Section 230 Works: Russian Trolls Don't Get To Sue Facebook For Being Kicked Off Facebook

from the don't-feed-the-trolls dept

Sorry Russian trolls (oh, and also all you people insisting that Section 230 doesn't and or shouldn't allow Facebook to kick trolls off its platform), but a court has made it clear that Facebook is clearly protected in kicking trolls off its platform. In this case, the Federal Agency of News (FAN) was kicked off Facebook soon after the 2016 election, when Facebook realized that various Russian trolling outfits had used the platform to push propaganda, often directed by the Russian "Internet Research Agency." Among the pages that Facebook removed was FAN's. For what it's worth, the "General Director" of FAN was one Aleksandra Krylova, who is among those who were indicted by Robert Mueller last year, for trying to influence the US election.

Somewhat incredibly, FAN decided to sue Facebook over this, claiming a violation of the First Amendment along with some other claims -- which I'll just note in passing seem oddly similar to the claims used by white supremacists and other trolls who have sued social media for being removed. This includes claims of a civil rights violation under both federal law and California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, a breach of contract claim and a breach of "implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing."

All of this fails. Miserably. For all the reasons we've discussed for years. Judge Lucy Koh points out that CDA 230 clearly applies here, and walks through why each of FAN's arguments are legally nonsense. We'll give a few examples, mainly highlighting the silly arguments that (other?) trolls keep putting forth lately to argue why CDA 230 does not protect such content moderation. First up, an argument that the CDA is only supposed to apply to obscenity or other kinds of "offensive" content, and therefore doesn't apply to garden variety trolling. Nope, nope and nope:

Plaintiffs argue that the Communications Decency Act does not immunize Facebook because the instant case “does not concern obscenity or any other form of unprotected speech; it concerns political speech that strikes at the heart of the First Amendment.”.... It is telling that Plaintiffs fail to cite any authority for this argument. Immunity under the Communications Decency Act does not contain a political speech exception. The statutory text provides that no “provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) (emphasis added). No distinction is made between political speech and non-political speech.

Then there's the argument that Facebook is a "public forum" and therefore is bound by the First Amendment. Judge Koh is having none of that:

Courts have rejected the notion that private corporations providing services via the internet are public fora for purposes of the First Amendment. For instance, in Prager Univ. v. Google LLC, this Court rejected the notion that “private social media corporations . . . are state actors that must regulate the content of their websites according to the strictures of the First Amendment” under public forum analysis. 2018 WL 1471939, at *8 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 26, 2018) (emphasis in original). In addition, the Ebeid court rejected the argument that Facebook is a public forum. 2019 WL 2059662, at *6. Moreover, in Buza v. Yahoo!, Inc., the court held that the plaintiff’s assertion that “Yahoo!’s services should be seen as a ‘public forum’ in which the guarantees of the First Amendment apply is not tenable under federal law. As a private actor, Yahoo! has every right to control the content of material on its servers, and appearing on websites that it hosts.” 2011 WL 5041174, at *1 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 24, 2011). Furthermore, in Langdon v. Google, Inc., the court held that “Plaintiff’s analogy of [Google and other] Defendants’ private networks to shopping centers and [plaintiff’s] position that since they are open to the public they become public forums is not supported by case law.” 474 F. Supp. 2d 622, 632 (D. Del. 2007).

At bottom, the United States Supreme Court has held that property does not “lose its private character merely because the public is generally invited to use it for designated purposes.” Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 U.S. 551, 569 (1972). Thus, simply because Facebook has many users that create or share content, it does not mean that Facebook, a private social media company by Plaintiffs’ own admission in the complaint, becomes a public forum.

Koh also easily rejects the idea that Facebook might be a public forum because it engages in functions "that are traditionally and exclusively governmental." As Koh points out, it doesn't:

Here, the Court finds that Facebook did not engage in functions that are traditionally and exclusively functions of the state. Examples of functions that are traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the state include “hol[ding public] elections”, “govern[ing] a town,” or “serv[ing] as an international peacekeeping force.” Brunette v. Humane Society of Ventura Cty., 294 F.3d 1205, 1214 (9th Cir. 2002). There are no allegations that Facebook holds public elections, governs a town, or serves as an international peacekeeping force.

And, no, Facebook kicking foreign trolls trying to meddle in elections off its platforms is not a "state action" either, just because it shared information about Russian trolling with the government.

Plaintiffs argue that Facebook, a private actor, was a willful participant in joint action with the government because Facebook provided the government with information for the government’s investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.... Plaintiffs’ argument lacks merit. The Deeths court found that there was no joint action even though a state actor relied upon a private actor’s information and recommendation to remove the plaintiff’s child from the plaintiff’s care..... In the instant case, Plaintiffs only allege that Facebook provided the government with information. ... Thus, under Deeths, Facebook was not a willful participant in joint action with the government.

In addition, Plaintiffs’ claims of joint action between Facebook and the government fail for another equally dispositive reason. The Ninth Circuit has held that for there to be joint action, there must be “‘state actions’ directed by or jointly conceived, facilitated, or performed by the [government actor].” Brunette, 294 F.3d at 1213. Plaintiffs’ Bivens claim for violation of the First Amendment is predicated on the alleged violation of “FAN’s First Amendment rights by deleting the contents of FAN’s Facebook Page and blocking FAN’s access to its Facebook account.”... However, the only interactions between Facebook and the government alleged in the complaint pertain to how Facebook provided information to the government for the government’s Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election investigation.... Plaintiffs do not allege that the government played any role in shutting down FAN’s Facebook page or blocking FAN’s access to its Facebook account. Thus, Plaintiffs fail to allege any state action “directly by or jointly conceived, facilitated, or performed by the” government that relates to the deletion of FAN’s Facebook page or restriction on FAN’s access to its Facebook account.... Consequently, there is no joint action here because there is no indication that the government directly or jointly conceived, facilitated, or performed a role in Facebook’s decision to shut down FAN’s Facebook page or the decision to prevent FAN from accessing its Facebook account.

Judge Koh does give the Russian trolls -- represented by actual respectable lawyers and everything -- a chance to amend their complaint, while making it pretty clear it still has no chance. We'll see whether they even bother.

In Professor Eric Goldman's discussion of this ruling, he notes that anyone supporting Senator Josh Hawley's silly bill to remove Section 230 protections from big internet platforms is effectively supporting Russian trolls like the ones who filed this case:

Just a reminder to anyone complaining about Facebook “censoring” them, arguing that Facebook is the new public square, or demanding that Facebook “must carry” content neutrally: you are making the exact same arguments as Russian trolls seeking to destroy our country. Either that’s the goal you intentionally want, or you are so narrowly focused on your concerns that you don’t realize or care how Russian trolls are weaponizing your arguments against our democracy. Want to Make America Great Again? (or keep America great, if we never stopped being great). Stop trying to destroy the editorial freedom of online publishers to decide what’s fit to publish and what isn’t.

In particular, this case reiterates the depravity of Sen. Hawley’s “[Ending] Support for Internet Censorship Act.” FAN was promoting its own political viewpoints, so Sen. Hawley’s proposal would force Facebook and other major Internet companies to treat FAN’s trolling as equally legitimate as the Republican Party’s social media activities. (Please, no “jokes” about how Republicans have become unexpectedly enthusiastic supporters of Russia’s policy and world views). Why would Sen. Hawley–and the few supporters of his bill–want to prevent online crackdowns against Russian trolls? It appears Sen. Hawley doesn’t understand the consequences of his bill–or worse, perhaps he does.

Filed Under: cda 230, civil rights, content moderation, russian trolls, section 230, unruh act
Companies: facebook, federal agency of news, internet research agency

DOJ Russia Indictment Again Highlights Why Internet Companies Can't Just Wave A Magic Wand To Make Bad Stuff Go Away

from the troll-troll-troll-troll dept

As you've certainly heard by now, earlier today the Justice Department announced that it had indicted thirteen Russian individuals and three Russian organizations for various crimes related to trying to influence the US election. You should read the full indictment if you haven't already. Not surprisingly it focuses on the infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA), which was the giant Russian online trolling operation that we've discussed going back to 2015.

While many are trying to position the indictment as a "significant" bit of news, I have to admit to being a bit underwhelmed. It really does not reveal much that wasn't already widely known. It's been widely reported that the Russians had interest in disrupting our democracy and sowing discord, including setting up and pushing competing rallies from different political sides, and generally stoking fires of distrust and anger in America. And... the indictment seems to repeat much of that which has already been reported. Furthermore, this indictment actually reminds me quite a bit of a similar indictment four years ago aginst various Chinese officials for "hacking" crimes against the US. As we noted then, indicting the Chinese -- who the US would never be able to arrest anyway -- just seemed to be a publicity stunt, that had the potential to come back to haunt the US. It kinda feels the same here.

What is interesting to me, however, is that the indictment also demonstrates why all the hand-wringing against Facebook, Twitter and Google seems kind of misplaced. For months we've been seeing big articles and Congressional hearings questioning why the platforms allowed the Russians to use their services as propaganda tools -- even getting the companies to recently send out (useless, confusing) announcements to people about whether or not they saw or reposted Russian troll propaganda. But what the indictment makes pretty clear, is that the Russians made it nearly impossible for an internet service to ferret them out. The money used was spread out among many different banks and laundered through various means to make it more difficult to trace back. And it details just how far the trolls went to appear to be Americans, including traveling to the US, posing as Americans online to talk to actual US activists and push them in certain directions. And, of course, confusing the internet platforms into thinking they were Americans:

ORGANIZATION employees, referred to as "specialists," were tasked to create social media accounts that appeared to be operated by U.S. persons. The Specialists were divided into day-shift and night-shift hours and instructed to make posts in accordance with the appropriate U.S. time zone. The ORGANIZATION also circulated lists of U.S. holidays so that specialists could develop and post appropriate account activity. Specialists were instructed to write about topics germane to the United States such as U.S. foreign policy and U.S. economic issues. Specialists were directed to create "political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation and oppositional social movements."

Defendants and their co-conspirators also created thematic group pages on social media sites, particularly on the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. ORGANIZATION- controlled pages addressed a range of issues, including: immigration (with group names including "Secured Borders"); the Black Lives Matter movement (with group names including "Blacktivist"); religion (with group names including "United Muslims of America" and "Army of Jesus"); and certain geographic regions within the United States (with group names including "South United" and "Heart of Texas"). By 2016, the size of many groups had grown to hundreds of thousands of online followers.

Most of those groups (if not all?) had previously been revealed by the platforms or by news reports. But the extent to which the Russians went to cover their trails is more revealing.

To hide their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, Defendants and their co- conspirators--particularly POLOZOV and the IT department--purchased space on computer servers located inside the United States in order to set up virtual private networks Defendants and their co-conspirators connected from Russia to the U.S.-based infrastructure by way of these VPNs and conducted activity inside the United States? including accessing online social media accounts, opening new accounts, and communicating with real U.S. persons--while masking the Russian origin and control of the activity.

Defendants and their co-conspirators also registered and controlled hundreds of web-based email accounts hosted by U.S. email providers under false names so as to appear to be U.S. persons and groups. From these accounts, Defendants and their co-conspirators registered or linked to online social media accounts in order to monitor them; posed as U.S. persons when requesting assistance from real U.S. persons; contacted media outlets in order to promote activities inside the United States; and conducted other operations, such as those set forth below.

Use of Stolen U.S. Identities

In or around 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators also used, possessed, and transferred, without lawful authority, the social security numbers and dates of birth of real U.S. persons without those persons' knowledge or consent. Using these means of identification, Defendants and their co-conspirators opened accounts at PayPal, a digital payment service provider; created false means of identification, including fake driver's licenses; and posted on social media accounts using the identities of these U.S. victims. Defendants and their co-conspirators also obtained, and attempted to obtain, false identification documents to use as proof of identity in connection with maintaining accounts and purchasing advertisements on social media sites.

This was not just some run-of-the-mill "pretend to be Americans," this was a hugely involved process to make it very difficult to determine that they were not Americans.

I've seen some people online claiming that this shows why the platforms have to take more responsibility for who is using their platform:

But my read on it is exactly the opposite. It shows just how ridiculous such a demand is. Would any of us be using these various services if we were all forced to go through a detailed background check just to use a social media platform? That seems excessive and silly. Part of the reason why these platforms are so useful and powerful in the first place is that they're available for nearly everyone to use with little hurdles in the way. That obviously has negative consequences -- in the form of trolling and scams and malicious behavior -- but there's also a ton of really good stuff that has come out of it.

We should be pretty cautious before we throw away all of the value of these platforms just because some people used them for nefarious purposes. People are always going to be able to hide their true intentions from the various platforms -- and the response to that shouldn't be "put more blame on the platforms" -- it should be a recognition of why it's so silly to blame the tools and services for the actions of the users.

Yes, we should be concerned about foreign attempts to influence our elections (while noting that the US, itself, has a long history of doing the same damn thing in other countries -- so this is a bit of blowback). But blaming the technology platforms the Russians used seems to be totally missing the point of what happened -- and risks making the internet much worse for everyone else.

Filed Under: doj, impersonation, indictment, influence, intermediary liability, propaganda, russia, russian trolls
Companies: internet research agency

Spinoff: Whatever The Reports About Russian Trolls Buying Ads Is Initially, It's Way, Way Worse

from the multiplication dept

With several reports about data breaches occurring over the past few years, we've developed something of a mantra around here: it's always, always worse than first reported. Yahoo just went through this having finally admitted that literally every email account was compromised way back in 2013 after having first said it was only a few hundred thousand accounts that were impacted. Deloitte and Equifax followed this same playbook with their own breaches, trickling out little by little just how wide an impact those hacks had achieved.

And now we're seeing something of a spinoff of that mantra when it comes to the impact Russian trolls and the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA) advertising buys had on Facebook. You may recall that everything about this story seemed fairly minimalist in the initial reporting. The amount of money spent on the ad-buy itself was low enough to induce eyerolls from many. Facebook itself estimated that 11.4 million people saw ads bought by the IRA over the course of two years or so, which is not the kind of number that sets off all four alarms at the democracy firehouse. But Facebook has now given everyone a better idea of how much reach these ads actually had. And these numbers are far more alarming.

Facebook will inform lawmakers this week that roughly 126 million Americans may have been exposed to content generated on its platform by the Russian government-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency between June 2015 and August 2017, CNN has learned. In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, a copy of which was obtained by CNN, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch says that 29 million people were served content directly from the Internet Research Agency, and that after sharing among users is accounted for, a total of "approximately 126 million people" may have seen it.

Facebook does not know, however, how many of those 126 million people actually saw one of those posts, or how many may have scrolled past it or simply not logged in on the day that one of the posts was being served in their News Feed.

The inability to nail down just how many eyeballs viewed these ads is, of course, due to the nature of social media. Buying the ads and targeting primary viewers of them is one thing, but it's the sharing and re-sharing of those ads that extend their reach exponentially. And it's quite nice of Facebook to come right out and admit that it actually has no idea how many people viewed these ads, even as it offers up estimates to the contrary.

This is a feature of a social media platform like Facebook, not a bug. And, to the IRA's credit, it's a brilliant and inexpensive method for having some measure of influence in a foreign country's democracy. Facebook builds a sharing tool and these folks take advantage of the very nature of that tool.

Which is what makes Facebook's attempt to downplay all of this all the more perplexing.

Nevertheless, Facebook says in its testimony that the posts from those pages represented "a tiny fraction of the overall content on Facebook."

"This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content," Stretch writes. "Put another way, if each of these posts were a commercial on television, you'd have to watch more than 600 hours of television to see something from the IRA."

Except, as Facebook and Colin Stretch damned well know, Facebook doesn't operate anything remotely like television. Nor do its ads. The engagement process of those ads is wildly different. The ability to share those ads is not a feature of television. The granular targeting for eyeballs of those ads is simply not something that can be achieved by television advertising. The geographic targeting specifically, with an eye on influencing votes and the outcome of an election, is simply not a feature available to traditional television advertising. I know why Facebook wants to pretend otherwise in this instance, but it simply isn't true.

So, even as some are trying to downplay the impact, and even the existence, of this foreign intervention into our election cycle, it's worth acknowledging that these things, like data breaches, tend to be worse than first reported. And no obfuscation from Facebook about how much like television it is can change the raw numbers, or its acknowledgement that it doesn't actually know how many people saw this stuff.

Filed Under: russia, social media, trolls
Companies: facebook, internet research agency, twitter

Putin's Internet Propaganda War Is Much Bigger And Weirder Than You Think, Now Extending Into The States

from the ministry-of-truth dept

We've been writing lately about how Putin and Russia have shifted their internet propaganda forces into overdrive, employing multiple factories operated by a company named Internet Research, filling the internet with Putin-friendly drivel twenty-four-hours a day. The insight into these efforts has become more and more interesting as whistleblowers have started exposing (and most recently suing over) them the last six months. Contrary to similar efforts in other countries (U.S. included), there's absolutely no subtlety on display here, and the scale is unlike anything the internet has ever seen.

Interestingly, many of the comments to my last piece made some really compelling points regarding what Putin is up to. Here's a small smattering:

"Karl Bode, author of this very article, has most likely unwittingly fallen for an ukrainian-made honey-pot propaganda trap."

"I cant help see this article as another stone in the western propaganda campaign against Putin the last few months, and not really about social media propaganda."

"The story of that Russian propaganda factory that caught Karl Bode's attention (assuming the story is even true and is not itself a counter-propaganda gig similar to 'WMD') seems very amateurish in comparison to the depth and sophistication to the US military's sock-puppetry programs."

"By writing this horse shit, all Techdirt has done is shown that it's writers are easily manipulated. I expect more pro-US, anti-Russia propaganda from them in the future."

Anybody who knows me remotely would find accusations that I'm "pro-US" pretty damn funny given how I've spent most of my career criticizing US government policies. Are these comments ingenious satire? Russian propagandists? Domestic garden-variety home-grown tin-foil hatters? The benefit of propaganda is you just can't tell. But science pretty consistently shows that comments can pretty easily impact discourse, even if what's being posted is relatively unhinged from reality. So to be clear, it's true: I'm a total lackey for western imperialists; a pawn of the NSA and CIA, and as most people know, I make a killing freelancing as a propagandist for AT&T corporation.

Moving on. While there's no doubt the United States has employed similar tactics for years (profitable wars and shitty foreign policy don't sell themselves, you know), that doesn't make the sheer scale of Putin's troll army any less impressive...or real.

The New York Times Magazine has an outstanding exploration of Putin's propaganda efforts and Russia's Internet Research Agency, connecting a series of incredibly well-constructed hoaxes using fake YouTube videos, fake Wikipedia entries, and thousands of Twitter accounts -- many of which were designed to pollute the global discourse pool here in the States. Author Adrian Chen headed to St. Petersburg to track down and talk to whistleblower Lyudmila Savchuk, who goes into greater detail than ever before about the program. Again, there's propaganda, and then there's what Putin's up to, which is a factory-grade internet assault on reality injected with steroids and caffeine:

"As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian."

These efforts have become so massive, local journalists claim they have, at least for now, managed to subvert the historical anti-authoritarian and free speech benefits of the internet:

"All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition. “The myth that the Internet is controlled by the opposition is very, very old,” says Leonid Volkov, a liberal politician and campaign manager to Alexei Navalny. “It’s not true since at least three years.” Part of this is simple demographics: The Internet audience has expanded from its early adopters, who were more likely to be well-educated liberal intelligentsia, to the whole of Russia, which overwhelmingly supports Putin. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction."

The piece repeats previous claims that Russia's industrial-grade propaganda apparatus has fixed its gaze upon the United States, and while so far some of these efforts on places like Facebook are so ham-fisted as to be comical, some of them are absolutely astounding in their scope and architecture. Like the Facebook group of Russian trolls that encourage followers to visit an art exhibit named "Material Evidence" hosted in Chelsea, New York City. The effort, funded by anonymous overseas donors, claims to show the "other side" of the Ukranian conflict and Syrian civil war not shown by Western media:

"Then there were the pictures from the Ukrainian revolution, which focused almost exclusively on the Right Sector, a small group of violent, right-wing, anti-Russian protesters with a fondness for black balaclavas. Russian authorities have seized upon Right Sector to paint the entire revolution, backed by a huge swath of Ukrainian society, as orchestrated by neo-fascist thugs. The show’s decision to juxtapose the rebellions in Syria and Ukraine was never clearly explained, perhaps because the only connection possible was that both targeted leaders supported by Russia. On the floor in front of many of the photos sat the actual items that appeared in them, displayed under glass cases. How, exactly, did organizers procure the very same battered motorcycle helmet that a Ukrainian protester wore in a photo while brawling with riot police? Who had fronted the money to purchase a mangled white van, supposedly used by Syrian rebels in a botched suicide bombing, and transport it to New York City?

Let that sink in for a second. Armies of fake U.S. Facebook accounts, sending followers to an entirely fake art exhibit in New York, promoted by an army of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts -- all of it tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency. At one point in his documentation efforts, Chen makes contact and meets up with a supposed Internet Research Agency employee and her brother, only to later discover the entire meeting is a staged photo op, later used by "news organizations" tied to Internet Research to discredit Chen as a neo nazi supporter. That story soon ballooned into a series of other Russian news stories accusing Chen of being BFFs with the NSA, CIA, and neo nazis, accompanied with snazzy videos to "prove" it.

So again, yes, most countries engage in propaganda. That's not really being disputed. Most Americans at this point are at least marginally aware of the propaganda used to sell recent wars conducted by the United States -- and the complicit behavior of the media in these efforts to this day stinks up the hallowed halls of most "respected" American news outlets (the same outlets that love to lecture bloggers on what news really is). But what Putin is up to is a propaganda war against the entire internet, and it makes dystopian visions by the likes of Orwell and Terry Gilliam look like Hardy Boy mysteries. Of course none of that matters because I'm clearly a Western imperialist puppy murderer, and this article was funded by the CIA, as commenters below will be sure to illustrate.

Filed Under: adrian chen, comments, propaganda, russia, social media, trolls, vladimir putin
Companies: internet research agency