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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new “oral history” of the former supermarket tabloid known as the Weekly World News was just published by Mental Floss, and it is well worth reading if you were ever a fan of the tab, or even if you weren’t. At one point it was one of the most successful newspapers in North America, with a circulation in the millions, and it sounds like at its peak — from the 1980s until the mid-1990s — it was a really fun place to work, mostly because the staff made up most of the stories, including the famous “Bat Boy” series, or the ones about Bigfoot and Elvis having a love child, etc. “Make up a few stories and then head to the beach,” as one former writer described working at the paper, which for most of its life was based in Boca Raton, Florida. While most of the world wanted to read about celebrities in the National Enquirer — which like the Weekly World News was started by Generoso Pope, Jr. — lots of people also seemed to love the Bigfoot and Bat Boy and alien-abduction stories, or the paper’s absurdly hilarious right-wing columnist, who went by the name Ed Anger.

Berger: Our mantra was, “Never talk yourself out of a good story.” If a lady called and said aliens ate her laundry, The New York Times might say, “Do you have evidence?” We’d say, “Oh, do you know if he liked jeans or frilly stuff best?”

Ivone: A lady once called us and said her toaster was talking to her. I said, “Put the toaster on the phone.” We took it seriously.

Kupperberg: That’s what Weekly World News is about. Put the toaster on the phone.

I was a big fan of the Weekly World News, which was a little like The Onion before the Onion came along (its founders were reportedly inspired by the WWN). It was so obvious that the stories were made up, and Ed Anger was such a great parody of right-wing columnists. So it was a big highlight for me when I got a chance to help the Weekly World News with a story in the mid-1980s, and got an interesting glimpse at how things worked inside the paper.

I was working for a regional newsmagazine in western Canada at the time (it no longer exists, and it was a bizarre story of its own, which maybe I will tell sometime), and because we were short on money and staff, we often grabbed interesting stories from medical journals or court filings and re-wrote them. So someone had written about a case where a young man with severe OCD decided to kill himself, and put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Through some kind of miracle, the bullet apparently went through his brain and out the top of his skull, but caused very little damage — apart from severing a connection that essentially cured him of his OCD (here’s an Associated Press story about it).

A couple of weeks after we ran this story, I got a call from someone who said they were an editor with the Weekly World News. Could they have the photo we used of the person in the story, as well as some of the background details? I was over the moon. Of course, I said, and sent them all of the info. And within a week or two, there was the story — and what was fascinating about it was that it was almost identical to the one we had published in terms of the facts (which were already pretty incredible, of course). All the editors had done was add adjectives like “amazing,” and “terrible,” and “painful” and so forth, along with a lot of exclamation marks. It sounded like the whole thing was made up, but I knew it wasn’t.

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

Last week, the chief executives of the four major tech platforms—Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook—appeared before Congress (virtually, at least) as part of a year-long investigation into whether antitrust regulators need to take action against any or all of them for anti-competitive behavior. Was the hearing mostly a sideshow, or was it a sign that Congress is planning significant changes to the rules that apply to these digital behemoths? And if regulations are going to change, or antitrust action is going to proceed against some or all of them, what would—or should—that look like? How can regulators apply laws that were designed a century ago for railroads and oil companies to digital networks whose products are ephemeral and cost nothing? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, we’ve been interviewing a number of journalists, academics, and other experts on antitrust, politics, and technology using CJR’s Galley discussion platform.

Our first interview was with Zephyr Teachout, an associate professor of law at Fordham University, a former Democratic candidate for governor of New York, and the former national director of the Sunlight Foundation. She said going into the hearing she felt “like a teenager on Christmas, ready to be pleased and ready to be horribly disappointed,” but came away thinking that the members of the committee posed some tough questions to the four tech titans, and even managed to draw out some “revelations,” as she put it—such as an admission from Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, that sellers who use Amazon’s shipping services are more likely to get access to the coveted “buy box” at the top of the page with recommended purchases. Teachout also said that the way Apple treats app developers renewed her commitment to antitrust regulation: “The 30% commission is just on its face highway robbery,” she said, adding that it “proves how monopoly is theft.”

David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect and author of a new book entitled “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power,” said that he felt the hearing exposed a number of obvious antitrust violations, and that the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice could have taken action to prevent some of this conduct but chose not to. Why? A lack of political will, he said. “Many of the top officials at FTC and DoJ Antitrust have ties to corporate law firms and have worked for the large companies they are now supposed to regulate,” Dayen said. “It’s kind of staggering how many conflicts there are.” Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, said the hearing was an important reassertion of Congress’s power to regulate markets. The legislative body “has been silent for so long on these questions,” he said. “It felt like a throwback to an earlier time when Congress took its oversight function and matters of market governance seriously.”

Continue reading “So the tech titans appeared before Congress—now what?”

This was originally written for the daily newsletter published by the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Like the old tale of the blind men describing an elephant, where each one was convinced they had found a different animal based on whatever part they were touching, Wednesday’s congressional antitrust hearing with the heads of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook looked dramatically different depending on your perspective. The Wall Street Journal said the six-hour hearing showed that there was room for compromise between the way Republicans perceive the technology giants and the way that Democrats do. But Slate and a number of other outlets pointed out how most of the Republican members of Congress spent their time talking about alleged bias by Facebook and YouTube aimed at conservatives (something for which there is absolutely no evidence) rather than antitrust. The Verge‘s Casey Newton said the “lunatic whipsawing between companies, issues, and conspiracy theories” made the hearing feel like a social-media feed, and not in a good way: “Every question shouted, every answer interrupted, nothing truly ventured, and very little learned. Polarized and polarizing” (although Newton also said that in the end he came away “mostly heartened” at the idea that Congress might finally be prepared to do its job as an antitrust regulator.

Part of the problem — as with with the elephant — was that the hearing was just too massive and sprawling and unfocused, and tried to cover too much ground. As Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times pointed out, each of the tech companies should probably have had its own hearing, since the antitrust issues that apply to each one are very different (Will Oremus of One Zero said sources told him the technology companies themselves pressed for a hearing with all four, as a way of muddying the waters, and if true then their attempt was successful). Even at six hours, once you subtract the grandstanding and irrelevant questioning by people like Republican Matt Gaetz — who seemed most interested in whether the companies shared what he called “American values” — or the sad spectacle of Rep. Sensenbrenner asking Zuckerberg why Facebook took down a comment from Donald Trump Jr. (something Twitter did), there wasn’t much time for more than one or two hard-hitting questions about actual anti-competitive behavior.

The fact that there were even a few of these was held up by some as a triumph — Prospect.org called it “The Triumphant Return of Congress” — something that says a lot about just how low expectations are when it comes to these kinds of hearings. And yes, it was better than the one where Facebook was asked how it made money and Zuckerberg responded, as if speaking to a toddler, “Senator, we sell ads” (and Facebook definitely makes a lot of money doing so — on Thursday, the day after the hearing, the company reported that its revenues rose to $18 billion in the most recent quarter). One of the stars of the day was Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who came equipped with voluminous notes, including some of the 1.3 million documents that Congress has accumulated over the year or so this antitrust investigation has been underway. She pinned Zuckerberg with questions about his acquisition of Instagram, including emails that showed he was planning to build a competitor if the company didn’t sell, and the CEO could only stammer “I’m not sure what you mean by threaten.” She also asked some tough questions of Amazon, including pressing chief executive Jeff Bezos on whether the company used internal sales data to launch competing products (he said this is against the rules, and he’s looking into it).

Continue reading “A bevy of billionaires: The tech titans go (virtually) to Washington”