Trumpist Gettr Social Network Continues To Speed Run Content Moderation Learning Curve: Bans, Then Unbans, Roger Stone

from the welcome-to-the-content-moderation-game dept

Remember Gettr? That's the Trumpist social network run by former Trump spokesperson (and vexatious lawsuit filer) Jason Miller that promised to be supportive of "free speech." As we point out what happens with every new social network that jumps into the space with promises to "support free speech!" and "not censor!" before long they will begin to realize content moderation is required to keep your site running -- and soon they discover that content moderation will involve difficult choices. And, sometimes, it involves making mistakes.

Of course, whenever Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or whoever else note that they made a "mistake" with a content moderation decision and reverse it, there are always some people who insist it couldn't possibly be a mistake and must be [insert conspiratorial reason here]. So I find it hilarious that on Wednesday, Gettr got to experience all this as well. First, Trump buddy and admitted "dirty trickster" Roger Stone went on Gab -- another such social network -- to whine about how he was "censored" by Gettr, claiming it was because he had made what he believed were disparaging remarks about Miller (and Steve Bannon).

This graphic alone is pretty hilarious, given all the people who insisted that Gettr doesn't do moderation.

A few hours later, Jason Miller told Salon reporter Zachary Petrizzo, that it was all a mistake, and blamed the problem of a bunch of fake Stone accounts that the site was trying to get rid of. In the process, Miller claimed, they "accidentally" deleted the real Stone's account. The timing coming right after Stone made remarks about Miller was, apparently, entirely coincidental.

"Multiple fake Roger Stone accounts were suspended following user complaints, but his real Gettr account was inadvertently suspended too," Miller told Salon via email. "His correct account is currently active, and the imposter accounts have all been removed."

It's almost like... running a social media account with malicious actors are trying to abuse requires content moderation, and that will often involve making mistakes, rather than, say, "bias" or desires to silence particular people.

Who knows why Gettr actually suspended Stone? These kinds of things happen all the time on all the other social media sites too. It doesn't mean it's malicious or directed at silencing a critic (though, honestly, there's a higher likelihood that is true with a site like Gettr than with Twitter or Facebook, that actually have real policies in place and a history of training staff to moderate judiciously). It could actually be a mistake. Just like Twitter and Facebook sometimes make mistakes.

I'm still waiting for Miller and his fans to realize that all of these challenges that Gettr is facing are no different than the ones that other social media apps faced -- and that maybe all their earlier complaints of "censorship" were just as bullshit then as the claims about Gettr being censorial today are. I get the feeling that I'll be waiting a long, long time for that recognition to set in.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, content moderation, jason miller, mistakes, roger stone
Companies: gab, gettr

Why Do Republican Senators Seem To Want To Turn Every Website Into A Trash Heap Of Racism & Abuse?

from the important-questions dept

Imagine if you could be sued for blocking other users on Twitter, or limiting who could see your Facebook posts. Or if every website were full of racial slurs, conspiracy theories, and fake accounts. Parental control tools could no longer prevent your kids from seeing such heinous content. If that sounds like the Internet you’ve always wanted, then you’ll love Republicans’ new “Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act” and “Online Content Policy Modernization Act!”

In 1996, Congress agreed, almost unanimously, that users, websites, and filtering tool developers shouldn’t face such legal risks and that it was imperative “to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies.” That’s why Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But a few weeks ago, after yet another Trump tweet raging about “biased Big Tech,” three Republican Senators rushed to introduce legislation that would turn the law on its head. Sen. Lindsay Graham followed suit with his own bill that would do essentially the same thing. Trump’s Department of Justice has proposed to gut Section 230. Never mind that Section 230 was authored by a Republican congressman who still defends the law.

Today, Section 230 broadly protects users, websites, and developers of filtering tools (built into operating systems, search engines, or services like YouTube — or that you can install yourself) when they exercise their First Amendment rights to decide what content or users to block or “restrict access” to. This new bill would sharply curtail such content moderation. To avoid liability, a defendant would have to prove the content was “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, promoting self-harm, promoting terrorism, or unlawful.” That covers only a fraction of the Internet’s awfulness. Even the vilest statements could not be removed or filtered unless tied to the harassment of specific users or the clear glorification of violence. The bill doesn’t cover spam, fake accounts, clear hate speech, or clear misinformation. That last exclusion is intentional: it was Twitter’s timid moves in May to put warning labels on Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting that quickly led the White House to issue an executive order calling for legislation to “reform” Section 230.

Republicans aim to stop content moderation for “political” reasons. But it would invite litigation over even truly neutral restrictions. Nextdoor.com limits discussion of national political issues to special “groups,” so that the site can focus on hyper-local issues. But the bill would no longer protect such segmentation. If a medical school wanted to keep its students focused on studying science rather than arguing about politics, enforcing that rule wouldn’t be protected either.

Republicans complain about “Big Tech,” but their bill would expose everyone to lawsuits. Trump himself has invoked Section 230 to avoid liability for retweeting allegedly defamatory material. FoxNews.com reserves the right to block “offensive” comments on its site, as Breitbart.com does for “inappropriate” content. Even Parler, the conservative “free speech” alternative to Facebook reserves broad discretion to remove any content that they consider “disruptive” or that creates “risk” (not just legal risk) for Parler.  

Section 230 protects not just the providers but users engaged in content moderation — such as those who manage Facebook pages and groups. Reddit relies on users to moderate its 130,000 “subreddit” communities, while the English Wikipedia depends on 1,131 volunteer administrators to resolve conflicts. Would you volunteer if you knew you could be sued by disgruntled users?

Republican proposals would open the door to creative plaintiffs’ lawyers to sue anyone who feels aggrieved for being “censored.” Yet it won’t do what Republicans want most: allow the FTC, Republican state attorneys general, and MAGA activists to sue “Big Tech” for “deceiving” consumers by not delivering political “neutrality” as (supposedly) promised. The reason consumer protection agencies have never brought such suits, and courts have tossed out private lawsuits, isn’t Section 230. Back in 2004, left-wing activists petitioned the FTC to sanction Fox News for not delivering on its “Fair and Balanced” slogan. The Republican FTC Chairman dismissed the petition pithily: “There is no way to evaluate this petition without evaluating the content of the news at issue. That is a task the First Amendment leaves to the American people, not a government agency.” Offline or online, the courts simply won’t adjudicate questions of media bias because they’re inherently subjective.

Section 230's protections are vital to the Internet, where both users and providers make editorial decisions about content created by third parties at a scale and speed that are simply unfathomable in the world of traditional publishing. This new bill attempts to use Section 230’s indispensability to coerce the surrender of First Amendment rights. That violates the “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine. In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld imposing special “Fairness Doctrine” conditions on broadcast licenses only because it denied broadcasters full First Amendment protection. But the Court has repeatedly said that new media providers enjoy the same free speech rights as traditional publishers — and has struck down fairness mandates on newspapers as unconstitutional.

Republicans fought the Fairness Doctrine for decades. Their 2016 platform demanded “free-market approaches to free speech unregulated by government.” Yet now they want an even more arbitrary Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. They should remember what President Reagan said when he ended the original Fairness Doctrine in 1987: “the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.”

If, despite a lack of any solid evidence, conservatives persist in believing that social media are biased against them, they should vote against it with their clicks and dollars. Switch to Parler, if you like. Just don’t be surprised when you find content like this on the site:

By comparison, #Section230 has 262 “parleys” (posts) — roughly 20% as many as #JEWS). And this is just the tip of a very large iceberg that includes “parleys” like this (note the gruesomely pro-Holocaust account name:

Parler has chosen not to remove such content — but Section 230 would protect the site if it did. Not so if Republicans got their way.

Let that sink in. When Republicans complain about “hate speech” being used as an excuse for censoring conservatives, this is among the content they’re saying should stay up. Because... “bias.”

Ironically, Parler has engaged in selective moderation of hate speech to make the site seem just respectable enough to attract Republican politicians like Sens. Ted Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. Devin Nunes. The site clearly blocks any variant of the n-word in hashtags — which are wildly popular on Gab, which Parler has rapidly eclipsed as the “free speech” network. Gab offers a clear picture of what social media would look like if Republicans succeeded in narrowing Section 230’s protections. This is what an “uncensored” Internet looks like:

If anything, it’s difficult to appreciate how widespread such content is on both Parler and Gab because, unlike Facebook and Twitter, they only allow users to search hashtags (and names of users and groups), not the contents of posts. But one thing’s clear: while Parler blocks the n-word in hashtags, they definitely don’t block it in posts.

Is this really what Sens. Wicker, Blackburn and Hawley really want the Internet to look like? Do they really believe Section 230 shouldn’t protect websites when they remove such heinous content? Or do they believe that that removing such content would still be covered by Section 230 because it would fall into the category of “harassing” content already explicitly protected by Section 230.

The NTIA’s petition to have the FCC rewrite Section 230 defines “harassing” content as having the “subjective intent to abuse, threaten, or harass any specific person.” You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how narrow that definition is. If a neo-Nazi posts something like one of the above hashtags as a reply to a black or Jewish user, yes, that might qualify as “harassing,” but simply ranting about both in his own posts would not be directed at any specific person — so websites wouldn’t be protected for removing it. Republican lawmakers might claim they take a broader view of what should qualify as “harassing,” but it’s hard to see why any court would agree. In any event, what Members or their staff say they intend is irrelevant; what matters is the plain text of the statute. If they want to make their intention clear, they need to pick other words and put them in the statute.

More importantly, hate speech is just one category of noxious content that websites could be sued for removing, hiding or labeling if Republicans have their way. The same goes for conspiracy theories, misinformation about COVID, vaccines, and voting, etc. For example:

Could moderating anti-vaccination misinformation be covered by the term “promoting self-harm?” Again, that’s a huge legal stretch — especially because the “harm” at issue here is primarily not to the “self” but to the children of parents duped by anti-vax content, and to those in society who get infected because vaccination rates fall below levels needed to achieve herd immunity. Even if a court decided that the term might cover some anti-vax content, websites would have to fight it out in court, and courts might rule differently in different cases.

If you want those things for yourself and your children, go to Gab or Parler. Just, please, stop trying to turn the rest of social media into those sites. And don’t complain when those sites fail to attract advertising. What respectable brand in America would want to advertise its products next to such content?

President Reagan’s answer would have been clear: private companies should be free to make their own decisions, especially when the alternative is a true cesspool of everything that is worst about humanity. Sadly, today’s Republicans don’t seem to care about anything beyond making political hay out of repeating the same baseless claims that they’re being persecuted.

Hashtag: #Snowflakes.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, case act, content moderation, doj, lindsey graham, online content policy modernization act, online freedom and viewpoint diversity act, section 230
Companies: facebook, gab, parler, twitter

Gab, Mastodon And The Challenges Of Content Moderation On A More Distributed Social Network

from the experimentation-through-federation dept

While so many of the discussions and debates about content moderation focus on a few giant platforms -- namely Facebook, YouTube and Twitter -- it's fascinating to see how they play out in other arenas. Indeed, one of the reasons why we're so concerned about efforts to "regulate" content moderation practices on social media is that focusing on the manner in which those big, centralized platforms work could serve to stifle newer, more innovative platforms, whose very set up may inherently deal with the "problems" in the first place (see my protocols, not platforms discussion for one example).

There are a few interesting platforms out there trying to take a different approach to nearly everything -- and one of the more well known is Mastodon, an open source "federated" system that is sort of somewhat like Twitter. If you somehow have missed the Mastodon boat, I'd recommend the long piece Sarah Jeong wrote about it two years ago, which is a pretty good intro to the topic. The really short version, though, is that anyone can set up their own Mastodon community and, if others so choose, they may "federate" with other Mastodon communities. You could build a Mastodon instance that is totally isolated from others, or you could build one that connects to others and allows "toots" to go from one instance of Mastodon to others. And, of course, the federating can change over time. It's kind of neat in that it allows for multiple communities, who can set different rules, norms and standards, and thus you get much more widespread experimentation. And, unlike a fully centralized system, like Twitter, the ability for different instances to just "go there own way" if they disagree, allows for much greater flexibility, without a centralized content moderation impossibility.

I'm still more interested in much more fully decentralized protocol-based systems, but a federated system like Mastodon, that allows for a distributed set of mini-centralized instances that can join together or separate as needed, is still pretty fascinating.

However, it got more fascinating and interesting earlier this month when the social network Gab moved to Mastodon. If you haven't followed this space at all, Gab likes to call itself the "free speech alternative" to Twitter, but in practice that has meant that it's the place that many trolls, racists and other general assholes have gathered after being kicked off of Twitter. Gab announced, back in May, that it was planning to shift its platform to Mastodon, setting up its own instance. In theory, this solved some "problems" that Gab had been facing -- starting with the fact that Apple and Google had removed Gab's mobile app from their app stores (something Gab sued over, in a strategy that was not very successful). Since there are a bunch of Mastodon apps that allow users to log into any particular Mastodon instance, Gab itself made it clear that this was a key reason for the move:

Of course, building on top of someone else's better tested open source code probably also helps Gab with the long list of technical issues the site was having. And then there's the pure troll factor. Besides harboring social media trolls, Gab, as a company has always sort of gleefully taken on a trollish roll in the way it works as a company as well. And, considering that part of the very reason that Mastodon's creator, Eugen "Gargron" Rochko, set up Mastodon in the first place was to build an alternative to Twitter that was free of Nazis, assholes and trolls... it was a truly trollish move to jump onto that platform and at least imply to many a plan to "invade" (or, perhaps we should say brigading) the wider "fediverse" of Mastodon.

The switch over happened earlier this month and it's been fascinating to watch how it's all played out. The shortest summary might be that the federated model has shown to be somewhat resilient so far. Mastodon itself put out a statement urging various Mastodon instances not to federate with Gab and also suggesting that the various Mastdodon app developers choose to blacklist Gab's domains from their apps (meaning that Gab's plan to use this to get back into the app store might not work as well as planned).

The Verge has a long, in-depth article about how all of this is playing out, and it seems like, as a federated system is designed to do, different parts of the system are experimenting and figuring out what makes sense. Most of the other instances have decided they don't want to federate with Gab.

If you join a major Mastodon instance right now, chances are you won’t be connected to Gab. “All the admins that I know, that I interact with myself, have already blocked Gab,” says Rochko — including Mastodon.Social. “Essentially, they’re isolated.”

As for the various app makers, they're figuring out what they want to do:

This has turned app access into a battlefield. Developers can lock Gab out by disabling login options to the instance or completely blocking content from its servers. And several have done just that. Mastodon lists six major mobile apps on its homepage. Four of them — the Android client Tusky and the iOS apps Toot!, Mast, and Amaroq — block Gab in some fashion.

Amaroq developer John Gabelmann banned Gab to avoid potential problems with the App Store. “My core objective is to keep Amaroq publicly available and to abide by all Apple policies, which keep unmoderated extremist/hateful content off the store,” he tells The Verge. “If your network is large enough and unmoderated enough to get the negative attention of Apple, Amaroq will follow Apple’s policies.”

Mast’s creator Shihab Mehboob, by contrast, blocked Gab after users requested it. He’s gotten one-star reviews from angry Gab users, but “if hate speech is masquerading as free speech on an app I’ve built, it’s upon myself to somehow moderate that and reduce it where possible,” he says. “I understand that the Fediverse is intended to be open and entirely at the user’s discretion as to what they want to see/use/partake in, but that shouldn’t cover Nazi-based ideologies. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.”

Other app developers maintain that this blocking doesn’t fit Mastodon’s mission. The Android-based Fedilab app’s free version initially blocked Gab because of Play Store content policy fears. But the ban has since been lifted. “I will simply not block instances with the app,” wrote Fedilab’s developer. “I clearly think that’s not my role … If you want a strong block, it’s in the hands of social network developers or your admins.”

And the developer of Subway Tooter, who goes by Tateisu, is skeptical that stores will censure apps for supporting Gab. “They can run their web app on a web browser,” Tateisu points out. “If Google wants to ban it, they should start from their Chrome web browser.”

This is all quite interesting. It's also the kind of experimentation and more distributed decision-making we'd like to see more of online. This is not a truly distributed system where the power is moved all the way out to the ends, but it is a federated system where the power is moved to various nodes -- leading to more competition and variety. The fact that most of the major Mastodon instances have said they don't want to federate or deal with Gab is an expression of preferences, and in many ways a better overall system than one in which a single company is making the decisions. And it's much better than politicians telling companies what they need to do. Of course, in a world without Section 230 -- or one with a nonsensical requirement for "neutrality" in platform moderation -- would these options even be available?

Filed Under: content moderation, distributed systems, federation, mastodon, moderation, platforms, protocols, social media
Companies: apple, gab, google, mastodon, twitter

Forget About Social Media Content Moderation; Get Ready For Internet Infrastructure Content Moderation

from the headaches-upon-headaches dept

The big topic du jour, of course, has been about content moderation on social media. But that may only be just the very beginning of where all of this heads. It didn't get that much attention, but last week Microsoft threatened to take down all of Gab.ai based on some (really awful) posts on that site. Gab, if you don't know, is the social network "alternative" that claims to be free speech supporting (even if that's a bit of an exaggeration), when it really has basically become the home to all the assholes who have been kicked off of Twitter. It's generally a cesspool of idiocy, so it's not clear what suddenly inspired Microsoft -- which hosts Gab on its Azure cloud platform -- to suddenly speak up.

As we've noted many times in the past, Microsoft, like any company, has certain rights, including First Amendment rights for what speech lives on its own computers and who it associates with. But, we're talking about a different kind of ballgame when we start getting to the infrastructure level, rather than just talking about content moderation at the edge provider level. This hearkens back to the big post I did nearly a year ago when Cloudflare stopped providing service to the Daily Stormer. As I noted at the time, there were no easy answers, and the situation is incredibly complicated. Simply kicking bad services off the internet doesn't make their hatred/ignorance/stupidity go away (and sometimes allows it to fester in even darker corners, where it can't be monitored or countered).

But there's an even larger issue here when its these infrastructure players making determinations on content at various edge providers -- effectively having their own terms of service substitute for the edge providers'. We discussed some of this on a recent podcast, focusing on how the legacy copyright players have been targeting infrastructure players -- CDNs, payment processors, advertising networks, domain registrars and registers, and even ICANN itself. While, again, these providers, as private companies, have every right to make their own decisions, they have much greater power than edge providers, and the tools they have are much blunter. Whereas Twitter can just take down a single Tweet, Microsoft's only remedy for bad content on Gab is to take down all of Gab.

This is a big issue that deserves a lot more thoughtful discussion, so it's great that Glenn Fleishman over at Fortune has started to question how infrastructure providers are dealing with these questions (for the most part, they're trying to avoid answering these questions). I'm briefly quoted in the article, from a much longer conversation that Glenn and I had where we tried to work through a variety of different ideas.

And, as I wrote in last year's post about the Cloudflare situation, I'm a lot more worried about infrastructure players suddenly deciding that they should have an editorial say as well, as that seems well beyond what role they should be playing. Yes, again, they have every right to stop working with services they dislike, but we should be discussing the potential impact of infrastructure players as censors. With edge services, one point that is regularly brought up is that if you don't like how a service is running you can just go to another one or build your own. But that gets a lot more complicated when you get to the infrastructure level where you can't just "build your own" and the number of options may be greatly limited.

As Glenn notes in his piece:

And infrastructure hosts have a great basis on which to claim neutrality on most points of view. For one part, that’s because because they don’t slap their name and branding—or sell advertising—alongside the content, unlike the Twitters and YouTubes of the web. But the other is that these Internet plumbing companies have to manage the complexity of operating their back-ends in nearly every country in the world, navigating often-conflicting cultural expectations and laws. In that climate, remaining as impartial as possible about content can help avoid nation-state demands on disconnecting groups and people.

But bans by consumer-facing providers have sparked new era of scrutiny, increased demands on accountability and possibly even transparency about hosting and connectivity. And with them, ironically, begin info wars in earnest. Infrastructure companies may not be able to stay out of the fight forever.

Indeed, infrastructure providers are the next battleground, and we should start thinking about what that means earlier, rather than waiting until everything is a total mess.

Filed Under: content moderation, infrastructure, open internet
Companies: gab, microsoft