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

Last week, Facebook shut down the personal accounts of several researchers affiliated with New York University, claiming that their work—including a browser extension called Ad Observer, which allows users to share the ads that they are shown in their Facebook news feeds—violated the social network’s privacy policies. The company said that while it wants to help social scientists with their work, it can’t allow user information to be shared with third parties, in part because of the consent decree it signed with the Federal Trade Commission as part of a $5 billion settlement in the Camridge Analytica case in 2018. Researchers, including some of those who were involved in the NYU project, said Facebook’s behavior was not surprising, given the company’s long history of dragging its feet when it comes to sharing information. And not long after Facebook used the FTC consent decree as a justification for the shutdown, the federal agency took the unusual step of making public a letter it sent to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, stating that if the company had contacted the FTC about the research, “we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest.”

To discuss how Facebook responded in this case, its track record when it comes to social-science research, and the way that other platforms such as Twitter treat researchers, CJR brought together a number of experts using our Galley discussion platform. The group included Laura Edelson, a doctoral candidate in computer science at NYU and one of the senior scientists on the Ad Observatory team; Jonathan Mayer, a professor at Princeton and former chief technologist with the Federal Communication Commission; Julia Angwin, founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a data-driven investigative reporting startup that has a similar ad research tool called Citizen Browser; Neil Chilson, a fellow at the Charles Koch Institute and former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission; Nathalie Marechal of Ranking Digital Rights; and Rebekah Tromble, a doctoral candidate and director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University.

Edelson has said the drastic action Facebook took against her and the rest of the team was the culmination of a series of escalating threats about the group’s research (they are currently lobbying the company to get their accounts reinstated), but that she also has good relationships with some people at the social network. “Facebook’s behavior toward our group has been… complicated,” she said. Since the group studies the safety and efficacy of Facebook’s systems around political ads and misinformation, Edelson said “there is always going to be an inherent tension there,” but that there are several people she has worked with at Facebook who are “smart and dedicated.” One thing that makes the company’s behavior somewhat confusing is that the user information Facebook says it is trying to protect is the names of advertisers in its political ad program, which are publicly available through its own Ad Library. “Those are, technically speaking, Facebook user names,” Edelson says. “We think they are public, and Facebook is saying they are not.”

Continue reading “Facebook’s excuses for shutting down research ring hollow”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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