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One great thing about fall is it’s a chance to post this timeless classic from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency — “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers”

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”

In September of 2014, Tom Maxwell moved with his family into a large, historic home in Hillsborough, North Carolina. With its affordable rent and lush surroundings, it seemed too good to be true. Nine months later, they broke their lease, loaded up the truck, and ran away as fast as they could from the spirits and apparitions that had tortured them. Only afterward would Maxwell learn about the 300 years of bad mojo that had piled up in the house they called Nannie.

“The old and sturdy house, set on rolling pastureland alongside a placid river, appeared safe and calm. It was not. Nannie, and the land around her, was thoroughly haunted. In less than a year we would break the lease, perform a binding ritual, and leave.

As the nature and intensity of the hauntings increased, an elongate man appeared downstairs, almost two-dimensional in his flatness. He would peep at you from around corners or through doorways, just inside your peripheral vision. When you looked at him, he would flash a toothy smile, flatten into the wall and vanish. Scratches appeared on Brooke’s back several times, before my eyes, as we showered.

A hooded thing with long, thin arms began standing over Brooke as she slept. We discussed the possibility of night-hag syndrome, a particularly unpleasant type of sleep paralysis. Whatever it was, it was recurring and utterly terrifying. We had a list of nicknames for our tormentors: Smokey, Spaghetti Arms, The Spook Parade, Bonnet Lady, Smiley, Buckskin Man, Kitchen Lady, The Upstairs Thing.”

In this new apartment complex in Harlem, some experimental apartments are fitted with a structural system designed by former Apple and Tesla engineers, which hides most of the resident’s belongings — including their bed — in the ceiling. Drawers filled with clothing and other articles drop down on command, using a smartphone, and according to the designers the app remembers where the owner put all of their clothing, so a user can request a certain hat or sweater and the system will bring down that drawer. Not a bad way of making a 500-square-foot apartment seem a lot larger!

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

Last week, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee about the company’s propensity for disregarding its own research into the harms done by its content algorithms, particularly among young girls who use Instagram, its photo-sharing site. One of the solutions that Haugen recommended is something a number of other Facebook critics have also proposed over the past several years: regulatory oversight that would impose standards of behavior on the social network (and presumably other social networks such as Twitter and YouTube) in an attempt to minimize their various harms. “Right now, the only people in the world who are trained to … understand what’s happening inside of Facebook, are people who grew up inside of Facebook or Pinterest or another social media company,” Haugen told the Senate subcommittee on **. She said the company’s profit motive was so strong that Facebook would not change unless it was subjected to pressure from a government regulator. “Until incentives change at Facebook, we should not expect Facebook to change,” she said. “We need action from Congress.”

There are plenty of critics of this idea, but there’s also one somewhat surprising supporter: Facebook. In a March, 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, argued that government regulation is necessary and that he welcomes it: “Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks,” he wrote. “But if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t ask companies to make these judgments alone. “I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators.” Among other things, Zuckerberg said he agreed with the need for a data protection law similar to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. “I believe it would be good for the Internet if more countries adopted regulation such as GDPR as a common framework,” he wrote.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, reiterated this line of argument in interviews following Haugen’s 60 Minutes interview. The algorithms the company uses “should be held to account, if necessary by regulation so that people can match what our systems say they’re supposed to do from what actually happens,” Clegg said on CNN. He also said the company is open to amending Section 230 of the Communictions Decency Act, which protects platforms from liability for what their users post. “We’re not saying this is a substitution of our own responsibilities,” Clegg told NBC, “but there are a whole bunch of things that only regulators and lawmakers can do. I don’t think anyone wants a private company to adjudicate on these difficult trade-offs between free expression on one hand and moderating or removing content on the other. Only lawmakers can create a digital regulator.”

Continue reading “Facebook hearing sparks talk of a social media regulator”

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

Several weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published a series of six investigative news stories about Facebook, alleging a pattern of questionable behavior on the part of both the social network and its photo-sharing service, Instagram. One alleged that changes to the Facebook news feed algorithm, which were purportedly designed to improve the news-reading experience, actually had the opposite effect, and “turned it into an angrier place.” Another said that the company knew about the negative effects its Instagram service was having on the mental health of young girls, because researchers working at Facebook had repeatedly mentioned it during briefings with senior executives, but Facebok took little or no action. Other Journal stories revealed a little-known feature that allowed celebrities to avoid responsibility for breaching Facebook’s rules, and claimed that the company knew its services were being used by drug cartels and human trafficking networks, but routinely failed to do anything to stop it (Facebook responded that the stories are inaccurate and that it cares deeply about the effect its products have on users, including young girls).

The Journal reports were all based on what the paper called “an extensive array of internal company communications” given to it by a whistleblower, a former Facebook staffer who copied the documents before they quit working for the company because they disagreed with its behavior. On Sunday, the whistleblower revealed herself on 60 Minutes to be Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook who has also worked for Google, Pinterest, Yelp, and a number of other technology companies. On Tuesday, Haugen testified before the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, product safety, and data security about the potential dangers of Instagram for young users (Haugen also posted her testimony to her personal website). In both her 60 Minutes interview and her congressional testimony, Haugen made the same central point: that Facebook knew about the dangers of the recommendation algorithms that power it and Instagram, but chose to do nothing. It knew about these dangers, Haugen said, because the company’s own researchers had mentioned them repeatedly in multiple research papers.

“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people,” Haugen said during her testimony to the senate committee. The bottom line, she said, is that Congress must take action, comparing Facebook to other industries that also wound up being regulated by the government in order to protect consumers from harm, such as tobacco companies and car makers. One of the big challenges with Facebook, she argued, is that legislators don’t have any idea how the company’s products work, because it is so reluctant to either share data from its own internal research, or provide data to outside scientists. “This inability to see into Facebook’s actual systems and confirm they work as communicated is like the Department of Transportation regulating cars by only watching them drive down the highway,” Haugen told the senate committee.

Continue reading “Whistleblower turns up the heat on Facebook and Instagram”

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

Earlier this month, an Australian court issued a decision in a long-running defamation case: the judges ruled that Dylan Voller, who filed the case in 2017, could proceed with a defamation lawsuit against a number of Australian media outlets, including Murdoch-owned The Australian and Sky News. Not that unusual. Except that Voller isn’t suing these news companies for things they printed or broadcast about him, he’s suing them for things that Facebook users said in comments that appeared on the Facebook pages of those media companies after they linked to news stories about him. In effect, the Australian court said these media outlets are legally responsible for the comments their readers left on those posts, even if the companies were unaware of their existence. The chilling effect of this decision has already been felt even outside Australia: according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, CNN says it will shut off all public access to its Facebook pages in Australia because of the ruling.

The decision states that “the acts of the appellants in facilitating, encouraging and thereby assisting the posting of comments by the third-party Facebook users rendered them publishers of those comments,” and therefore liable. The judges added that an attempt by the media companies to portray themselves as “passive and unwitting victims of Facebook’s functionality” was not credible. “Having taken action to secure the commercial benefit of the Facebook functionality, the appellants bear the legal consequences,” the court said. It’s worth noting that the decision isn’t a lower-court ruling that might later be reversed: Voller won the original case, giving him the right to sue the companies; an appeals court upheld that decision in 2019, and that in turn was appealed to the country’s highest court, which issued the latest ruling. Five of the seven judges hearing it agreed with the majority.

When news of the decision was first released, some speculated that media companies might shut down their comments, or even their entire Facebook presence, for fear of being caught up in similar lawsuits. CNN appears to be the first, but it may not be the last. The media company reportedly asked Facebook for help in turning off comments on all of its posts in Australia, but the social network refused. Until recently, Facebook didn’t allow comments to be turned off on pages, presumably because they are a significant source of user engagement. It introduced the ability to do so in 2019, after the original Australian court decision in the Voller case, but comments have to be disabled on a post by post basis, rather than across all of a publisher’s pages.

Continue reading “Australian defamation ruling threatens media companies”

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

In a data leak first reported last week by independent journalist Steven Monacelli on Twitter, a group of unnamed hackers claiming to be associated with the hacker collective known as Anonymous released more than 180 gigabytes of data from Epik, a web-hosting company that has become notorious for having a number of alt-right groups and services as clients, including right-wing Twitter alternatives Gab and Parler, as well as pro-gun and pro-Trump sites. “This dataset is all that’s needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the internet,” the group said in its news release. “Time to find out who in your family secretly ran an Ivermectin horse porn fetish site, disinfo publishing outfit or yet another QAnon hellhole.” The data dump is said to contain account information for all of Epik’s clients, including the registered owner’s email address, mailing address, and other information (although some right-wing sites use anonymization services to conceal this data).

The importance of the information in the Epik hack — if it proves to be accurate — seems obvious, especially for researchers trying to track QAnon groups or other disinformation sources, as well as hate-speech advocates and domestic terrorists. “The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive,” Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism, told the Washington Post. “Without Epik, many extremist communities—from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis—would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the January 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy.”

Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a journalism non-profit that specializes in leaked data, told the Post that some researchers have called the Epik hack “the Panama Papers of hate groups,” a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed the offshore finance industry. Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism, told the Post “It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting. It’s an embarrassment of riches.” Like the Panama Papers, getting information out of the huge database and making sense of it is time-consuming, which could explain why it took several days for mainstream sites like CNN and the Post to report on the Epik hack.

Continue reading “Leaked files from alt-right host Epik raise some hard questions”

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

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, and widespread criticism that Facebook had helped to destabilize the process by enabling Russian trolls and spreading disinformation, the company seemed to strike mostly an apologetic tone. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, occasionally seemed defensive in his subsequent testimony before Congress, but the general sense was that he and the company were sorry for playing a role in those events, and were trying to do better. However, more recently Facebook appears to be taking a much more aggressive approach to criticism, if the company’s response to recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times is any indication. The social network also seems to be trying to shift public opinion by inserting positive stories about Facebook into users’ news feeds, while Zuckerberg is doing his best to stay out of the fray.

After a series of Journal articles detailing how Facebook has a special program that allows celebrities to get around the platform’s rules of behavior, and has ignored the advice of its own researchers in its drive for growth at both Facebook and Instagram, the company responded with a lengthy blog post written by Nicholas Clegg, vice-president of global affairs and a former deputy prime minister in the UK. In it, the Facebook executive said the stories “contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do,” and that the reporting from the Journal “conferred egregiously false motives to Facebook’s leadership and employees.” The central allegation in the series, he said — that the company conducts research, and then systematically and willfully ignores it if the findings are inconvenient — is “just plain false.”

In the past, given such accusations, Zuckerberg might have penned his own blog post explaining the company’s behavior, as he did when Facebook said it was moving discussions on the platform toward private groups and encrypted messaging, or when he was describing his commitment to free speech, or when he discussed the decision to permanently block Donald Trump from the platform. In this case, Facebook decided to expand on Clegg’s argument in a separate post, but the post was not signed by anyone. In it, the company tried to highlight some of the positive work it has done on disinformation and abuse, including the fact that it has 40,000 people working on safety and security, and has invested more than $13 billion to protect users (which a former Facebook executive pointed out is about four percent of the company’s revenue).

Continue reading “Facebook goes on the offensive against critical reporting”