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Free speech and censorship are hot topics in North America, with heated debates over issues such as Facebook’s decision to delete pages belonging to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Twitter’s refusal to ban neo-Nazis, and whether Google should remove controversial or offensive YouTube videos. But none of these topics stir much interest in China, according to a recent piece by Li Yuan, a technology writer for The New York Times—mostly because an entire generation has never heard of Facebook, Twitter or Google, and censorship isn’t something they seem to care much about.

For anyone with an interest in the open, uncensored web, Li’s portrayal of how millennials and their ilk in China experience the Internet is likely to be profoundly depressing. She mentions an 18-year-old named Wei Dilong, who lives in a city in southern China and likes basketball, hip-hop music and Hollywood superhero movies. He has never heard of Google or Twitter, and has a hunch that Facebook might be a bit like Baidu, the Chinese search engine. Wen Shengjian, a 14-year-old who likes playing basketball, said he had heard of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but said a friend of his father’s told him they were blocked because some of their content wasn’t appropriate for the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics. “I don’t need them,” Wen said.

Li’s piece raises the possibility that the Chinese government has achieved some or all of its original goal in blocking certain sites and services, and heavily censoring others: It has managed to keep almost an entire generation away from content it disapproves of, and has replaced Western apps and services with its own heavily censored versions, to the point where young Chinese men and women show little or no interest in—or even awareness of—the alternative. According to Li, two economists found most college students were not interested in uncensored sites even when they were given free tools to access them.

The Knight First Amendment Institute on Tuesday called on Facebook to add a special amendment to its terms of service that would create a “safe harbor” for journalists and researchers, allowing them to do things other users are forbidden from doing, including creating fake accounts and using automated tools to harvest user data. It may seem like a reasonable request, but it’s likely to be highly contentious, if only because those are the exact same things that blew up in the company’s face with the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and the Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm.”

As reasonable as the Institute’s request may be, however, there’s an inherent problem at the heart of its proposal: Namely, who gets to decide who is deserving of protection? Having Facebook choose which researchers qualify might not raise too many red flags, but giving a private corporation the ability to say who is or isn’t an approved journalist would be hugely controversial, as evidenced by the controversy over Facebook’s recent attempts to rank “trusted” news outlets. Also, what’s to prevent bad actors from pretending to be journalists or researchers in order to get around the rules?

The Institute’s proposal and letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggest that the research or journalism in question would have to be designed to “inform the general public about matters of public concern,” including issues like echo chambers, misinformation, and discrimination. The proposal says researchers and journalists would have to take steps to protect user privacy and to not mislead users about the purpose of their work, and wouldn’t be able to sell or transfer any data they acquired.

Jameel Jaffer, the Institute’s executive director, said in an email that the group isn’t asking Facebook to decide who is and who isn’t a journalist. “We’re asking it to decide, with respect to any given investigative project, whether the purpose of the project is to inform the general public about matters of public concern, and whether the project appropriately protects the privacy of Facebook’s users and the integrity of Facebook’s platform,” he said. While there are risks in asking the platform to do so, Jaffer said it would be better than journalists and researchers being blocked from doing their work.

Digital journalism and research “are crucial to the public’s understanding of Facebook’s platform and its influence on our society,” the Institute says in its proposal. But Facebook’s terms of service “limit this kind of journalism and research because they ban tools that are often necessary to it.” The statement goes on to point out that journalists and researchers who use these tools risk not only having their accounts suspended or disabled, but also risk civil and criminal liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Kashmir Hill, who works on investigative projects for Gizmodo, says in a piece published Tuesday that Facebook tried to shut down a tool the site came up with to do research into the social network’s “People You May Know” feature. The tool still remains up and active, but Facebook made it clear that the kind of automated data collection Gizmodo was trying to do was a breach of its terms. The Knight Institute said Hill is one of the journalists it is representing in its attempt to get a safe harbor exemption, along with Kate Conger of The New York Times and award-winning journalist Cameron Hickey.

So far, Facebook’s response to the Institute’s request suggests it wants to appear concerned about the problem without sending any signal whatsoever about whether it intends to help. Campbell Brown, the social network’s Head of News, said in a statement that journalists and researchers “play a critical role in helping people better understand companies and their products—as well as holding us accountable when we get things wrong,” and that Facebook recognizes its rules “sometimes get in the way of this work.” But the company said nothing about what, if anything, it plans to do about that problem.

After almost a decade of giving China the cold shoulder, Google appears to be planning to re-enter the country officially, even if doing so means agreeing to the government’s demands for wholesale censorship of topics such as human rights and democracy. The story was initially reported by The Intercept, but multiple sources have now confirmed Google has been working on a Chinese search app (using the code name Dragonfly) for over a year, as well as a news app. Both would block sites that don’t comply with the country’s censorship rules, effectively making them part of China’s “Great Firewall.”

The news has caused some consternation in political circles, but also within Google, in much the same way the company’s work for the US Department of Defence did earlier this year. In that case, Google said it would not renew a contract it was working on, but it is less likely to back down in the case of China, since it represents a huge market opportunity (Facebook is also said to have worked on a feature that would allow the Chinese government to censor content on the network). According to The Intercept:

“When a person carries out a search, banned websites will be removed from the first page of results, and a disclaimer will be displayed stating that ‘some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements.’ Examples cited in the documents of websites that will be subject to the censorship include those of British news broadcaster BBC and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.”

Moving back into China with a service that implements government censorship would be a significant reversal for Google, which pulled out of the country completely eight years ago. The final straw was a series of hacks aimed at prominent Gmail accounts, but Google’s decision to leave also appeared to be driven in part by concerns about how it was playing into the hands of a totalitarian state by doing business in the country. At the time, co-founder Sergey Brin spoke about how China’s tactics reminded him of the methods used by the government of the former Soviet Union, where he lived as a child.

When Google was still active in the country, the company’s argument was that withdrawing would be worse than continuing to do business with a repressive government, since it would deprive Chinese citizens of a useful service. But that argument is significantly less persuasive now that China’s Baidu has effectively become the local version of Google search, and many other services as well. Now, an attempt to move back into the country would look more like a crass commercial gesture.

Google watchers and others are also concerned that if the company accedes to the Chinese government’s demands, it will make it easier for others to do so, and will also embolden other totalitarian states to ask for their own custom censorship services from Google and other tech giants.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1025021272076570624

“Any move by Google to provide government censored search services to China would not only be evil, but also incredibly dangerous,” wrote Lauren Weinstein, a long-time technology commentator who has worked as a consultant for the company. If it goes ahead with the plans, he said, “Google will not only have gone directly and catastrophically against its most fundamental purposes and ideals, but will have set the stage for similar demands for vast Google-enabled mass censorship from other countries around the world.”

Facebook has put on what amounts to a full-court press over the past several days, a move that appears to be aimed at convincing  Congress it is working hard to crack down on misinformation ahead of the upcoming US midterm elections. But is it really? Tuesday’s announcement that the company shut down 32 accounts for what it calls “inauthentic behavior” sounded impressive, and the blog post describing the move was filled with colorful details. On closer examination, however, the shutdown looks like fairly small potatoes, which makes the whole thing feel more like a PR campaign than anything substantive.

For a social network that has 2.2 billion users every day uploading more than ** posts and other content, 30 pages and accounts amount to a tiny molecule in a vast ocean of information. Even the most engaging post from that entire network garnered a relatively puny ** followers, and most of the content posted by the pages in question didn’t have anything to do with politics or even broader social issues related to the election.

Facebook made a point of saying that it wanted to be as transparent as possible about the steps it was taking, noting that it had shared details with Congress and with other tech companies, as well as with researchers such as the Digital Forensic Research Lab, and publishing a series of blog posts written by senior executives. And yet, this is the same company that has been repeatedly criticized by the UK government for not sharing enough information about its connections to Cambridge Analytica and that company’s use of private data. In a recent report, the UK’s commission on disinformation said:

“What we found, time and again, during the course of our inquiry, was the failure on occasions of Facebook and other tech companies, to provide us with the information that we sought. We undertook fifteen exchanges of correspondence with Facebook, and two oral evidence sessions, in an attempt to elicit some of the information that they held, including information regarding users’ data, foreign interference and details of the so-called ‘dark ads’ that had reached Facebook users. Facebook consistently responded to questions by giving the minimal amount of information possible, and routinely failed to offer information relevant to the inquiry.”

It’s easy to see why Facebook might be interested in at least giving the impression that it is hard at work fighting misinformation and malicious behavior. The federal grilling it got in the aftermath of the 2016 election about the activities of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian-operated troll farm, forced CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives to embark on what some called the 2018 Facebook Apology Tour, during which dozens of Senators and congressmen and women took turns admonishing them for allowing their platform to be used in an attempt to destabilize American democracy.

This experience was more than just embarrassing. It raised the possibility that Congress could decide to regulate the social network in a variety of unpleasant ways, up to and including limiting the protection it currently enjoys under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That’s the clause which effectively gives Facebook and other social platforms immunity from prosecution for anything posted by their users.

A recent discussion paper circulated among members of Congress and the tech community by Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, raises that as one of a number of potential regulatory moves—along with forcing the platforms to label automated accounts, requiring them to put a price tag on the user data they collect, and implementing a privacy framework similar to the European Union’s GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation. The proposals have no real regulatory weight, but they are still signposts that indicate where some politicians would like to go.

The memory of what happened during the 2016 election is likely still fresh for Mark Zuckerberg—how he failed to take action against a Russian troll network running a misinformation campaign aimed at influencing the election, and was ordered to appear before Congress for a dressing down. This time around, the Facebook CEO is doing his best to crack down on similar behavior before it becomes a problem: The company said Tuesday it has shut down more than 30 accounts and pages that were exhibiting behavior similar to that of the former Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

In its blog post announcing the move, Facebook said it couldn’t confirm whether the disinformation tactics it identified (which it called “coordinated inauthentic behavior”) came from Russian sources, but some observers appear to have already jumped to that conclusion. Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a prepared statement and on Twitter that he believes the campaign was also the work of Russian intelligence agencies. “More evidence the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation,” Warner said.

According to Facebook, the accounts in question were “more careful to cover their tracks” than the Internet Research Agency was, by using virtual private networks to disguise their location, or paying third parties to run ads. “As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort,” Facebook said. The company admitted, however, that some of the activity was consistent with what they saw during the election, and that there was some evidence of a connection between the latest group of accounts and the Internet Research Agency accounts disabled last year.

There have been multiple sessions in Congress over the past year looking at the failures of digital platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, including their failure to properly limit the actions of trolls spreading misinformation during the 2016 election. But there have been very few concrete proposals from the government on how to deal with those failures, how to blunt the virtual monopoly some of the platforms have on certain kinds of information, or how to handle user privacy.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner hopes to fill that gap with a white paper he has been circulating in governmental and tech circles over the past few weeks, according to a report from Axios (which obtained a copy of the paper from an unknown source). The proposals contained in the paper are wide-ranging, and in some cases may even be politically impossible, but at least someone has started an official discussion about some of the potential decisions Washington could take.

The paper states that the revelations of the past year, including evidence that Russian trolls manipulated Facebook, have “revealed the dark underbelly of an entire ecosystem.” It goes on to say:

“The speed with which these products have grown and come to dominate nearly every aspect of our social, political and economic lives has in many ways obscured the shortcomings of their creators in anticipating the harmful effects of their use. Government has failed to adapt and has been incapable or unwilling to adequately address the impacts of these trends on privacy, competition, and public discourse.”

When it comes to misinformation, the Warner paper proposes that platforms be required to label automated or “bot” accounts, and also do more to identify who is behind anonymous or pseudonymous accounts, and it proposes that a failure to do these things might be bet by Federal Trade Commission sanctions. But would either of these things actually help solve the issues Congress is concerned about?

Experts in misinformation say bots are just one part of the problem, and that the behavior of what are sometimes called “cyborgs”—partially automated accounts run by human beings—is also important. And while anonymity can be a shield for some trolls, others are more than happy to engage in all kinds of bad behavior under their real names. The paper also admits that identifying users could backfire if it invades the privacy of journalists or others who have real reasons for wanting to remain anonymous.

One other significant change the Warner paper proposes is a change to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives the platforms immunity from prosecution for content that is uploaded by their users. Since some users complain that harassing material is often re-uploaded after being removed because of defamation, etc., the white paper recommends that Section 230 be amended so that the platforms could face sanctions if they don’t prevent such material from reappearing.

In addition, the paper argues that the US should pass privacy-protection legislation similar to the General Data Protection Regulation now in force in Europe, including the right to data portability and what is often called “the right to be forgotten.” It notes, however, that in order to have a GDPR-like regime, the US would have to create a central body to administer the law, something it doesn’t currently have.

If there’s one thing we can count on in these uncertain times, it’s that no matter what evidence they are presented with, many Republican members of Congress will remain convinced that the major social platforms are in league against them and are secretly using their algorithms to down-rank conservative content. The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives held a hearing in April on this topic—one that spent most of its time trying to decide whether Facebook had somehow censored the right-wing YouTube duo known as Diamond & Silk—and it held a second hearing on Tuesday.

The executives testifying before the committee were Monika Bickert, Head of Global Policy Management at Facebook; Juniper Downs, YouTube’s Global Head of Public Policy and Government Relations; and Nick Pickles, Senior Strategist for Public Policy at Twitter. Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte said the hearing’s purpose was to “look at concerns regarding a lack of transparency and potential bias in the filtering practices of social media companies [and] how they can be better stewards of free speech.” But as with the first hearing, most of the discussion on Tuesday focused on individual claims by members of Congress that one or more of the social platforms was censoring conservative views.

Republican Lamar Smith of Texas asked why Google censored search terms like “Jesus, Chick-Fil-A and the Catholic religion,” although he couldn’t provide any evidence for his claim. Iowa Republican Steve King asked Facebook why right-wing news site Gateway Pundit had seen its traffic drop. Neither comment drew much response from the platforms (Facebook said it couldn’t comment on individual pages). On a more serious note, Goodlatte and others also raised the question of whether the social platforms should still be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

For the most part, the platforms stuck to their argument that they are neutral when it comes to content, and that they don’t deliberately prejudice their algorithms against conservative posts. But it was clear the repeated allegations of bias have hit their mark, and the platforms seem nervous. As The Washington Post reported last month, both Facebook and Twitter had back-room meetings with conservative celebrities and pundits to reassure them they aren’t biased, and at the beginning of Tuesday’s committee hearing, Monika Bickert of Facebook apologized for “mishandling” the Diamond & Silk situation.

Some Democratic members said the platforms weren’t doing enough to remove offensive content, including sites peddling dangerous conspiracy theories such as Infowars. Ted Lieu of California, meanwhile, said the hearing was a waste of time, and that members of the committee should have been investigating the Russian infiltration of the NRA, instead of “how many Facebook likes Diamond & Silk should be entitled to have.” He said the only thing worse than a video from Alex Jones of the conspiracy site Infowars was the idea of the US government holding a hearing about content published on a private platform.

Here’s more on the social platforms and their struggles with Congress:

• Facebook as utility: In addition to criticizing Facebook for allegedly restricting the traffic of Gateway Pundit, Republican Steve King mused during the hearing about whether the social network and other massive tech platforms should be subject to the ultimate penalty. “What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we’re talking about here into public utilities?” he asked.
• No Infowars ban: One theme that Democratic members returned to multiple times during the hearing was why Facebook wouldn’t just ban misinformation providers such as Infowars. “How many strikes does a conspiracy theorist who attacks grieving parents and student survivors of a mass shooting get?” asked Ted Deutch of Florida. Bickert said fake news doesn’t breach the site’s terms of service, but tweaks to the News Feed algorithm are designed to down-rank such sites.
• Appeasement: Just days before the hearing, a group of senior media executives met with Facebook and some criticized the company for bending over backwards to appease conservatives, according to The Wall Street Journal. BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith said the number of conservative news sites at the meeting suggested Facebook had bought into the idea “that mainstream outlets such as the New York Times are liberal and should be counterbalanced by right-leaning opinion outlets.”
• Three strikes: While Juniper Downs of YouTube was fairly straightforward on how many strikes a news outlet had before being blocked for posting offensive content (three), Facebook was not nearly as forthcoming. When asked how many times a site like Infowars would be able to post content that breached the site’s guidelines, Bickert waffled and would only tell the committee that “the threshold varies depending on the severity of the infractions.”
• QAnon fans: New York Times writer Kevin Roose pointed out on Twitter that the live comments on YouTube’s stream of the Judiciary hearing were filled with conspiracy theorists who appeared to believe the QAnon conspiracy, a series of rumors spread on various Internet forums about an alleged coup against the “deep state.” Roose called this ironic juxtaposition “kind of perfect.”

Other notable stories:

A man who worked for a Facebook contractor in Dublin moderating content on the social network said in a documentary aired on Britain’s Channel 4 network that the company lets far-right fringe groups get away with posting content that others are banned for, including hate speech. Facebook posted a response that said these examples were mistakes and that it would retrain its moderators so they wouldn’t happen again.

Karen Ho and Alexandria Neason write for CJR about the return of former long-time WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate, who has a new show on WBAI, a progressive station based in Brooklyn. Lopate was suspended from WNYC and eventually fired after reports of inappropriate conduct.

A federal judge lifted a controversial order that would have required the Los Angeles Times to remove information it had published in a story about a former Glendale police detective who was accused of working with the Mexican mafia. The information was supposed to have been sealed by the court, but was posted to a public database of court documents by mistake. The judge said the paper could publish the information but he warned it to be careful because of the danger it might put the defendant in.

Isaac Lee, the head of content for Univision and architect of the company’s Fusion expansion, is stepping down from his position and plans to start his own TV production company, according to a report in Variety magazine. Univision recently changed CEOs and said it is looking to sell some of its holdings, including Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion, acquisitions Lee spearheaded.

Andy Kroll writes for California Sunday Magazine about Congressman Adam Schiff, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and how he has gone from being a mild-mannered politician without much of a public profile to the unlikely hero of the Democratic party for his role in pushing for an investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian government.

Imagine, for a moment, that the media ecosystem as we know it has ceased to exist. There are still journalists and readers, but all the traditional distribution methods and revenue streams are unavailable. How would you design a new ecosystem from scratch? How would you build a financially viable publishing platform that would also inherently support journalistic values?

This, in a nutshell, is what Civil founder Matthew Iles is trying to build: A global platform for independent journalism, powered by blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, governed by an open-source constitution—including an advisory council that will act as a kind of Supreme Court to adjudicate disputes—and run as a non-profit foundation. In addition, there’s a related for-profit company called Civil Media, which will sell services of various kinds to platform users and publishers.

Civil hasn’t launched its cryptocurrency yet, but the platform already hosts newsrooms like Popula, which is run by writer Maria Bustillos, and Block Club Chicago (a reboot of the Chicago version of the former DNA Info network) as well as a New York-based project called Documented that is tracking immigration issues. Each one has gotten seed funding from a $1-million pool provided by Civil. Civil itself is funded by a $5 million grant from ConsenSys, a developer working with the Ethereum blockchain.

It’s an ambitious goal, to not only launch a new blockchain platform, but also a crowdsourced constitution, a foundation and a council of expert advisers all at the same time. It’s a bit like creating a virtual country, complete with citizens who vote, an economy, a court system and a government—but the structure of this country is unlike anything that has come before it. As Vivian Schiller, the former NPR and Twitter executive who recently joined Civil to run its non-profit foundation, put it in a Medium piece about her new job:

If you have an anti-Elon Musk take, you should probably publish it soon, because they are piling up. The latest was triggered by his attempt to help rescue a group of young soccer players trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. A piece at Gizmodo said Musk’s attempt was a classic example of his empty promises, and made fun of the fact that no one wanted the mini-sub he developed. But the piece itself seems like a great example of something else: Namely, a desire to see the worst in Elon Musk, no matter what. It says:

The weird difference between some of Musk’s famous vaporiffic moonshots and the kid-sized submarine is that Musk actually built the sub. But it’s nothing more than a useless stunt. Not only did Musk show up too late to help, he showed up with a tool that wasn’t even helpful.

A similar sentiment triggered dozens of scathing Twitter memes about the dumb and publicity-hungry billionaire showing up after something is all over with the stupid invention that isn’t even necessary. But at the end of the Gizmodo piece, an update notes that Musk posted part of an email exchange he had with the man co-ordinating the rescue effort, in which the man encouraged Musk to hurry up developing the mini-sub. In other words, it wasn’t just some billionaire’s feeble attempt at PR.

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Did this change anyone’s mind about Musk or the cave resuce? Not appreciably. After his tweet explaining the email exchange, new pieces appeared taking shots at him for denigrating **, because he said in his email that the man was a ** rather than an expert in cave rescues.

How did Musk suddenly become the poster child for bad billionaires? Not that long ago, he was a little-known engineering nerd working on an affordable electric car. What a great idea, everyone thought. He did a small cameo in the first Iron Man movie, and it seemed cute. Then it turned out he was building a reusable rocket that might go to Mars. Another great idea! Especially when it actually worked.

So what happened? The electric car turned out to be the Tesla, which is unaffordable for most normal people but took off with wealthy tech executives. Then Musk—who seems incapable of not doing five things at once—started a bunch of crazy-sounding side projects, like the Hyperloop, or his plan to dig tunnels underneath Los Angeles to avoid traffic. Almost all of these projects were seen as expensive toys designed by a short-attention-span billionaire, like his desire to shoot a Tesla into space.

Musk has also taken fire for the amount of debt he has raised to fund Tesla, even as he has come up short on production of the latest model, and he responded in a somewhat childish way by attacking the media for reporting on him. At one point, he even proposed starting a service that would automatically rank sources of trustworthy journalism, a service he sarcastically said would be called Pravda—which of course is the name of a notoriously unreliable Russian government newspaper.

When he was still a plucky, little-known entrepreneur, Musk’s try-anything attitude and somewhat wacky and combative Twitter persona seemed endearing. But now that he is running several billion-dollar enterprises and dating an Internet celebrity (singer **, also known as Grimes), the way he shoots from the lip on almost any topic makes his Twitter account a target-rich environment for anyone wanting to cut him down to size. And there is no shortage of people who seem eager to do so.

While Facebook has taken the brunt of the criticism over fake news, YouTube has also become a target of late for those who believe the video-sharing site isn’t doing enough to stem the flow of misinformation. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has called it “an engine for radicalization,” because the YouTube algorithm continually suggests extreme content, and a former Google engineer who worked on the algorithm agrees, telling CJR this behavior was designed as a way of boosting engagement.

The Google-owned site appears to have heard some of these criticisms, because it just announced new features it says should help cut down on the spread of misinformation through the platform, along with a $25 million funding program the company says is aimed at fostering innovation at news organizations—money that comes from the recently announced $300-million Google News Initiative. The first feature being rolled out is an “information panel” that will pop up on top of search results involving breaking news stories, with links to news articles about the event from “authoritative sources.”

And who defines what qualifies as an authoritative source? YouTube, of course. According to the announcement, Fox News fits into that category, something a number of observers say is problematic at best. In any case, the feature is designed to help avoid some of the embarrassing moments YouTube has suffered in the past, when conspiracy theories and hoaxes popped up among the top recommended videos for news events such as the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. At one point, most of the top 10 recommended videos about that event said the victims were “crisis actors.”

For years now, Twitter has been accused of being too soft on trolls, spam, and fake accounts. But the service appears to be trying to make up for lost time: According to a report from The Washington Post, based on anonymous sources with knowledge of the company’s inner workings, Twitter has dramatically ramped up the rate at which it suspends fake accounts. It is now suspending as many as one million every day, and has shut down over 70 million since April. But the process could backfire.

One reason why the company hasn’t taken concerted action against such fakes in the past is that they boost the service’s user numbers, which makes it look more popular, and therefore satisfies investors. That helps explain why Twitter’s share price dropped by as much as 8 percent on Monday, the first trading opportunity after the Post report came out: Investors were concerned that weeding out fakes might hit Twitter’s user numbers. But Twitter’s chief financial officer sought to reassure them:

Whether most of the accounts suspended so far were largely inactive or not, the moves are still likely to have an impact on Twitter’s user base, and market watchers say that could trim some of the recent enthusiasm about the stock. If the inactive accounts were the low-hanging fruit, then future suspensions could have even more impact on its numbers, as Twitter has to suspend some of the more active accounts (assuming it wants to continue its campaign to root them out).

One interesting aspect of the Post story is that a group of Twitter employees concerned about trolls and fakes appears to have mounted a kind of guerilla campaign within the company to get it to see the dangers of allowing such accounts to run rampant. The story describes a “white hat” attempt to call attention to the problem, and says the project—code-named Operation Megaphone—remained secret from Twitter executives, including head of trust and safety Del Harvey.

“The name of the operation referred to the virtual megaphones — such as fake accounts and automation — that abusers of Twitter’s platforms use to drown out other voices. The program, also known as a white hat operation, was part of a broader plan to get the company to treat disinformation campaigns by governments differently than it did more traditional problems such as spam, which is aimed at tricking individual users as opposed to shaping the political climate.”

Another reason Twitter  might have been reluctant to pursue an all-out campaign against fakes and trolls is that doing so could open the company up to further charges of being biased against conservatives, something it has already been fighting hard to deny at private dinners between CEO Jack Dorsey and prominent conservative commentators and celebrities. If someone showed that many of the suspended accounts appear to be right-wing, that would give critics even more ammunition.

Meanwhile, at least one conservative Twitter user believes the company should use its expanded suspension powers on other kinds of fakes, such as the “fake news” purveyors he believes are covering his administration unfairly, including The New York Times and the Post. After the Washington Post report was published, president Donald Trump tweeted:

A wave of mob violence continues to roll across India—beatings and lynchings that appear to be related to conspiracy theories circulating on WhatsApp. In the most recent episode last Sunday, five people were lynched by a mob who believed they were child kidnappers. As CJR has described, one problem with trying to stop the spread of misinformation on the service is that it is encrypted end-to-end, so neither WhatsApp nor its parent company Facebook ever see the messages they distribute.

It’s like trying to stop conspiracy theories being spread by people calling each other on the phone. Are there ways to stop such things? Yes, but the solution could turn out to be worse than the problem.

The Indian government, however, doesn’t see it that way. The country’s information ministry sent a strongly-worded letter to WhatsApp this week, saying it “cannot evade accountability and responsibility” for the abuse on its platform. The government also ordered the company to “take immediate action to end this menace.” In a response, WhatsApp executives argued that they can’t solve the problem alone, and that false news, misinformation and the spread of hoaxes “are issues best tackled collectively by government, civil society and technology companies working together.”

WhatsApp said it is “horrified by these acts of violence,” and that it has taken a series of steps recently to try to cut down on misinformation, including giving WhatsApp group administrators more power over who gets to send messages. The company also said it will give up to $50,000 to researchers to study the problem. But is this enough? Nikhil Pahwa doesn’t think so. The publisher of a site called Medianama, Pahwa wrote about some of the steps he thinks WhatsApp should take:

“Change #1: Users can make messages either public (media) or private (P2P message). The default setting for all messages should be private. This will impact virality on the platform, but that’s a price it will have to pay for bringing in accountability. This will create a level of friction while forwarding: they will be frustrated when they cannot forward certain messages.”

Pahwa also argued that WhatsApp could make it easier for users to flag certain messages as misinformation or hoaxes, and they could then be reviewed by WhatsApp moderators the same way spam is. Other users responding to his post said it should be easy enough to delete these messages not just in a few accounts but anywhere they were shared across the network. A proposal from Pahwa that suggested every public message should have a unique ID tagged to its creator, however, got some pushback:

Much like other Internet-related issues, WhatsApp’s deadly rumor mill is not an easy problem to solve. The anonymity and encryption of WhatsApp are two features that make the app so appealing for many, in particular for dissidents and others who want to communicate with fear of being identified. And yet, those same features also enable or empower trolls and bad actors to misuse the platform for their own purposes. How do you stop one without also crippling the other? Meanwhile, some believe that in this case, India itself is more to blame for the misinformation problem than WhatsApp.

There are a couple of different ways to look at the acquisition of Quartz, which announced early Monday morning that parent company Atlantic Media is selling the site to a Japanese financial information provider called Uzabase. On the one hand, for a media startup to get between $75 million and $110 million after only six years in business is probably cause for some celebration, given an industry environment in which even giants like BuzzFeed are missing revenue targets, and one-time superstars like Mashable are selling themselves for a fraction of their previous value (The Atlantic magazine was sold last year for an undisclosed price to Emerson Collective, which is controlled by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs).

That said, however, the Quartz deal doesn’t give media insiders much to celebrate from a financial point of view. Based on figures from a Uzabase slide presentation about the acquisition, even the higher end of the proposed sale price (which is based on certain subscription targets being met over the next five years) amounts to about 2.5 times Quartz’s projected revenues for this year, and less than four times last year’s revenue. That’s not quite at the low end of prior deals, but neither is it at the high end, which was set by Axel Springer’s acquisition of Business Insider in 2015, for six times projected revenues.

To be fair, the ABusiness Insider deal is widely seen as an anomaly. The German media giant had reportedly gotten board approval to spend as much as $1 billion on an acquisition of the Financial Times, but when the magazine was bought by Japan’s Nikkei instead, Springer was left with a bag of cash and a hunger to expand. The muted price for Quartz could also be a result of what appears to be a revenue decline last year of about 10 percent (to $27 million), as well as a significant loss of $8 million.

Another reason the Quartz deal is likely to spark only muted celebration in broader media circles is that Atlantic Media has been shopping the site around to potential acquirers off and on since 2015, and it wound up being sold to a little-known Japanese media startup not much older than itself. Uzabase was founded in 2008 by two former investment bankers from UBS. Their original mission was to build a financial information service that could compete with Bloomberg, a service now known as Speeda, and more recently Uzabase launched a news curation/aggregation app called NewsPicks.

Although the name may not be that familiar to a lot of North American users, the company says NewsPicks has more than 64,000 users who pay $15 a month for a premium version of the app, which allows members to share and comment on news articles. That’s an income stream of almost $1 million a month, something many media companies would no doubt like to have coming in as digital advertising wanes. And Uzabase itself appears to have a strong business: The company went public in 2016 and the stock price has climbed sharply since then, giving it a market cap of almost $1 billion.

Much like the Nikkei deal for the Financial Times, the Uzabase/Quartz acquisition suggests there is a continuing appetite from Asian media entities—particularly financially-oriented ones—for outlets that have a presence in English-speaking markets. But based on the terms of the Quartz sale, no one in the media industry should get their hopes up about that translating into a massive windfall.

Are tech platforms biased against conservative users? That accusation keeps coming up, and both Facebook and Twitter seem almost desperate to prove it’s not the case, to the point where they keep meeting with conservative groups and Trump supporters in an attempt to show good faith. This process is fraught with complications, however, since a) it’s not clear right-wing critics actually have a case for making such a claim, and b) bending over backwards to prove they aren’t biased has blown up in Facebook’s face in the not-so-distant past, and in the process arguably made the situation worse.

Washington Post writer Tony Romm has a story up about secret meetings that both Twitter and Facebook have had with Trump aides and other conservative leaders, including senior members of the Republican National Committee, in which they tried to ease concerns about alleged bias in their platforms and algorithms. According to Romm, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey held a private dinner that included Fox News commentator Greta Van Susteren and Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp:

“The gathering came weeks after Dorsey provoked conservatives’ ire by tweeting a story suggesting voters should elect Democrats in November… the Twitter executive heard an earful from conservatives gathered at the table, who scoffed at the fact that Dorsey runs a platform that’s supposed to be neutral even though he’s tweeted about issues like immigration, gay rights and national politics.”

The story goes on to say that Facebook sent a team to Washington to address complaints of bias, a team led by former Republican senator Jon Kyl, who met with groups like the Heritage Foundation.  Conservative critics like to bring up the alleged “banning” of two right-wing video bloggers known as Diamond and Silk (even though they weren’t banned), and the fact that a conservative congresswoman was blocked from uploading a video about abortion. But some argue that this eagerness to prove they aren’t biased not only won’t actually work, but could backfire on the platforms.

For a glimpse of how this could backfire, all you have to do is look at what happened when conservative critics accused Facebook of rigging its “trending topics” section to remove content from certain right-wing news sources in 2016. The accusation was based on some comments made by the human editors Facebook used for the feature, who told Gizmodo they had discretion to remove some sources. The social network responded by firing almost all of its editors, then reached out to conservative pundits for meetings at which it maintained that it wasn’t biased. It recently shut down the feature altogether.

If you assume such incidents have made the issue of conservative bias a hot button for both Facebook and Twitter, it’s not hard to draw a line between the platforms’ desire to avoid such charges and criticism that they are too soft on right-wing trolls and others who take advantage of their networks. There are even those who argue Facebook’s attempt at damage control after the trending topics fiasco made it easier for the Trump administration to leverage the platform to help win the 2016 election.

Does this kind of accusation seem like a stretch? Maybe a little. But if right-wing allegations of bias are not being made in good faith, but are only another blunt instrument with which to try and hamstring political opponents, then treating those allegations as serious and bending over backwards to prove them wrong could actually cause as much or even more damage than it prevents.

On the one hand, all the recent talk about a decline in “civility” seems like a distraction from much more important topics, such as the detaining of immigrant families in what amount to internment camps, as Pete Vernon pointed out in yesterday’s newsletter. And yet, the debate continues, with multiple articles and op-ed pieces plumbing the depths of the most obvious hot takes: Namely, a) The decline of civility on the left is a gift to Trump and his supporters, or b) At a time when we are surrounded by literal Nazis bent on destroying the rule of law, asking for civility is like fiddling while Rome is aflame.

Is it because summer is under way, and people are looking for a quick story or column they can polish off before they duck out to catch a baseball game or watch the World Cup? Or is there more to this debate than meets the eye? Probably a combination of both.

The appeal of a hot take on civility is fairly obvious for both sides of political sphere. For the left, it’s a way to establish just how serious things have gotten in recent months, as the president has locked up immigrant babies in “tender care” camps and mused publicly about how due process for those seeking asylum is a nuisance, and we should probably get rid of it. At a time like this, how can we realistically get mad at someone for denying Sarah Huckabee Sanders a meal at a restaurant, or at Robert de Niro for swearing at Trump? Would being polite to Hitler have made things any better?

On the right, meanwhile, the focus on civility provides a slam-dunk argument that the left has lost its way and are now a pack of drooling jackals. After all, wasn’t it the left who insisted that “when they go low, we go high?” Now they seem just as happy to get down in the muck and sling it anywhere they can. And the fact that the left’s argument amounts to “we can’t be polite because the right are Nazis,” it allows conservatives to make the case that liberals have lost the ability to draw distinctions between what Trump is doing and what the Third Reich did. In other words, that the left has become hysterical.