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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

The difficulty of moderating the ocean of content that gets posted on social networks by billions of users every day was obvious even before Donald Trump’s presidential trolling forced Facebook and other platforms to block his accounts earlier this year. Trying to determine what constitutes genuine harassment or abuse vs. friendly banter, identifying images and videos that are inappropriate or harmful from the tens of millions uploaded every day, distinguishing between authentic political messages and professional trolling operations, and so on is hard enough just for English-speaking audiences in North America, but these challenges are compounded when different languages and cultural norms are involved. What sounds like innocuous phrasing when translated into English could be dangerous hate speech in another language or culture, and automated systems — and even human moderators — are often not good at making those distinctions.

On top of these kinds of social or technical hurdles, there are political ones as well. Countries with authoritarian regimes have become expert in navigating the terms of service for the major platforms, and using them to flag content they don’t agree with, and some countries have used problematic content such as “fake news” as an excuse to legislate the truth. How are the digital platforms handling these challenges? And what are the potential downsides of their failure to do so? To answer these and related questions, we convened a virtual panel discussion using CJR’s Galley platform, with a group of experts in content moderation and internet governance and policy around the world.

The group included Jillian York, the director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law, and Policy at UCLA; Emma Llansó, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology; Jenny Domino, who leads the Internet Freedom Initiative for the Asia-Pacific region at the International Commission of Jurists; Sarah Roberts, an associate professor of information studies at the UCLA; Rasha Abdulla, a professor of journalism at The American University in Cairo; Agustina Del Campo, director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at the University of Palermo in Argentina; and Tomiwa Ilori, a researcher at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Continue reading “The challenges of content moderation in the global south”

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

After being banned from both Facebook and Twitter for his role in spreading disinformation about the election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, former president Donald Trump’s team of advisors started talking about a “new social platform” he would soon be launching, which they said would provide a direct conduit for his views, and restore him to his rightful place at the top of the social-media firmament. Trump advisor Jason Miller told Fox News in March that Trump would be returning to social media “in two or three months, with his own platform,” which Miller said would be “the hottest ticket in social media,” and would “completely redefine the game.” On May 4, the Trump website unveiled a new social feature, but it was more like a recapitulation of an old game rather than the definition of a new one: in sum, it was a blog, with short posts in Trump’s voice (although most were likely not written by him) and a series of buttons with which to share his comments on the social platforms where he could no longer post them himself.

Now, less than a month after this much-hyped launch, Trump has shut down the blog, according to a number of reports. The page formerly known as “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” has been removed from the site and will not be returning to it in the future, Miller confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday. According to a report from the Washington Post, based on interviews with anonymous sources close to the Trump camp, the former president’s decision was driven by the relentless mocking the feature got from established media outlets and political commentators, combined with a significant lack of traffic and engagement. “Upset by reports from The Washington Post and other outlets highlighting its measly readership,” the paper reported on Wednesday, “Trump ordered his team Tuesday to put the blog out of its misery.”

In May, NBC News looked at data from a social-media analytics company called BuzzSumo and found that the Trump blog as a whole had only attracted about 200,000 forms of engagement, including links and other social interactions (likes, shares, etc.) on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Before he was banned from those and other platforms, a single tweet from the former president would often be liked or reshared hundreds of thousands of times within a matter of hours, thanks to his 88 million followers. The Post reported that on the final day of the blog’s existence, the Trump website got just 1,500 shares and comments on Facebook and Twitter.

Continue reading “Donald Trump shuts down his blog, irked by low traffic”

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

Over the weekend, a massive merger agreement was hammered out between telecom giant AT&T and entertainment company Discovery Inc., and the result was announced on Monday: if it receives the blessing of federal regulators, the telco will spin off its WarnerMedia unit — which includes HBO and other assets, including CNN — into a separate company that it and Discovery will co-own. The arrangement was described in the typical way: that it is a merger made in heaven (Discovery chief executive David Zaslav said the two “fit together like a glove”), that there are numerous synergies, and that the combination will be what the New York Times called “a juggernaut.” As Paul Farhi, Washington Post media reporter, pointed out following the news, a number of deals over the past two decades were described in similar terms, including the merger of Time Warner and AOL in 2000 in a deal that was worth about $165 billion at the time. It was later unwound, with Time Warner taking a massive writedown and spinning off AOL as a separate company.

Despite the hyperbole being used to describe the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, a number of analysts and media industry experts believe the deal represents an admission of failure by AT&T. The company said it planned to buy WarnerMedia in 2016, and spent the next two years fighting with competition regulators for approval to do the deal. Finally, the acquisition was approved in 2018, and AT&T bought the company for $85 billion, which it heralded as the start of a new media and entertainment empire.

Tthe unwinding of the deal is “a major course correction,” Axios wrote about the new arrangement. “The deal essentially confirms shareholder fears that the company’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner three years ago was not fully baked.” Wall Street media analyst Brian Wieser told the New York Times that “AT&T didn’t know what they were buying” when they acquired the content company, and that the strategy “was probably flawed.” A WarnerMedia veteran told Vanity Fair “there’s no way this deal doesn’t make AT&T look like fools.”

Continue reading “AT&T unveils a new merger that unwinds a previous failed one”

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

Over the weekend, a massive merger agreement was hammered out between telecom giant AT&T and entertainment company Discovery Inc., and the result was announced on Monday: if it receives the blessing of federal regulators, the telco will spin off its WarnerMedia unit — which includes HBO and other assets, including CNN — into a separate company that it and Discovery will co-own. The arrangement was described in the typical way: that it is a merger made in heaven (Discovery chief executive David Zaslav said the two “fit together like a glove”), that there are numerous synergies, and that the combination will be what the New York Times called “a juggernaut.” As Paul Farhi, Washington Post media reporter, pointed out following the news, a number of deals over the past two decades were described in similar terms, including the merger of Time Warner and AOL in 2000 in a deal that was worth about $165 billion at the time. It was later unwound, with Time Warner taking a massive writedown and spinning off AOL as a separate company.

Despite the hyperbole being used to describe the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, a number of analysts and media industry experts believe the deal represents an admission of failure by AT&T. The company said it planned to buy WarnerMedia in 2016, and spent the next two years fighting with competition regulators for approval to do the deal. Finally, the acquisition was approved in 2018, and AT&T bought the company for $85 billion, which it heralded as the start of a new media and entertainment empire.

Tthe unwinding of the deal is “a major course correction,” Axios wrote about the new arrangement. “The deal essentially confirms shareholder fears that the company’s $85 billion merger with Time Warner three years ago was not fully baked.” Wall Street media analyst Brian Wieser told the New York Times that “AT&T didn’t know what they were buying” when they acquired the content company, and that the strategy “was probably flawed.” A WarnerMedia veteran told Vanity Fair “there’s no way this deal doesn’t make AT&T look like fools.”

Continue reading “AT&T unveils a new merger that unwinds a previous failed one”

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

Whenever technology giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon come under fire for the cavalier way in which they deal with their users’ data, one thing is certain: that Apple will make as much marketing hay out of it as possible. Apple followers know by now that the company takes every opportunity to trumpet its unshakeable commitment to user privacy, and makes it clear that because its business model doesn’t rely on advertising, the way its competitors’ models do, it stands apart from them — a lone protector, concerned more about a user’s welfare than the value of their data. A case in point are the new privacy-protection rules the company just rolled out for its iOS platform, which require users to explicitly opt-in to have their data collected or shared by the apps they use.

Apple coverage from technology-centric news outlets often congratulates the company for the purity of its approach, which relies solely on selling you expensive pieces of hardware rather than engaging in targeted advertising. But there are some uncomfortable facts about Apple’s business that critics say raise questions about how deep its alleged commitment to privacy goes, and yet are rarely mentioned.

A recent feature in the New York Times took aim at one rather large blind spot in Apple’s commitment: China. While Apple has made a point of publicizing its fight with law enforcement in the US when the authorities want to get data from one of its phones — as it did in the case of a mass shooting in San Bernardino in 2016 — it doesn’t like to admit that it does the opposite in China. As the Times notes, all of the data on Apple users who live in China is kept on government-owned servers, as required by a Chinese law passed in 2016, and companies beholden to the Chinese government not only control access to the data but also the software keys required to decrypt it.

Continue reading “Apple’s commitment to user privacy rings hollow”

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

The history of Congressional hearings into the inner workings of Facebook, Twitter, and Google — which dates back to before 2017 — isn’t exactly filled with penetrating insights or dogged investigation. For the most part, it’s been a series of sideshow carnival-style events, with a lot of grandstanding by senators and members of congress designed to get airtime on TV news shows and/or help with re-election bids, not to mention finger-waving about non-existent fears, such as the alleged bias that social platforms like Facebook have against conservative voices. For every hard-hitting question about the ways in which these networks distort information or use personal data for ad targeting, there have been dozens more poorly-informed inquiries like Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s infamous question about how Facebook makes money if it doesn’t sell personal data. “We sell ads, Senator” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg replied, overjoyed at seeing such a softball pitch.

Given that backdrop, the likelihood of yet another Congressional hearing producing anything of substance was extremely low, especially since the one that just concluded on Tuesday — titled “Algorithms and Amplification: How Social Media Platforms’ Design Choices Shape our Discourse and Our Minds,” — didn’t involve any of the chief executives of Facebook, Twitter, or Google. The fact that there were no high-profile names attached helps explain why there were no front-page headlines with quotes from those involved, or video clips of senior executives being pigeonholed by a senator. In advance of the hearing, some argued that the lack of big names might actually be a positive development, since there was less chance of the whole thing turning into a circus. So was this hearing notable for its depth or perspicacity? Not really. If anything, there was less outrage than there probably should be about the hidden algorithms that control what we see and do on social platforms.

At the outset of the hearing, Democratic Senator Chris Coons said “there’s nothing inherently wrong” with how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube use algorithms to keep users engaged. Coons said the committee wasn’t weighing any actual legislation and that the hearing was designed to be a listening session between legislators and the platforms. That sanguine description was at odds with some of the experts who testified, however, including Joan Donovan, who runs the Technology and Social Change project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “The biggest problem facing our nation is misinformation-at-scale,” she told the committee, adding that “the cost of doing nothing is democracy’s end.” On Twitter, Donovan criticized those at the hearing for not going deeper. “The companies should have been answering questions about how they determine what content to distribute and what criteria is used to moderate,” she said. “We could have also gone deeper into the role that political advertising and source hacking plays on our democracy.” For its part, Facebook routinely argues that its algorithms merely give you more of what you have already indicated you want to see or interact with on the platform.

Continue reading “Congress fails to grapple with social-networking algorithms”