes will be a frightening picture of them as ongoing orgies of violence orchestrated by the shadowy, malevolent group known as Antifa (despite the fact that no organization by that name exists). And he and his supporters—both inside the White House as well as outside it—have taken every opportunity to lay the blame for abetting that violence on Democratic politicians like Wheeler and Oregon governor Kate Brown, for what Trump claims is a lack of action against the protesters, including a failure to call in federal troops. “The only way you will stop the violence in the high crime Democrat run cities is through strength!” he tweeted on Sunday, in addition to retweeting a claim that high crime rates only occur in cities or states run by Democrats (which is untrue, as Vox has pointed out).

While the president has not explicitly called for violence during the protests, he has made it clear whose side he is on: he invited a couple who brandished weapons during a protest to speak at the Republican convention, and following the death of the Patriot Prayer member in Portland, he retweeted a video clip of another convoy of his supporters heading into the city and called them “GREAT PATRIOTS!” Trump and his administration have also done their best to explicitly tie the violence to Joe Biden, whom they accuse of being soft on violence because of his support for Black Lives Matter protests—Trump followers have recently started using the hashtag #BidenRiots on Twitter, and the president has retweeted them enthusiastically and often. The worldview that Trump is clearly hoping to encourage in voters’ minds is that the violence in Portland and elsewhere is a) a result of the liberal sympathies and general weakness of the Democratic party and by extension the weakness of Joe Biden, and b) that only Trump can ensure that law and order—or “LAW & ORDER!” as he tweeted again on Sunday—is maintained, thanks to the use of federal troops like the ones he sent into DC and Portland not long after the death of George Floyd.

Continue reading “Trump’s self-serving rhetoric on protests needs to be called out”