As Speakers At The RNC Whined About Big Tech Bias, You Could Only Watch The Full Convention Because Of 'Big Tech'

from the stop-shitting-where-you-eat dept

There was much nonsense spewed at this week's Republican National Convention, and as has been expected given the nonsense narrative about "anti-conservative bias" in big tech, there were plenty of people using the podium to whine about how the big internet companies are working against them. Thanks to the folks at Reason for pointing out how utterly stupid and counterfactual this actually is. Indeed, if you actually wanted to watch the RNC speeches (and I'm not sure why you would), the only place to actually watch them uninterrupted was... on those internet platforms that the speakers swore were trying to silence them.

And yet if there was ever a televised event that demonstrated the lameness of the conservative anti-tech position, it was the first day of the RNC. No major tech platform censored any of the content—on the contrary, they granted easy and unrestricted access.

Multiple YouTube channels aired the RNC in full. It was possible to watch the event live on the GOP Convention's Facebook page, and to find it on Google (it's the top video result). Even Twitter, the platform most obviously hostile to conservatives, made it perfectly easy to watch. All of the platforms provided unlimited access to the remarks by Kirk, Parnell, and everyone else who spoke—and importantly, this access came at no cost to viewers.

Meanwhile, the other options -- mainly cable news including Fox News -- regularly cut away from the coverage:

Contrary to the anti-social media perspective peddled by Kirk and others, it was traditional media outlets that restricted conservative speakers. CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News cut away from the convention repeatedly. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was petrified that unfiltered access to Republican speakers would cause her audience to succumb to disinformation, and thus she ceaselessly intervened to explain why certain GOP talking points were false. (Unsurprisingly, there was no live fact-check of the Democratic National Convention.)

Viewers with a cable subscription who preferred a selective, biased curation of the RNC could turn on their televisions. Viewers who just wanted to watch the event without interruption or interjection could do so for free on any of the major tech platforms.

As Robby Soave at Reason points out, there's a lesson here, if Trump's crew of whiners actually were interested in learning, not just playing the victim.

To the extent that there are genuine anti-conservative biases on social media, they pale in comparison to the biases of the traditional media. It's true that tech platforms occasionally make arbitrary or contradictory rulings about politically extreme speech; meanwhile,

The New York Times opinion page apologized for publishing a provocative but fairly mainstream opinion piece by a major Republican senator, fired the editor responsible, and essentially vowed never to make this mistake again. Conservative voices have flourished on Facebook, where articles from Breitbart and The Daily Wire praising President Donald Trump are routinely among the most shared content. At the same time, there's not a single reliably pro-Trump columnist at the Times or The Washington Post.

While I disagree that an op-ed proposing turning American troops on American citizens is a "fairly mainstream opinion piece by a major Republican Senator," the rest does stand. As we've pointed out many, many times, the problem people have is not so much with censorship, but rather that they don't like anyone having editorial discretion over them. Yet, that happens much more in the world of traditional media than on social media. And a big part of the reason for this difference may be because Section 230 exists.

Section 230 allows social media to host whatever nutty idea the RNC and its supporters want to post. The NY Times and others, by contrast, recognize that publishing dangerous nonsense might make them liable, should that dangerous nonsense run afoul of the law. It is still perplexing why any Republican who is upset about perceived (not real) anti-conservative bias is against 230. Without it, many platforms just wouldn't bother with their nonsense at all.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, bias, big tech, charlie kirk, convention, internet, media, rnc, tech, victims
Companies: facebook, twitter, youtube

Piracy Sees 'Unprecedented' Pandemic Bounce, But So Does All Media Consumption

from the maybe-try-competing-on-price dept

With a large part of the planet on lockdown in a bid to slow the spread of COVID-19, streaming video consumption has seen explosive growth. Streaming platform Mux this week issued a study stating that during one three-week period measured by the company, streaming video usage overall jumped 239%.

UK piracy tracking firm Muso TNT says they've also seen "unprecedented" traffic to movie streaming websites around the world in the last few months. The firm found that in many countries, the kind of piracy traffic traditionally reserved for weekends is now the norm during most weeks:

"Data provided to Motherboard by London-based Muso TNT show that between February 20 and March 20, visits to pirated movie websites by users in both the U.S. and UK jumped 31 percent. The data shows similar growth in Spain (35 percent), Portugal (37 percent), India (33 percent), and Germany (30 percent), with Italy the highest overall at 50 percent."

In just one month in the U.S. alone, the firm tracked 137 million page views to more than 19,000 websites offering streaming and BitTorrent access to pirated films, and more than 601 million page views of sites offering access to pirated TV content. The company says its data originates from an “industry-leading website traffic data provider.”

None of this should be particularly surprising given that pirates are some of the heaviest consumers and buyers of movies, films, and television content.

But it's worth noting that piracy, and BitTorrent use in general, had already been seeing a bounce even before the pandemic started. Why? While streaming is certainly cheaper with better customer service than traditional cable TV options, the rise of a universe of exclusivity silos has started to confuse and annoy some customers. With every broadcaster and their uncle now flooding the sector, hunting and pecking between a laundry list of exclusives and ever-shifting licensing agreements has become frustrating (aka "subscription fatigue"), driving some of these users back to the simplicity of piracy.

"Piracy is a level playing field,” Muso wrote in one recent white paper. “No walled data-garden, no exclusivity, no windowing and no theatrical release. It’s all there: consumption with no barriers."

Sure, this "subscription fatigue" is a minority of subscribers and not the end of the world, given streaming revenues are exploding. But pandemic or no, there's still some familiar lessons here about viewing piracy as a competitor or as a useful gauge of customer dissatisfaction. And based on the kind of price hikes we're still seeing at major cable TV providers, these remain challenging ideas for many traditional cable and broadcast execs to wrap their heads around.

Muso found that while visits to illegal movie streaming websites have surged, visits to pirated TV stream outfits hasn't seen the same level of growth, in large part due to the suspension of most sports leagues. With sports, one of the few things that keeps people subscribing to traditional pay TV, several studies on cord cutters have shown that the cord cutting trend is likely to accelerate -- with bloated TV bundles a likely early casualty as a growing number of folks experience financial hardwhip:

"Considering the financial crisis element of the pandemic, something has to give for the consumer,” Chatterley said. “If they discover piracy now the question is do they go back to multiple subscriptions?"

So while many things have certainly changed, the same core issues still apply. Companies still need to compete with the simplicity and affordability of piracy if they want to hinder its growth. That's particularly true of the traditional cable sector, which, for the better part of the last decade, has treated competing on price as a some kind of deadly contagion in its own right. Just because an entertainment industry executive doesn't think its fair that they have to compete with privacy has never mattered -- and still doesn't.

Filed Under: content, covid-19, lockdown, media, pandemic, piracy, streaming

Australia Gives Up Any Pretense: Pushes Straight Up Tax On Facebook & Google To Pay News Orgs

from the how-dare-you-send-us-traffic-without-paying dept

Last week we wrote about France's push to force Google to pay legacy news organizations for the high crime of... sending them traffic. That was somewhat expected, as under the EU Copyright Directive, some version of this will show up in every EU country over the next few months (though France's first approach is particularly dumb). Down in Australia, they're not subject to the EU Copyright Directive, but it's not stopping them from taking the same ridiculous approach:

Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

As the article notes, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had been working to get the media companies and Google and Facebook to come up with a voluntary plan, but since the media companies basically want it all, that hasn't worked out so well. Instead, the ACCC has now been told to just write up the plan. Make no mistake about this: this is the Australian government, at the behest of a bunch of legacy media companies that failed to adapt to the internet, now taxing Google and Facebook for sending media companies free internet traffic that those companies don't know how to monetize.

And it goes beyond just having to pay to send them traffic, it also requires Google and Facebook to let media companies know ahead of time if they're going to make any changes to their algorithms that might impact content rankings. That is ridiculous. It's basically giving news companies preferred placement in search rankings, and locking those legacy providers in. Why in the world should media companies get special access to the algorithm of either company?

Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it.

They do get paid for it. They decided to put content on the web. If they don't like the traffic, they can easily use robots.txt to block sites from scraping them. If they can't monetize the traffic, that's on them, isn't it?

“This will help to create a level playing field,” he said.

This is the exact opposite of a level playing field. This is basically tilting the playing field strongly towards legacy media companies in a manner that is not only silly for the internet companies, but in a manner that makes it nearly impossible for new entrants in the field, as the legacy players get an automatic boost from the free money they get from the internet companies that send them free traffic.

Filed Under: aggregation, australia, journalism, legacy, links, media, news, tax, traffic
Companies: facebook, google

Is There A Conspiracy Among Legacy Media Companies To Push A False Narrative About Big Tech?

from the well,-there's-some-smoke... dept

Over the last few months we've witnessed a veritable flood of misleading to simply false articles about internet companies showing up in mainstream sources. There were misleading articles in Vox and the Washington Post. And then, just recently, we saw not one but two NY Times pieces that went out of their way to misrepresent the law. And, then of course, there's the Wall Street Journal that has been misrepresenting Section 230 for ages. To date, the only one of these publications to run a serious correction (and to continue to help debunking misrepresentations) is the smallest of those listed above: Vox, who did some research and published a big mea culpa.

This has gotten many in the tech industry to begin to wonder. It's one thing for (cross aisle) grandstanding politicians like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Nancy Pelosi, and Richard Blumenthal to totally misrepresent the law. But when the mainstream media is doing so on a regular basis -- it's causing a lot of talk behind the scenes about whether this is a coordinated hit. Some, like the excellent reporter Anna Wiener, recently more or less dismissed this theory as being "mostly... a facile argument," though I think she mixes up two separate issues. First, it is absolutely true that many startup founders don't know how to deal with the press well, and get personally offended by bad press coverage. And, for those entrepreneurs: fuck 'em. They should grow up and learn what the press actually does, when done right -- which includes researching and debunking nonsense (and there's a ton of nonsense in Silicon Valley).

But, that's a separate issue from whether or not there's a coordinated campaign to undermine the foundations of the internet by a few larger, legacy industries who have failed to adapt to a changing time. Indeed, we saw significant evidence of Hollywood's top lobbyists working behind the scenes (though, it occasionally slipped out publicly) to push for FOSTA, the first bill that significantly undermined Section 230.

And there's plenty more evidence of legacy industries -- mainly legacy media and entertainment companies -- plotting to take down internet companies by making use of the news. Remember, during the Sony Pictures hack, that MPAA emails were leaked, revealing "Project Goliath," which was specifically a plan to damage Google through any means necessary -- and that included using a smear campaign placed in the Wall Street Journal and on the Today Show. In an email sent to an official in Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood's office by then MPAA "director of external state government affairs" official (and former ICE official) Brian Cohen, Cohen admits the "proposed plan" is to place an anti-Google smear campaign:

If that image is not showing up, the text comes from a larger strategic plan between the MPAA and various state Attorneys' General, and includes this:

Media: We want to make sure that the media is at the NAAG meeting. We propose working with MPAA (Vans), Comcast, and NewsCorp (Bill Guidera) to see about working with a PR firm to create an attack on Google (and others who are resisting AG efforts to address online piracy). This PR firm can be funded through a nonprofit dedicated to IP issues. The "live buys" should be available for the media to see, followed by a segment the next day on the Today Show (David green can help with this). After the Today Show segment, you want to have a large investor of Google (George can help us determine that) come forward and say that Google needs to change its behavior/demand reform. Next, you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google's stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed.

So, sure, while it may seem "facile" for some to argue that legacy media firms are out to get big internet companies with trumped up claims in their own media properties, there's very real evidence of a conspiracy to do literally that. Not so facile.

And there's more where that comes from. In Wired's giant profile last year of the "troubles" inside Facebook, it is made clear that Rupert Murdoch used his ability to damage the company via the editorial pages of the WSJ as part of a negotiating strategy:

Zuckerberg traveled to Sun Valley, Idaho, for an annual conference hosted by billionaire Herb Allen, where moguls in short sleeves and sunglasses cavort and make plans to buy each other’s companies. But Rupert Murdoch broke the mood in a meeting that took place inside his villa. According to numerous accounts of the conversation, Murdoch and Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp, explained to Zuckerberg that they had long been unhappy with Facebook and Google. The two tech giants had taken nearly the entire digital ad market and become an existential threat to serious journalism. According to people familiar with the conversation, the two News Corp leaders accused Facebook of making dramatic changes to its core algorithm without adequately consulting its media partners, wreaking havoc according to Zuckerberg’s whims. If Facebook didn’t start offering a better deal to the publishing industry, Thomson and Murdoch conveyed in stark terms, Zuckerberg could expect News Corp executives to become much more public in their denunciations and much more open in their lobbying. They had helped to make things very hard for Google in Europe. And they could do the same for Facebook in the US.

.... Inside Facebook, executives believed Murdoch might use his papers and TV stations to amplify critiques of the company. News Corp says that was not at all the case; the company threatened to deploy executives, but not its journalists.

Zuckerberg had reason to take the meeting especially seriously, according to a former Facebook executive, because he had firsthand knowledge of Murdoch’s skill in the dark arts. Back in 2007, Facebook had come under criticism from 49 state attorneys general for failing to protect young Facebook users from sexual predators and inappropriate content. Concerned parents had written to Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who opened an investigation, and to The New York Times, which published a story. But according to a former Facebook executive in a position to know, the company believed that many of the Facebook accounts and the predatory behavior the letters referenced were fakes, traceable to News Corp lawyers or others working for Murdoch, who owned Facebook’s biggest competitor, MySpace. “We traced the creation of the Facebook accounts to IP addresses at the Apple store a block away from the MySpace offices in Santa Monica,” the executive says. “Facebook then traced interactions with those accounts to News Corp lawyers. When it comes to Facebook, Murdoch has been playing every angle he can for a long time.” (Both News Corp and its spinoff 21st Century Fox declined to comment.)

Got that? Facebook actually traced fake accounts, that were handed to long-grandstanding anti-internet crusader Richard Blumenthal (then a state AG, now a Senator) back to News Corp. And Murdoch strongly implied to Facebook execs that he needed to get a better deal from them or his publications, such as the WSJ, would put out hit pieces.

So, yes, there are legitimate points of concern to raise about big internet companies. I'm not one to normally believe in cynical conspiracy theories, but it's not at all crazy to think that the recent onslaught in major media properties may not be coming from the most ethically sound place. After all, if Hollywood has plotted in the past to do exactly that, why would anyone expect them to have given up those underhanded games?

Filed Under: attacks, behind the scenes, conspiracy, hit pieces, journalism, lobbying, media, misrepresentations, section 230
Companies: comcast, mpaa, news corp.

Prince Harry Uses GDPR To Obtain Payout From Photographer Who Shot Photos Of His Rental Home

from the something-about-pictures-of-a-house-on-a-beach... dept

The repeated answer to the question, "How does the GDPR work?" is: "Not well." The privacy law enacted by the European Union is a regulatory omnishambles that was first greeted by non-European websites telling Europeans their business was no longer welcome.

From there, the convoluted law the EU Commission itself can't even comply with properly has been used to vanish everything from documents on US court dockets to trash cans inside an Ireland post office. When it's not providing new attack vectors to cybercriminals, it's being co-opted by the powerful to control what the public gets to see and hear about them.

The latest repurposing of the GDPR into an offensive weapon occurred in the pre-Brexit UK, which may give the royal family a reason for remaining united with the rest of Europe. Britain's literal ruling class has never shied away from dragging publications and paparazzi into court, but this latest case -- involving photos of house being rented by Prince Harry -- has a new GDPR twist.

Prince Harry this week notched another victory in the royal family's long-running battle with paparazzi photographers, securing a "substantial payout" from an agency which used a helicopter to take pictures inside a house he was renting.

Potentially even more interesting than that is the way in which he won his battle — basing a legal case partly on a sweeping new European data law that is less than a year old.

According to a statement delivered to London's High Court on Thursday, in which the paparazzi agency Splash News apologized to Harry, also known as the Duke of Sussex (emphasis ours):

"This matter concerns a claim for misuse of private information, breaches of The Duke's right to privacy under Article 8 ECHR and breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") and Data Protection Act 2018 ("DPA")."

This settlement has the potential to deter journalists from taking pictures of anyone or anything. While this case involved photos of the inside of Prince Harry's rental property, it wouldn't take much to stretch the definition of unlawful data-handling to cover any photos taken without the subject's permission.

Although the details of the settlement still remain mostly under wraps, there's speculation that the privacy violation wasn't just the photos of the interior of the house -- an interior only visible by air. (The photos were taken by a paparazzo in a helicopter.) It may also have something to with information not revealed publicly by Prince Harry: namely, the address of the photographed residence.

Given that the law allows subjects to revoke consent at any time following publication, this makes reporting on the lives of public figures that much more risky. It appears the GDPR can be abused much more easily than the UK's routinely-abused defamation laws. The GDPR has an exemption for journalists, but it's not clear-cut and requires a case-by-case examination by an EU comptroller who will make the final determination on the issue of public interest.

There's no presumed exemption to the law that protects reporting. The EU Commission comptroller decides whether or not the published info was in the public interest when it's challenged, which puts even less-sensational efforts on shaky ground. Given its retroactive reach, the GDPR can act as yet another "right to be forgotten," allowing subjects of reporting to revoke consent (implied or otherwise) months or years after publication to force removal of content from the web. This case may deal with the unsavory actions of paparazzi but the side effects will be felt by journalism as a whole. Any public figure who wants to keep their private dealings out of the news -- for whatever reason -- will have the GDPR available to do their dirty work.

Filed Under: censorship, eu, gdpr, media, paparazzi, prince harry

If You're Surprised By Verizon's AOL, Yahoo Face Plant, You Don't Know Verizon

from the yet-another-face-plant dept

So for years we've been pointing out that Verizon's attempt to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial ad brand hasn't been going so well. Oddly, mashing together two failing 90s brands in AOL and Yahoo, and renaming the coagulated entity "Oath," didn't really impress many people. The massive Yahoo hack, a controversy surrounding Verizon snoopvertising, and the face plant by the company's well-hyped Go90 streaming service didn't really help.

This week, Verizon was forced to acknowledge that Oath was now effectively worthless, at least in full context of what Verizon paid for it, and the company's past claims that the company would be taking on Facebook and Google in the online advertising wars for a generation to come:

"Verizon announced Tuesday that it would take a $4.6 billion writedown on its the media unit, which includes Yahoo and AOL. Oath's brand value is now worth just $200 million, according to Verizon. That's a stunning decrease in value since it formed in 2017. Verizon said Oath's brand was worth $4.8 billion when it last accounted for the company's goodwill valuation. With virtually no goodwill brand value, Oath's overall value (assets and goodwill) is now worth half of what it was a few years ago.

While some folks reacted with "shock" on Twitter, none of this should really have been a surprise to anybody who has watched Verizon do business over the last decade or two.

Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating admittedly excellent networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, being misleading about net neutrality), Verizon falls flat on its face. Whether it's the company's failed Go90 platform, failed video joint venture with RedBox, failed news website Sugarstring (which you may recall tried to ban reporters from talking about surveillance or net neutrality), its app store, its "me too" VCAST apps, or any of a dozen other countless efforts to expand into less familiar territory, Verizon failed. Usually semi-spectacularly.

This happens because having spent the better part of a generation engaged in turf protection and lobbying, telcos really can't innovate. We've known this for more than a decade, yet somehow, each time Verizon announces some new pivot, we forget. Telecom executives tend to think they can overcome this character flaw via megamerger, which usually just saddles the company with oodles of additional debt, but doesn't really address any of the sector's core shortcomings, built on the back of being largely government-pampered natural monopolies for the better part of a generation.

A big part of Verizon's attempted pivot to Millennial video ads was courtesy of former CEO Lowell McAdam, who left the company last summer. His predecessor, Ivan Seidenberg, believed that Verizon should remain focused on what it does best (sometimes): building better, faster networks. Seidenberg was a big reason for the company's $24 billion push into pure fiber with "FiOS." McAdam came in, froze most of those deployments, then tried to turn a legacy telco into Google. It didn't work, and anybody who is surprised by that hasn't watched Verizon do business.

All of that said, a company SEC filing effectively blamed McAdam and his team for the failure. As of this writing, that appears to have been enough to satisfy the company's investors, who are clearly eager to ride the hype waves emanating from Verizon's next big unfulfilled promise.

Filed Under: internet, media, telcos, writedowns
Companies: aol, oath, verizon, yahoo

Techdirt Podcast Episode 182: Anonymity In The Media & Online

from the someone-said dept

Anonymity is back in the news in a big way, especially since the New York Times published an explosive opinion piece by an anonymous White House official. Here at Techdirt — proudly one of the few blogs that still allows completely anonymous comments with no sign-up — we've talked about anonymity for a long time in the context of the internet. On this week's episode, Mike and regular co-hosts Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy talk about the benefits, challenges, and overall importance of anonymous speech.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: anonymity, comments, journalism, media, podcast