Brazil's Government Wants Twitter To Turn Over Data On Users Who Mocked Victim Of Assassination Attempt

from the criminalizing-jerks dept

World governments continue to believe Twitter is the best conduit for oppression. Twitter is the main target of Turkish president Recep Erdogan's loutish attempts to mute dissent and criticism. Other countries find Twitter's speedy delivery of punchy content a constant threat to their power and routinely block their citizens' access to the microblogging site.

Twitter is too compliant too often, so the cycle of dissent-crushing continues. Twitter will push back now and then but, like other service providers, often places market share ahead of protecting users from their encroaching governments.

Brazil's government was hoping to speak to a more compliant Twitter when complaining about mean tweets, but the call appears to have been answered by the steelier side of its international relations unit.

A judge on Brazil’s top electoral court on Friday ordered Twitter to hand over data of 16 users who celebrated via tweets the near-fatal assassination attempt two weeks ago of far-right, poll-leading presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.'

Judge Carlos Horbach rejected an appeal from Twitter regarding the request and gave two days for the company to hand over the data, which was requested by the Bolsonaro campaign. The users could potentially face charges under Brazil’s hate crime laws.

Twitter did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the judicial order in its second-biggest market in terms of number of users.

Celebrating the stabbing of a presidential candidate may be tasteless and rude, but it shouldn't be a crime. But in Brazil, it's apparently illegal to celebrate the wounding of politicians. This is the danger of hate crime laws -- ones often written with an eye on defending the powerless, but deployed in service of the powerful far more often. Bolsonaro may not be president, but he's ahead in the polls so he's only a vote away from being Brazil's leader. A politician with 30 years of service under his belt is the very definition of "powerful."

Twitter is pushing back this time and appears to have some experience challenging government overreach. If it continues to refuse to turn over the data, it will face fines of $12,000/day, presumably in perpetuity. In addition, the Brazilian version of contempt of court charges could result in the arrest of Brazil-based Twitter execs.

It's another reminder that it's good to be king -- or at least a step away from the top job. The laws written to serve the public will protect you, even if your personal security team can't.

Filed Under: brazil, data, jair bolsonaro, privacy, stabbing, subpoena
Companies: twitter

James Woods Is Correct That Twitter Shouldn't Have Blocked His Account, But Still Hypocritical On Free Speech

from the you're-no-free-speech-martyr-jimbo dept

I think we've made our general feelings about James Woods perfectly clear. After all, he's the guy who sued an anonymous Twitter user for a somewhat mild comeback that referenced cocaine usage (leaving aside that Woods himself had tweeted very similar hyperbolic tweets suggesting people he was arguing with were on crack). In the middle of that lawsuit, the (still) anonymous tweeter died, leading Woods to gloat about "winning" the case and about the guy's death. Suffice it to say, Woods is -- in our opinion -- a terrible human being. Suing someone for being mildly critical of you is bad. Gloating over their death takes you up a few notches to being a horrible human being.

That said, when Woods' own free speech is attacked via a similarly bogus defamation lawsuit over his own tweets, we didn't support the plaintiff just because it was against Woods. We noted, instead, that we hoped he won the case -- and he did.

Now Woods is in another situation, where -- somewhat incredibly -- he's trying to make himself out as a free speech warrior. It seems that Twitter suspended his access to his account because of a meme he had tweeted. It was what appeared to be a fairly obvious satirical fake meme urging men to stay home on election day to let women's vote have more weight. Woods admitted that it was "not likely" to be real, but still noted "that there is a distinct possibility this could be real." First of all, there was no such distinct possibility. Second of all... none of it makes any sense. The meme is completely nonsensical no matter what your views on these issues are.

But, for this tweet, Twitter has suspended Woods, arguing that the meme violates its terms of service because it: "has the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election." It is, of course, fairly obvious how we got here. During the 2016 election, there were a bunch of memes -- some of which appear to have been placed deliberately by state actors seeking to influence our election -- that were actual attempts to suppress the vote. The various social media players, including Twitter, have been under great pressure (including from Congress) to try to avoid a repeat of such things in 2018. And thus, they created a rule against images that have "the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election." Then, that rule is handed off to one of the hundreds or thousands of content moderators working for Twitter, and they have basically a few seconds to review the tweet and say "does this break the rule?" If you look at the rule and the tweet... and nothing else... it's not hard to see why you'd choose the option that says "yup, he violated the rule."

Of course, this is entirely lacking in context -- and even as Woods is too silly to recognize that there's zero chance that this is real. And there is similarly zero chance that anyone reading Woods' feed would look at this meme and say "oh, right, sure, I'm not going to vote now." But, as professor Kate Klonick discussed in our recent podcast, you can't write "understand the context" into the rules. It's literally not possible. So you can only expect these low wage content moderators to follow the rules as written, no matter how silly the potential results. And, applied literally, that tweet violates that rule -- even if that leads to a totally ridiculous outcome.

This is why we keep trying to point out that moderating content at scale on these platforms is a case where it's impossible to do it well. There will be lots of "mistakes" like these, because there's no other way.

That's not to say that someone at Twitter shouldn't fix it. But, it's still tricky. If Twitter changes the ruling on this, then people will claim that it's not following its own rules... and (yup) a bunch of people will get angry again.

In the meantime, Woods is ridiculously trying to turn himself into a free speech martyr over this.

“Free speech is free speech — it’s not Jack Dorsey’s version of free speech,” Woods said, referring to Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.

Dude. You sued an anonymous troll for a mild bit of criticism on Twitter. You don't get to whine about a lack of "free speech" on Twitter without basically all of us calling you a total fucking hypocrite.

Woods, not surprisingly, also seems to have no clue how content moderation on internet platforms works:

He noted that his original tweet was reposted by his girlfriend on Friday and had been retweeted thousands of times by Sunday. His girlfriend’s account wasn’t locked, which he said was proof that he’d been singled out because of his large Twitter following.

No, dude. It just means that someone reported your tweet, but no one reported your girlfriend's. Twitter isn't proactively scanning every single tweet. It's just if someone reports it, then it goes through the process. In this case, since tons of people hate follow Woods to see what crazy statement he's going to make next, it shouldn't be that surprising that someone "reported" that tweet -- and then the process described above happened.

But Woods just keeps going on a tear about his free speech apparently being suppressed... and something about knives and pillows.

“The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact, their banning of me is the truly egregious interference,” Woods said. “Because now, having your voice smothered is much more disturbing than having your vocal chords slit. If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow.”

Woods said if he deletes the tweet, it would force him to watch his step with everything he says in the future, chilling free speech.

Let's just stop for a moment and recall that Woods sued another Twitter user for a mild criticism in the midst of one of Woods' many Twitter fights and then gloated when that guy died, initially making it appear that he had "won" the lawsuit, rather than having it closed due to the death of the defendant, and then later happily saying he hoped that the dead defendant died screaming Woods' name in agony. And now he wants to whine about the "chilling" effects of Twitter saying he can't tweet? Come on.

Anyway, yes, it's silly that Twitter suspended Woods' account, and the company should probably reverse that decision, even if it's totally understandable how it came about. But none of that changes Woods being a total free speech hypocrite and a really awful human being.

Filed Under: content moderation, free speech, hypocrisy, james woods
Companies: twitter

Manafort's Daughter's Lawyer Wants Twitter To Vanish Tweets Linking To Text Message Database

from the man-wields-hammer,-demands-Twitter-produce-nails dept

The leak of text messages sent and received by Paul Manafort's daughter might be old news, but new wrinkles keep appearing. Originally obtained by hackers, the texts have been perused by journalists, resulting in articles discussing Manafort's apparent complicity in violence in Ukraine. The full set of texts has been around since at least early 2017, but no searchable database of the texts themselves existed publicly.

Apparently, Wikileaks had the full dataset in searchable form but refused to release it. FOIA/transparency activist Emma Best decided to call out Wikileaks on its perceived duplicity (the dumping of the Podesta/DNC emails but not the release of the Manafort text messages) and made the database publicly available. As she wrote then, the likelihood of the text message dump leading to further issues for Manafort's daughter was minimal, given that it had been more than a year since it became public knowledge their phones had been hacked.

Now, more than two months after Emma Best made the texts available in searchable form, a lawyer representing Manafort's daughter is demanding the removal of Best's tweets linking to her post about the text message database. This summary of events comes from Joseph Cox at Motherboard:

Shortly after that publication and Best’s tweet, Shand’s lawyer, Matthew Crowl from law firm RSHC, flagged the tweet to Twitter through its normal reporting mechanisms, judging by the letter Crowl sent to the company days later. Twitter said the tweet did not violate its policy on distributing private information, according to the letter.

“That response is unacceptable,” Crowl wrote. “After these private, stolen messages were linked in the offending Tweet, several members of my client’s family have received harassing and threatening messages.” Crowl highlights Twitter has various options to “protect Ms. Shand’s privacy,” including suspending or terminating an offending account, and points to how Twitter’s rules say users “may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission.” The tweet itself did not contain any of the hacked text messages, but contained a link that went to a page which led to the text cache.

Emma Best posted screenshots of the threat letter to Twitter, noting she is not going to voluntarily delete the tweets targeted by Matthew Crowl. Twitter apparently isn't going to delete them either, leaving Crowl with little more than a blustery threat on law firm letterhead. Crowl intends to pursue "all legal remedies" to get the tweets removed, which will probably include a lawsuit he has little chance of winning.

The publication of the texts is clearly in the public's interest, even if a vast majority of them are not newsworthy. Prior to this publication, people were dependent on journalists to sift through the mass of texts to surface those deemed newsworthy. Independent investigations of the messages' content was all but impossible before Best published a searchable database.

While there may be some privacy implications in the released texts, those relating directly to Paul Manafort and his actions -- especially those discussing his relationship with Russian entities -- carry minimal privacy concerns, at least when weighed against the public's interest in the content of those messages. Best's upload simply made it easier to find newsworthy text messages, even if the unavoidable side effect was the easy perusal of texts containing nothing of public interest.

Any legal action undertaken by Crowl will have to go head-to-head with the First Amendment. Even if Crowl finds a judge willing to buy his arguments, the dissemination of the database ensures the burial of Best's article/tweets will do nothing to prevent the public from continuing to dig through the 285,000 messages obtained by hackers. While it's understandable his client is unhappy this has happened, a lawsuit victory would be about as effective as hanging Emma Best in effigy. It might make a few people feel better, but it won't turn back the clock. The only thing it's guaranteed to do is create a chilling effect that will deter future publications of newsworthy data obtained from third parties.

Filed Under: emma best, paul manafort, transparency, whistleblowing
Companies: twitter

Actual Research On Political Bias In Search Results Would Be Useful, But So Far It Doesn't Show Anything

from the not-how-it-works dept

A few weeks back, we explained why claims of political bias in moderation by tech companies was not accurate at all. I recognize this has upset people who seem to have staked their personal identity on the idea that big internet companies are clearly out to get them, but we like to deal in facts around here. Of course, soon after that post went up, PJ Media editor Paula Bolyard put out an article -- using what she admits isn't anything close to a scientific study -- to make dubious claims of bias in Google searches for Trump news.

There were all sorts of problems with her methodology (including using Google search, rather than Google News, and using an extraordinarily sketchy ranking of how liberal or conservative certain publications were). But the bigger issue, as we noted in another post this week was that it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how search engines work. It was not -- as some commenters who clearly did not read the article claimed -- that algorithms are perfect and show no bias (because they obviously do). But that the search algorithm boosts sites that are more popular, and if you looked at the sites that Bolyard's test showed as appearing in her search results were... larger sites. And those included typically "conservative" news sites such as the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. In other words, Google wasn't biasing based on political viewpoint, but on popularity of the news site itself. Which... is how Google has worked since basically the beginning.

Unfortunately, our President did what our President does, and took Bolyard's confusing mess (as amplified by Lou Dobbs on Fox News) and claimed that it was now proven that Google biases its search results against conservatives. He's since posted a video claiming that Google didn't link to a live stream of his state of the union address -- a claim that has already been proven to be 100% false.

Of course, that is leading people to (as they should!) start to do research on whether or not there really is some political bias in search results -- which is a good thing. We should investigate that, but it should be done rigorously. Digital Third Coast is pushing some research claiming to show no bias based on Google search autocomplete, but that methodology strikes me as equally dubious to Bolyard's study.

A much more interesting, and scientifically rigorous study, however can be found at ScienceDirect, in a study by Efrat Nechustai and Seth Lewis entitled What kind of news gatekeepers do we want machines to be? Filter bubbles, fragmentation, and the normative dimensions of algorithmic recommendations. Lewis recently discussed the results on Twitter. The results don't fully get at whether or not the algorithm is biased, but it does throw a lot of cold water on the idea that the Google News (separate from Google search) algorithm creates filter bubbles that drive people deeper and deeper into their own echo chambers.

But what the study does seem to suggest, is that Google tends to recommend big traditional news organizations most of the time. That... shouldn't be a surprise. I am confident that Trump's loudest supporters will argue that this is a sign of political bias on its own, because they believe whatever nonsense he spews about the NY Times and CNN being "fake news," but that's silly. Those publications may not be great, and I have serious concerns about the way they cover news, but the issue is not one of political bias. And the evidence again just seems to suggest that these news organizations are large and extremely popular, which is why Google recommends them.

Some others are attempting to research this topic as well, and they all seem to be coming up empty when it comes to any evidence of actual political bias on Google. The site Indivigital tried to look more closely at the sites that were analyzed in the study that Trump tweeted about and found... that the sites that were dubbed "left wing" tended to get a lot more inbound links. And, as you hopefully know, much of Google's ranking algorithm is based on inbound links. So if there's "bias" it's the "bias" of basically everyone else on the internet to more frequently link to those sites. It also found that the supposedly "left wing" sites published a lot more -- again, leading to more links and more attention.

In response, Google’s parent company Alphabet stated: “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology”.

To address these claims, we analyzed each of the top 25 right-wing and left-wing websites listed in PJ Media’s study. We looked at the quantity of unique links pointing into each news website as well as the total content output by each news website over a 24 hour period.

The results are listed in the tables below. Overall, from the websites analyzed we discovered:

1. Left-wing news websites attract more links than right-wing news websites; and
2. Left-wing news websites create more content than right-wing news websites.

So there may be "bias" in there, but it's not "political bias due to crazy liberal Google engineers."

Then there's another study by sociologist Francesca Tripodi, who looked at whether or not political bias was showing up in Google's rankings and also found little to support the claims. Instead, she found that the wording of the search query mattered tremendously in what kinds of responses you got (which makes a lot of sense). So, some search queries might return you more "conservative" leaning stories, while others might return you more "liberal" ones.

My research demonstrates that Google can actually drive the public toward a silo of conservative thought. For example, users curious for more information on the connection between Nellie Ohr and the Department of Justice—a topic widely discussed both on the QAnon message board and Fox News—would have received predominantly conservative perspectives if they queried her name on August 6, 2018. The top result was a piece by conservative think tank the American Spectator, the second and third links are from Fox News, followed by two more links from conservative news sites.

Again, obviously there is "bias" involved in story selection on search. That's the entire point. You want a search engine to "bias" towards what will be most relevant. The question of whether or not there is "political bias" (especially as influenced by the political leanings of the employees at a company) is a different one -- and one that can and should be researched. But to just default to insisting there must be such bias, without any actual evidence showing that political bias is happening in search results, it really looks silly to keep claiming it's a fact.

And, as multiple people have pointed out, if this really is somehow unfairly tilting things to one side of the political spectrum, there is nothing stopping anyone in this free market system from setting up their own news search that skews towards whatever it is Trump fans think is fair and balanced. Of course, it's still worth doing more research on this topic, but so far there is little to suggest any actual political bias in search results beyond the bias of "big, popular media sites get more links."

Filed Under: content moderation, political bias, research, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter, youtube

Microsoft Wants Confirmation That Helping Politicians Not Get Hacked Isn't An Illegal Campaign Contribution

from the the-times-we-live-in dept

We live in such ridiculous times. The ongoing silly narrative over supposed "political bias" by tech companies is causing all sorts of stupid follow on effects. For instance, Microsoft has now asked the Federal Election Commission for an advisory committee to state that offering its enhanced security features -- known as AccountGuard -- to any political campaign won't be deemed an unfair campaign contribution.

At first blush, this seems crazy that they would even need to do so, but it's really a product of the era that we live in. As you may recall, part of the issue around the whole Stormy Daniels / Donald Trump fight is the question of whether or not Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paying her off to stay quiet was an illegal campaign contribution because it was money paid specifically with the intent to aid a particular candidate (in this case, Trump) in his election campaign. Indeed, John Edwards got caught up in something quite similar in the 2008 campaign in having someone pay off his mistress to keep her quiet. And some have argued that the case against Trump is significantly stronger than the one against Edwards (in which he was indicted, but after an acquittal on one charge and a hung jury on the rest, the DOJ decided to drop the case).

But the key issue under election law is that they apply to payments (or in-kind contributions) "for the purpose of influencing an election." And, in Microsoft's case, it highlights in its letter that it is offering this security service to all candidates regardless of their party positions, and thus is not trying to influence elections one way or the other just to protect politicians from getting hacked.

Microsoft seeks confirmation that it will not be making prohibited in-kind contributions by offering a package of enhanced online account security protections at no additional charge on a nonpartisan basis to its election-sensitive customers, including but not limited to federal candidates and national party committees, as described above.

It seems fairly obvious that this shouldn't even be an issue, but seeing as I'm not an expert in campaign finance, I reached out to former FEC chair Ann Ravel to see if I was missing something. She agreed that it was unlikely that Microsoft doing this would be seen as a violation of the law: "I am fairly confident that the FEC will conclude that Microsoft's proposed free service to "election sensitive" customers is permissible and not a prohibited in-kind contribution. Microsoft has made a good case that the service will not only be non-partisan but is in the company's own business interests, as well as their social obligation."

But another reason why Microsoft may have asked the FEC for an opinion is that lately we've been seeing more and more people claiming -- somewhat ridiculously -- that the silly debate over "political bias" on the platforms also involves illegal campaign contributions. I believe that this is intellectually dishonest partisan gamesmanship, simply trying (weakly) to take the claims about the Daniels' payment and play whataboutism on a grand scale.

Indeed, at least one candidate has even filed an FEC complaint over being banned by Twitter: and that's Paul Nehlen, who self-describes as a "pro-white candidate" and whose bigoted views are extreme enough that even Steve Bannon and others in the Trump camp have washed their hands of Nehlen.

Nehlen's FEC complaint was put together by lawyer Marc Randazza, who many of you are familiar with. Frankly, I believe this is not his best work. It relies heavily on the debunked article by Vice that incorrectly claimed that Twitter was "shadowbanning conservatives" based on their political views. The reality was that Twitter was not shadowbanning (it was merely having some users not show up in autocomplete) and it wasn't based on their political views. But the complaint doesn't acknowledge any of that, and insists that the article is evidence of Twitter trying to silence Nehlen's side of the "debate."

I raised some fairly skeptical questions about the complaint with Randazza over email, who responded that he believes that "Twitter and other platforms are attempting to "meddle in" elections" and stated, "Once they figure out who they can ban and who they can't, just watch for it." No offense to Marc, but that sounds fairly paranoid and devoid of any actual evidence. The discussions I've seen from platforms is that they actually are bending over backwards to appear "balanced" in how they handle political candidates from all across the political spectrum, perhaps to a ridiculous degree, out of fear of backlash from the supporters of those politicians. In Nehlen's case, his tweets were so far over the top and so far beyond what Twitter's terms of service allowed, that they finally got rid of him.

Again, due to my lack of experience with campaign finance laws, I ran the Nehlen complaint by former FEC Chair Ravel, who also felt that it stood little chance before the FEC, and suggested that the complaint misrepresented campaign finance law:

I don't believe that this issue comes within the FEC jurisdiction. The "debates" that the FEC has some responsibility to oversee, (11 CFR 110.13) has to do, clearly, with the "staging of debates." The code refers to whether or not a debate is a contribution or expenditure for a candidate, so related to the use of funds to defray "staging of candidate debates" not being a contribution. The FEC's only responsibility is to ensure that the structure if the debate is not to give priority to one party or individual. Consequently, the only issue that the FEC considers regarding a debate is whether or not pre-established objective criteria, to avoid real or apparent bias that is used to eliminate some candidates from the debate.

And while the Nehlen complaint bends over backwards to argue that "Twitter is the new debate platform," it seems like a huge stretch to argue that just because everyone shows up on Twitter to debate, that this is the same as Twitter "staging" a debate. Ravel also see some other massive hurdles to Nehlen's complaint:

Further, I think that the complaint would run afoul of the regulation that is still very much in existence (11 CFR 100.94) which says that uncompensated internet activity is not a contribution to influence a federal election. This includes the use of equipment or any form of communication on the internet. The only exception is as to those activities that are placed for a fee on a platform. So while this is not meant to apply to the platforms itself and its decisions about removing offending individuals from the platform, it certainly would be an impediment to the kind of relief that they are seeking.

In short, this seems unlikely to get very far. Though, given how long these things take, it may be years before we get official rulings on these issues. But, seeing as people are now trying to use campaign finance law as a weapon against anything related to politics, I guess we shouldn't be all that surprised to see Microsoft feel the need -- and you can almost hear the giant sigh coming from the legal team in Redmond -- to first seek an advisory ruling to make it clear that what they're doing in protecting candidates is okay.

Filed Under: accountguard, campaign contributions, elections, fec, paul nehlen, social media, technology
Companies: microsoft, twitter

Ajit Pai Coddles Big Telecom, Demonizes Silicon Valley

from the inconsistency-ahoy dept

To be very clear there's no shortage of legitimate criticism aimed at giants like Facebook and Google for their inconsistent policies, repeated privacy snafus, and incessantly-incompetent public relations skills.

That said, a large chunk of the push to "do something" about Google, Facebook and Twitter's supposed assault on free speech is also little more than wet nonsense driven by people who don't understand how the internet or First Amendment work. And a lot of the recent breathless hyperventilation in DC and vilification of "big tech" is being driven by the telecom sector, which has spent years demanding that their broken and uncompetitive monopoly market be mindlessly deregulated, while the healthier, more competitive online content and ad space face onerous new regulations.

We've discussed at length how the telecom industry has grown bored with the slow, steady profit made from upgrading and running broadband networks, and has shifted its focus toward the sexier realm of online advertising. Granted, when large ISPs try to directly compete in that space they tend to fall flat on their faces, since running government-pampered monopolies has dulled their innovative and competitive edge. As a result, the Comcast/AT&T/Verizon version of "competition" usually involves two things they're actually good at: cheating by distorting the playing field (aka net neutrality violations) and lobbying.

The motivation here (money) isn't really mysterious. Cable lobbyists routinely call for regulation of companies they're trying to compete with in the online ad space, and loyal policymakers and lawmakers are frequently happy to oblige to keep campaign contributions flowing. Telecom executives like to pretend this is just fair play, given Netflix and Google's (long since dead) support of net neutrality. The difference: ISPs really were trying to use their broadband monopolies to harm competitors, and Google and Netflix's arguments were largely being made in good faith.

There's no good faith ISP arguments occurring here. ISPs don't actually care about privacy, transparency, or your right to spread hate on Twitter. And ISP BFFs like Ajit Pai have long demonized Silicon Valley giants by using straight up nonsense in order to make their argument (like the time he tried to claim a run of the mill Netflix CDN was a network neutrality violation). All while turning a blind eye to ample problems in the telecom sector.

This inconsistency was again on proud display this week in a post by Pai over at Medium ahead of this week's Silicon Valley hearings. In it, Pai laments all manner of problems with Silicon Valley giants, from their disdain for privacy, to a lack of total transparency. You'll notice that most of the concerns Pai expresses were comically-absent as he dismantled popular net neutrality (and ISP transparency) protections last fall:

"Are these tech giants running impartial digital platforms over which they don’t exercise editorial judgment when it comes to content? Or do they in fact decide what speech is allowed and what is not and discriminate based on ideology and/or political affiliation? And again, going back to the first point: where is the transparency?"

Pai's sudden interest in transparency is downright adorable. But you'd have to be blind not to notice how the things Pai demonizes Silicon Valley for pale in comparison to many of the things we've seen in the telecom sector. You'd also have to be blind not to notice how Pai's arguments perfectly mirror the telecom industry lobbying talking points accidentally leaked to us last week by US Telecom. Surely that's only coincidental, right?

From ISPs efforts to charge customers more for privacy to using bullshit fees to jack up your bill, Pai never bats an eyelash when AT&T or Comcast engages in all manner of bad behavior. Yet watch how Pai hyperventilates when talking about Google, Facebook, and Twitter doing things notably less terrible or, as we saw with the recent bogus Twitter shadowbanning controversy, completely made up.

Pai spent the last five years insisting that ISPs shouldn't face "burdensome regulations," despite the fact ISPs like Comcast operate natural monopolies. Yet here he is, advocating for new regulatory restrictions to be foisted upon ISP competitors who actually do face competition:

"The public deserves to know more about how these companies operate. And we need to seriously think about whether the time has come for these companies to abide by new transparency obligations. After all, just as is the case with respect to broadband providers, consumers need accurate information in order to make educated choices about whether and how to use these tech giants’ platforms."

Part of the problem is that this conversation on what to do about Facebook, Google and Twitter has been infected by our idiotic need to apply partisanship to fucking everything, regardless of whether it makes intellectual sense. Net neutrality, for example, has long been played up as a "partisan" issue by ISPs to sow dissent and derail consensus, despite the fact that an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans support it.

Here too, ISPs are using baseless, inconsistent, and inflammatory rhetoric to enflame ideological divides and censorship fears with an eye on hampering competitors and encouraging partisan gridlock. In reality, telecom operators don't exclusively inhabit "the right," and Google, Facebook, and Twitter aren't the exclusive dominion of "the left." They're comprised of employees across vast swaths of the ideological spectrum, who, if you actually sit down and talk to them, tend to agree more than they disagree.

But viewing technology debates through a partisan lens is encouraged by those eager to keep the public bickering--instead of developing real solutions to real problems. When the partisan labels come out, the brain often turns off. And there's entire industries happily cashing in on that fact to thwart consensus and meaningful change. There's also an ocean of lawmakers and politicians like Pai more than happy to unabashedly-parrot those efforts on demand, knowing full well that loyalty now means either a lucrative lobbying job or posh think tank gig down the road.

There's absolutely a legitimate conversation to be had here in terms of what to do about privacy and speech in the Facebook and Twitter era. And that may or may not involve crafting new regulations. But it might be nice if people wised up to the fact that a huge swath of the conversation is being dictated not by parties acting in good faith with a genuine eye on valid solutions, but by telecom monopolies eager to pee in the discourse pool simply to fatten their wallets.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, neutrality, privacy, regulations, transparency
Companies: facebook, google, twitter