No, The Resignation Of NYT Editor James Bennet Does Not Mean American Newsrooms Have 'Turned Into College Campuses'

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

On Friday we wrote about the uproar regarding the terrible op-ed piece by Senator Tom Cotton in the New York Times, calling for the use of the US military against protesters in the US. There was widespread anger against the decision to run the op-ed, and then a backlash from some who argued that this showed the people complaining about it were somehow "unwilling to listen" to viewpoints they disagreed with. In my piece, I argued that if the NY Times didn't publish my op-ed on why the Opinions Editor James Bennet was an incompetent dweeb, then clearly, they hated free speech and were unwilling to confront difficult ideas.

Over the weekend, the news came down that Bennet had resigned, leading to a new round of hand-wringing from people who want to appear to be among the Serious Thinkers™, fretting that American newsrooms were "becoming college campuses" full of "safe spaces" and "political correctness."

Again, this is just silly. I'm probably more extreme than most in arguing for free speech and the importance of listening to viewpoints and ideas that people disagree with. And while there have been incidents on college campuses where students have pushed back on hearing uncomfortable ideas, there's a big difference between an unwillingness to listen to "uncomfortable" ideas and an unwillingness to support disingenuous ideas that are simply designed to rile people up.

Again, as we discussed last week, while some people were freaking out about so-called "censorship," the issue was actually about editorial discretion -- which is something wholly different. When you consider every act of editorial discretion to be the same as censorship, then the real problem is on your end. You can disagree with the decision (in either direction) and speak out about it (because there are many ways to speak out these days). But a single platform choosing to publish a terrible, disingenuous op-ed whose entire point appeared to be to piss people off, and then the person in charge resigning following the controversy, has nothing at all to do with censorship or safe spaces or avoiding difficult conversations.

The issue, again, is whether or not the editorial discretion is well applied. And the evidence -- which goes way beyond that one op-ed -- says that it was not. Indeed, an honest look at Cotton's piece showed that it was incredibly dishonest and deceptive in describing a "problem" that did not really appear to exist, and a solution that would have made actual problems much, much worse. That's why people said it was dangerous to publish -- not because they were afraid to discuss and debate ideas, or because of political correctness.

It comes down to this simple point: there are certain elements in society now who are simply trolling. And Tom Cotton is a giant troll. Whether he intends to be or not, he has all of the characteristics of an internet troll. He's posting dishonest claptrap, designed to enrage. He's cherry picking his facts and ignoring any countervailing evidence. He frames his nonsense with claims about wanting to be a part of the debate, but as anyone who has ever dealt with internet trolls knows, that's all part of the game to keep people engaged.

The general rule of thumb on the internet is "don't feed the trolls." I don't always agree with that wisdom, as there is sometimes value in a one-off response to trollish behavior to highlight for others why the troll's disingenuous claims are bullshit. But, there's an issue beyond just not "feeding" the trolls: you never need to elevate them and act as if they are in the debate for honest and reasonable reasons. That's where the NY Times Opinion section has failed miserably over the past few years. In its attempt to "both sides" every damn issue, it has ignored constructive debate in favor of elevating trolls who are simply playing the Times and (until now) Bennet, using the fact that the Times wants to appear to host "multiple viewpoints" to their advantage.

You can feed the trolls in the comment section if you want, but the NY Times shouldn't be elevating them. That's not because they're college campuses, too politically correct, or afraid of difficult ideas. It's because if you want serious debate you figure out who the trolls are and leave them in the comment section. There are serious, non-trollish people with opposing viewpoints. Editorial discretion is finding them. Bennet didn't. And now he's out of a job.

Filed Under: editorial discretion, free speech, james bennet, journalism, opinion pieces, tom cotton, trolls
Companies: ny times

Senator Blumenthal Is Super Mad That Zoom Isn't Actually Offering The End To End Encryption His Law Will Outlaw

from the also-should-acquaint-himself-with-the-1st-amendment dept

Richard Blumenthal has been attacking internet services he doesn't understand since before he was even a US Senator. It has carried over into his job as a Senator, and was abundantly obvious in his role as a co-sponsor for FOSTA. His hatred of the internet was on clear display during a hearing over FOSTA in which he flat out said that if smaller internet companies couldn't put in place the kind of infrastructure required to comply with FOSTA, that they should go out of business. Blumenthal's latest ridiculous bit of legislation lose your Section 230 protections. And while Blumenthal likes to pretend that the EARN IT Act doesn't target encryption, he also lied about FOSTA and insisted it had no impact on CDA 230 (which it directly amended).

But Blumenthal has now taken his ridiculousness up a notch. Following the (legitimately concerning) reports that the suddenly incredibly popular videoconferencing software Zoom was not actually providing end-to-end encrypted video chats (despite its marketing claims), Blumenthal decided to step in and play the hero sending an angry letter to the company, while linking to the Intercept's original story about Zoom's misleading claims about encryption:

The letter highlights a number of recent claims that have been made about Zoom's security and privacy practices -- some of which are very significant (and a few that aren't as big a deal) -- including the end to end encryption claims:

Does Zoom provide end-to-end encryption, as the term is commonly understood by cybersecurity experts, for video conferences? Please describe when end-to-end encryption is available for users and how the personal data is encrypted?

And this is a legit question and I think it's good that a Senator is asking that. I just think that this particular Senator is the wrong messenger, given his active role in trying to make it impossible for companies like Zoom to offer end-to-end encryption in the first place, as Riana Pfefferkorn (the Associate Director Surveillance & Cybersecurity at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society) pointed out:

And it gets worse. As Pfefferkorn also points out, Blumenthal's claims to be so concerned about cybersecurity and privacy ring hollow when just last month he straight up claimed that you have no right to privacy online:

This was in a weak attempt to "respond to concerns" raised about the EARN IT Act. In one of the responses, concerning government mandates for scanning content and how that interacts with the 4th Amendment, Blumenthal, quoting Neil Gorsuch, claims that there's no reasonable expectation of privacy for any content you put online:

In the Ackerman opinion cited by tech companies as raising Fourth Amendment concerns, Gorsuch suggested that the third-party doctrine will protect evidence of CSAM found by a company that privately searched. When a company has terms and conditions that enable it to privately search, there is no Fourth Amendment violation because users lose their reasonable expectation of privacy. Gorsuch stated that “The [Supreme] Court has, after all, suggested that individuals lack any reasonable expectation of privacy and so forfeit any Fourth Amendment protections in materials they choose to share with third parties.”

Of course, as Pfefferkorn further points out, Blumenthal's broken analysis of the Ackerman opinion leaves out some important information. But, still, Blumenthal seems to constantly be talking out of both sides of his mouth. He doesn't believe in an expectation of privacy for content posted online, but he also wants to slam a company for not keeping information private. He doesn't want companies to have end-to-end encryption, but he's angry at Zoom for not having end-to-end encryption.

And that's not the end of the problems with Blumenthal's approach here. While some of the privacy concerns he raises are legit, he lumps them in with ones that are not. For example, for reasons that make no sense at all, he seems to think the relatively new practice of Zoombombing -- in which (often racist trolls from the worst parts of the internet) find publicly linked Zoom events and pop in to be total assholes -- is on par with the other (often legit) security questions raised by Zoom's security practices. Right after his question about end-to-end encryption he asks:

What measures has Zoom put into place to detect and prevent Zoombombing -- intrusions and abuse targeting Zoom meetings? What are the policies governing such abusive behavior, what detection mechanisms are in place, how can users report abusive intrusions, and how quickly does Zoom respond to such incidents?

While there are plenty of questions about how companies can deal with such things, this is not an issue that is under the government's purview. Indeed, as annoying as Zoombombing is, and as quickly as I'm sure Zoom has been working on technology tools to allow meeting hosts to deal with the issue, most Zoombombing is still 1st Amendment protected speech, and a Senator has no business insisting that Zoom silence such activities. And yet, that seems to be exactly what he's focused on doing:

In that tweet he says: "I am calling on Zoom to take urgent & aggressive action to stop the racists, trolls, & peddlers of hate that are silencing & bullying communities." Yeah, the 1st Amendment (the one you swore to defend) might want to have a word with you about that, Senator. I'm all for Zoom coming up with tools for users of its service to help prevent such trollish behavior, but seriously, these kinds of stunts are not at all new on the internet and have been around for literally decades. That doesn't make the juvenile behavior any less annoying or problematic, but it's not the role of any government official to insist that a company censor people for protected speech, no matter how trollish.

Separately, of course, this ignores that Zoom had already put in place a detailed plan for how to stop Zoombombing over a week before Blumenthal sent the letter. The company still could do more, and it's worth noting that it has since released a detailed plan to deal with the newly raised security and privacy concerns, including a 90 day freeze on all feature development to have the engineering team focus on privacy and security issues. That didn't take Senator Blumenthal's grandstanding -- and, of course, if Blumenthal's EARN IT Act passes, that would make Zoom's job that much more difficult.

I know that Senator Blumenthal loves to grandstand over tech issues, but it might help if he understood the technology, the law, and the Constitution before making such a fool of himself. Unfortunately, for over a decade he's shown a decided lack of interest in doing any of those things, and I guess he has no intention of starting now.

Filed Under: earn it, encryption, fosta, free speech, privacy, richard blumenthal, section 230, security, trolls, zoombombing
Companies: zoom

Twitter Suspended Cory Doctorow For Putting Trolls On A List Called 'Colossal Assholes'

from the moderation-impossibility dept

Shout it from the rooftops: content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Mistakes will always be made, or even "legitimate" decisions will appear "wrong" to many, many people. The latest example: Twitter -- which has received criticism for being both too aggressive in shutting down accounts and not nearly aggressive enough (sometimes by the same people) -- suspended Cory Doctorow's account earlier this week. The reasoning for the suspension? He would put various trolls onto a Twitter list called "colossal assholes" before muting them, and Twitter claimed this violated its policies (though the company only told him well after it suspended him):

I woke up yesterday morning and discovered that my account was locked. There was no explanation, either in the app, the site or my email for this. I contacted everyone I knew at Twitter, and everyone who knew anyone at Twitter. At 830AM Pacific – about 5h after the suspension – I got an email from support – saying I'd been suspended for having a list to which I add trolls called "colossal assholes."

I'm not sure that this qualifies as a ToS violation (I gave up reporting trolls who called me much worse, because Twitter inevitably replied that these epithets were not prohibited), but it's super-weird that they suspended me without warning or explanation. Also weird: I could not rename the list while suspended, only delete it (I tried to rename it "thoroughly unpleasant individuals").

Weirder: "Colossal assholes" got me suspended, but not its companion list, "Toe-faced shitweasels"

Given the kind of language that I regularly see on Twitter, I agree that this certainly appears to be a silly decision (as is the failure to let him just rename the list, not to mention the failure to notify him until many hours later). At the same time, going back to the Masnick Impossibility Theorem, I can totally see how this happened, where a content moderator (perhaps alerted by some keyword-checking algorithm) flagged the list "colossal assholes" and decided that maybe it violated Twitter's prohibition on abuse/harassment or hateful conduct.

The issue, of course, is that an overworked content moderation team isn't going to be in a position to explore who Cory is, how he's using that list or -- most importantly -- if the list is actually made up of "colossal assholes." It's just going to pull the plug. Of course, there's an argument that merely adding an account to a list is not a form of harassment -- but that ignores the fact that just a few months ago Twitter was heavily criticized for not doing enough to stop trolls from abusing the list feature to harass people.

Again: getting this right is impossible. One person's trolling is another person's counter trolling. One person's impassioned debate is another person's harassment. There's literally no way to get this right -- though I do think that this one looks particularly silly and that Twitter's notification process here could have been much better (also it should have let him change the list name, rather than just deleting it).

In the meantime, Cory has announced that he's renamed all of his lists:

Also, in response to Twitter's sensitivity about "colossal assholes" as a listname, I've renamed and expanded my lists.

• Potent emetics
• Tissue-thin bad faith
• Foolish timewasters
• Beneath contempt
• Odious nonsense-spewers
• Confederate gravy-eaters
• Toe-faced stenchweasels
• Hilariously inept lackwits
• Probably bots
• Thick as two short planks
• Raving conspiracists
• Sociopath climate deniers
• Dim bulb centrists
• Inept MAGA trolls
• Red scare bedwetters

I get the feeling some people could end up on, well, nearly all of those lists.

Filed Under: colossal assholes, content moderation, content moderation at scale, cory doctorow, trolls
Companies: twitter

Study Says Russian Trolls Didn't Have Much Influence On Election; But It's More Complicated Than That

from the nothing-is-black-and-white dept

Since the election, I've been pretty firmly in the camp that believes that those who rushed to blame social media and things like (well documented) Russian attempts to interfere in the election via social media, have been vastly blown out of proportion. It's resulted in silly things like famous comedians suggesting that if Mark Zuckerberg allows Russians trolls to try to influence another election Zuck should go to jail. That's just silly. Much of it, to me, seems to be people who expected one outcome in the 2020 election casting blame towards something they could latch onto. Did Russian trolls try to use social media to influence the election? Absolutely. Did the results of the 2016 Presidential election surprise the politically savvy? Absolutely. Does that single correlation mean anything? There's been little evidence to suggest there is, even as many people assume their must be.

Given those priors, you might think that I'd be quick to jump on board a new study that suggests that my intuition is accurate. The study, entitled Russian Influence on US Twitter Users, by some Duke University researchers suggests little impact from Russian trolling operations.

There is widespread concern that Russia and other countries have launched social-media campaigns designed to increase political divisions in the United States. Though a growing number of studies analyze the strategy of such campaigns, it is not yet known how these efforts shaped the political attitudes and behaviors of Americans. We study this question using longitudinal data that describe the attitudes and online behaviors of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 merged with nonpublic data about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) from Twitter. Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted 6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network, high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized. We conclude by discussing several important limitations of our study—especially our inability to determine whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election—as well as its implications for future research on social media influence campaigns, political polarization, and computational social science.

As Will Oremus summarizes at OneZero, the evidence mostly suggests that "the people most likely to interact with Russian trolls are the ones who were already the most entrenched in their partisan views." And thus, the people least likely to change their views in the first place.

In short, “the type of people who are most likely to interact with political influence campaigns are the least likely to be influenced by them,” said Christopher Bail, the paper’s lead author, who is a professor of sociology at Duke and the director of its Polarization Lab. That doesn’t mean the tweets had zero effect, but they failed to move the needle on any of six survey questions designed to measure different ways that one’s politics could change.

In a phone interview, Bail also highlighted two other reasons Russian influence campaigns might struggle to make a measurable impact. One is that their content makes up only a tiny fraction of most users’ feeds, if any. Another is that previous research has shown that political persuasion in general tends to be challenging, and the effects of political advertising hard to detect. “We know that most attempts to influence people’s politics fail,” Bail said. “Put in that light, why should we expect Russians to have influence if the most sophisticated American campaigns can’t move voters?”

The results of this study also support other research that found little direct impact from Russian online propaganda campaigns, which only seemed to generate real momentum once the propaganda/conspiracy theories appeared on Fox News. So, in those cases, there was influence, but only once the gullible suckers at Fox bit on them.

Still, I'm not sure that this study really actually shows that much. It's a useful addition to the literature, to be sure, but there are some pretty significant limitations to the study and its findings -- which, to their credit as good academic researchers, the authors of this study readily admit and highlight. Still, Renee DiResta, who also studies these things (currently at Stanford) had a good Twitter thread about this study, highlighting some of the challenges in determining the actual impact. In that thread, she notes that the trolling campaign wasn't always about trying to drive voters from one candidate to another, but often to do what it appears to have actually done, which was to entrench certain views (perhaps destructive views) and to divide people. And, even if everything in the study above is accurate and true, those two goals might have been accomplished anyway.

And, of course, it's difficult to measure "persuasion" anyway, and it's even more difficult to measure "impact" on any particular voter or set of voters of a single channel of messages, given just how many bits of information everyone processes every damn day. Josh Farkas, who also studies this stuff, highlighted another critique of this style of study, amusingly quoting from a book from the 1960s, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes that similarly notes that most studies on propaganda show little direct result from any individual piece of propaganda. But that doesn't mean the propaganda wasn't useful:

Farkas quotes further, including: "You cannot measure with any precision the effects of a film because you cannot dissociate it from current newspaper articles and radio broadcasts on the same subject." Again, this is useful in thinking about this study and the framing of it -- along with all discussions regarding using the internet and internet trolls to try to "influence" elections.

The end result is that thinking this is an "internet" problem, or that it's an issue that is unique (or even brand new) to the internet would be wrong and not particularly helpful. And that's why, even if this study isn't particularly useful in showing what impact there was (or was not) from Russian trolls on the internet, at the very least, it serves as a useful reminder that if we want to tackle the challenges of disinformation, simplistic solutions that amount to little more than telling social media companies "you solve it!" will not do a damn thing.

Filed Under: elections, influence, propaganda, russian trolls, social media, trolls

Jerks 'Reporting' Women Who Swipe Left On Them In Tinder, Once Again Highlighting How Content Moderation Gets Abused

from the always-another-thing dept

We keep trying to highlight (over and over and over again) how content moderation at scale is impossible to do well for a variety of reasons -- and one big one is the fact that assholes and trolls will game whatever system you put in place -- often in truly absurd ways. The latest example of this is that guys who are pissed off about women who reject them after meeting through Tinder are "reporting" the women in the app, trying to get their accounts shut down.

I had been banned from Tinder. It turns out, though, I’m far from the only woman to have been kicked off the app for no other reason than I rejected the wrong guy. Indeed, without the need for any apparent proof of wrongdoing, a new breed of scorned men have stumbled upon a particularly passive-aggressive way to say, “If I can’t have her, no one can” — tapping the report button.

Case in point: Last year, 33-year-old Amy declined to go out with a man she’d been messaging with when he started insulting her. The insults, of course, only intensified from there — with him telling her she was shaped like Slimer from Ghostbusters and that her fertility was declining. Stunned, she put her phone away. After taking a moment, she went to block him, but when she opened Tinder, her account had been banned.

Of course, as some of the article highlights, Tinder itself seems woefully (ridiculously) unprepared to deal with even the most basic instances of this kind of abuse. Tinder apparently bans accounts based on a single report and the company states that it does "not offer an appeals process at this time." The article highlights a bunch of tweets from women who all seem to have gone through a similar experience. They met a dude on Twitter, date doesn't go well, she says she'd rather not go on another date... the guy flips out, acts like an asshole, and minutes later, she's banned from the app.

The author of the article, who herself was banned from Tinder right after such an experience, found a guy who admitted to doing this.

I did, though, find one man — 26-year-old Brian — who admitted to reporting women who were unresponsive to his messages. “I’ve done this,” he confides. “It’s a huge waste of time for girls to match with you and then not reply. Like what’s the point?”

He then goes on to spout a bunch of misogynistic nonsense, apparently believing that women do this on purpose to be mean to men like him, which apparently is what he needs to convince himself that getting their accounts shut down okay.

Of course, what's left out of this discussion is a bit of the flipside. You can kind of understand why Tinder is so aggressive in banning people, because if people actually are violating its rules, the consequences could be a lot more serious, especially given that the entire point of the app is to get people to meet up in real life. If they mess that up, there will be all sorts of bad press about how Tinder failed to take down an account or something. Hell, as we've detailed, Grindr effectively got sued over this exact scenario and the plaintiff in that case recently asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal.

That's not to say the companies can't do a better job -- they can. Having an appeals process seems like a no-brainer. But an appeals process can be gamed as well. And this is the point that we keep trying to make: it's literally impossible to do content moderation well at this kind of scale. There will always be problems and judgment calls people disagree with -- and outright abuse. In both directions. People abusing the system to take down content they don't like, and others abusing the system to keep up content or profiles that probably should be taken down. It's easy for someone to say "oh, they shouldn't do that," but no one has yet come up with a system that always gets it right and stops any such abuse. Because it's literally impossible.

Filed Under: appeals, assholes, content moderation, content moderation at scale, dating, reporting, trolls
Companies: tinder

Fox News Commentator Calls For A 'Backlash' Against Big Tech... Because Wikileaks Released His Phone Number

from the say-that-again? dept

It's widely recognized that there's been a widespread backlash against the big tech companies over the last few years. Politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US have been calling for massive, sometimes crippling, regulations, fines or even antitrust breakups of the companies. Regulators around the globe have been fining the companies billions of dollars.

Apparently all of that is news to Fox News contributor Juan Williams, who has taken to the august pages of The Hill to publish an op-ed calling for a backlash to big tech. Dude, it's already happening. Still, perhaps Williams has a new argument that is worth considering? I mean, there are legitimate points to be made about competition, privacy and the like. But... nope. Williams is mad that Wikileaks -- which, last I checked, is not considered a member of "big tech" -- leaked his cell phone number in a cache of John Podesta emails:

Tell the truth — you love Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the rest.

I did, too. Then it got personal for me.

In 2016, Russian hackers, using WikiLeaks, “doxed” me.

They published my private cell phone number in a dump of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails. I gave him my number in a private email to set up an interview.

Once the number was out, my phone blew up. Pranksters harassed me. Thuggish partisans threatened me. I had to get a new phone as I was covering the final weeks of the campaign.

So, uh, what does that have to do with "Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the rest"? I have absolutely no clue. And neither does Williams. But apparently, it's a reason to attack them. Oh, also because some asshole troll wrote negative reviews on his upcoming book on Amazon.

Then, in 2018, a smiling man came up after I hosted a television show in Dallas to tell me how much he enjoyed “trolling” me online with racist language.

I couldn’t believe he was saying this to my face. His smile made it weird.

He then bragged about how he and his pals wrote phony reviews of a book I wrote on President Trump’s history of racism. He wanted to bring down the book’s rating on Amazon, even though it had not yet been released and he had not read it.

And get this – this guy then asked for a selfie.

That's certainly a good example of an asshole troll doing asshole trollish things. But according to Williams, it's proof of why we need to attack social media companies?

This is just one horrible way the world has been transformed for the worse by social media.

Huh?

Then he just blames them all for recent mass shootings.

The recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton reminded the nation of the damage done by Big Tech's refusal to take responsibility for hate speech, racism and calls to violence.

Wait. What did any of those sites have to do with the mass shootings in either place? This is just a random slur for no reason at all. There is no connection at all. Indeed, there's a much stronger connection between those shootings and... wait for it, Williams' own employer:

There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month.

[....]

An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.

So, uh, Juan Williams, perhaps there should be a "backlash" against your own house, before you start throwing stones at others. But, nope. It's important for Fox News to keep the narrative focused on the tech companies, lest anyone take a look at its own efforts. And one way to fuel the narrative is to lie about it and then poll the public you fooled. Williams plays along:

Polls now show a sharp increase in Americans who are furious with big technology companies that rake in millions while refusing to take any responsibility for the spread of hateful language, bizarre conspiracy theories, financial scams and trolls — as well as the derailing of honest political discourse.

Funny, but it's Williams buddies at Fox News who keep arguing that these platforms take too much responsibility on the site and are supposedly "banning conservatives," and that's why Senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz keep threatening laws to stop these sites from taking down any speech. Meanwhile, you have to be horrifically and totally out of touch to argue that these sites have not been trying to deal with "hateful language, bizarre conspiracy theories, financial scams and trolls." They've been trying. They've been failing, but part of that is the impossibility of the task. And part of it is the intellectually dishonest claims by folks like Williams.

Start with the big tech companies’ refusal to stop Russia from interfering in the 2016 election with a deluge of phony online posts designed to tear the country apart by race, religion, sexual preference, and fear of immigrants.

"Refusal to stop" is an interesting way to rewrite history. First off, according to Fox News, all that Russia stuff is a hoax and we should be holding people responsible for "years of lies" about it. But now, Williams is claiming that tech companies should be held liable for not stopping what his colleagues insist is a total hoax? Second, it is absolutely true that social media companies were caught unaware of the extent of Russian operations on social media during the 2016 election. But it's also true that detailed data analysis showed that it was Fox News and not Russian trolls who were more successful in spreading the kind of bogus propaganda the Russians were pushing.

Again, Mr. Williams, perhaps check your own house first.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a leading candidate for the White House in 2020, is following Hughes’ lead by campaigning on a plan to break up the big tech companies.

And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has introduced legislation to hold tech companies accountable for the fact that consumers — especially young children — are becoming addicted to tech products and harming their health in the process.

Williams is so clueless he doesn't even realize that Hawley's other recently introduced bill would literally ban what Williams is requesting in terms of having companies "take responsibility" for hate speech online.

Back in December, I wrote in this column:

“An honest 2020 election is not possible without Congress getting its hands dirty by confronting Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, the tech corporations often referred to by the acronym ‘FAANG.’”

The problem has only gotten worse.

Congress — for the future of our democracy, please bring on the tech backlash!

Again, all of the evidence says that Fox News had significantly more impact than any of the big internet companies, and Williams' sole point of complaint is that Wikileaks -- not a big tech company -- released an email with his phone number, and some random asshole online trolled him. Maybe, next time, Mr. Williams can take a look at his own employer first.

Filed Under: backlash, fox news, internet, juan williams, tech, trolls
Companies: facebook, google, wikileaks

Using Restorative Justice To Deal With Internet Trolls And Jackasses

from the that's-one-approach dept

One of the things that I've tried to highlight over the years, when it comes to questions of content moderation on internet platforms, is that there is a much wider spectrum of options than just "take it down" or "leave it up." Many people seem to think that those are the only two options -- and this is especially true when it comes to policymakers looking to create new laws to moderate types of content online. So much of it is focused on getting sites to remove content. But there are other options -- and sometimes those other options can be more effective.

The latest episode of the radio program On The Media is an interesting (and admittedly unscientific) experiment in using techniques of "restorative justice" in response to internet trolling and harassment. On The Media has been doing an interesting series of episodes on the concepts of "restorative justice," highlighting that focusing just on punishing those who engage in bad behavior often leads to more of their bad behavior, rather than an improvement going forward. There are a variety of programs these days, that seek to come up with more proactive approaches to dealing with criminal behavior that is driven by circumstances, and it's likely there will be many more as well.

For the experiment, OTM producer Micah Loewinger teamed up with researcher Lindsay Blackwell, to see if they could use restorative justice techniques to deal with internet fights that resulted in someone being banned from a particular platform. They specifically chose a potentially controversial subreddit, and tried to get fighting parties to come together to discuss things. They did three such cases -- and arguably one was a pretty clear success, one was a pretty clear failure, and one was... somewhere in the middle. I won't breakdown the whole thing, but suggest you listen:

In listening to it, it reminded me of a couple of other stories that I've pointed to over the years, both involving cases where people you don't expect end up "befriending" and talking to KKK members. One is the story of Rabbi Michael Weisser, who after moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, started receiving a bunch of hate mail from a local racist named Larry Trapp, the Grand Dragon of the KKK in Nebraska. Over time Weisser befriended Trapp and tried to help him. The story is covered in a variety of articles, but here's one from the NY Times:

In a 1992 interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trapp said he had wanted to scare Rabbi Weisser into moving out of Lincoln. “As the state leader, the Grand Dragon, I did more than my share of work because I wanted to build up the state of Nebraska into a state as hateful as North Carolina and Florida,” he said. “I spent a lot of money and went out of my way to instill fear.”

Rabbi Weisser, who suspected the person threatening him was Mr. Trapp, got his telephone number and started leaving messages on the answering machine. “I would say things like: ‘Larry, there’s a lot of love out there. You’re not getting any of it. Don’t you want some?’ And hang up,” he said. “And, ‘Larry, why do you love the Nazis so much? They’d have killed you first because you’re disabled.’ And hang up. I did it once a week.”

Eventually, Trapp and Weisser became so friendly that Trapp not only renounced his previous beliefs, but converted to Judaism and even moved in with Weisser when he became ill later in life. It's quite a story.

And then there's the story of Daryl Davis, a black musician who set up a "hobby" of befriending KKK members. Over the past 30 years, he claims he's been able to convince somewhere around 200 Klansmen to leave the KKK. As with the Weisser story, you can find Daryl Davis' story in many places, including at the CBC:

"He remarked then that this was the first time he had ever had a drink with a black man," says Daryl. "I asked him why...and eventually it came out. He said that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan."

"He gave me his phone number and he wanted me to call him any time I was to return to this bar with this band because he wanted to bring his friends, meaning Klansmen and Klanswomen, to see this black guy play like Jerry Lee."

Ever since then, Daryl has been befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan and attempting to love the hate out of them.

In fact, both of these stories have been featured on the excellent Snap Judgment podcast: The Rabbi and the KKK and The Silver Dollar Lounge.

I think about both of those stories quite a bit -- especially over the past few years as it has certainly felt as if the world has grown more tribalistic and angry. Obviously, that kind of thing does not and cannot work in lots of situations. But the fact that we almost never even try is concerning. So much of the hate and anger often comes from the general feeling that the people you dislike are not human or are somehow less than you. Getting to know them, personally, shatters that illusion. It's very difficult to do -- and there are certainly some situations that would give me pause before even trying it. But, at the same time, I'm curious if it could be done more often -- and that's a big part of what the latest On the Media episode suggests.

It certainly recognizes that it doesn't make sense in every situation (and even its own experiment wasn't all that successful in two out of the three cases). But that one success story certainly suggests that there are scenarios and there are cases where actually getting people together in some form, just to talk, and to better understand each other, leads to more of an understanding between them and a de-escalation of the more personalized, generalized hatred. It seems like that's something that the internet could better enable, if everyone wasn't so quick to retreat away from such scenarios.

Filed Under: censorship, restorative justice, social media, trolls

For All Of Trump's Complaints About Social Media 'Censorship', The White House Itself Moderates Content Similarly To Social Media Sites

from the oh,-look-at-that dept

As you may have heard, a couple weeks ago, President Trump hosted what he called a "social media summit," where he brought in various Trump-supporting social media people, and where they all got to whine about the completely made up concept of anti-conservative censorship on social media sites (and, because I know the same three of you are going to show up in the comments and scream your heads off that I'm being blind to such censorship: you have yet to show any actual evidence to support your claims -- and, no, a few anecdotes of trolls, assholes, revisionists and propagandists being blocked does not actually prove your point). Trump gave a long speech at that event, most of which made literally no sense. However, he seemed pretty damn sure that social media sites are censoring conservatives.

But we run out of here… Shadow-banned, a hundred percent. You look at what’s going on. You know, I could go… The blocking, just the basic blocking of what we want to get out. The fact that they don’t let them join. They don’t. There was…. There’s no doubt in my mind that I should have millions and millions…

I have millions of people, so many people I wouldn’t believe it. But I know that we’ve been blocked. People come up to me, and they say, “Sir, I can’t, I can’t get you. I can’t follow you. They make it impossible.” These are people that are really good at what they do. They say they make it absolutely impossible. And you know we can’t have it. We’re not going to let it happen.

Josh, we’re not going to let it happen. And you know, if they did it on both sides, if it were done to the other side, to the other group… And I’m representing everybody. I do, I represent everybody. I fully understand liberal. I fully understand Democrat. We want to get along. We want to make sure that everybody loves each other, if that’s possible. And maybe, I really believe it is.

Also, during the talk, he briefly admitted that he understands why sites have kicked off some of these people before then going back to saying it's unfair:

Of course, as Charles Duan notes at the Washington Examiner, if the White House is really upset about social media platforms kicking people off, it might want to check its own house first. Because on the "We The People" petition site, the White House itself appears to take a surprisingly similar approach to that of the big social media companies.

Or consider We the People again. Surprisingly, the White House petition site has a stringent content moderation policy, prohibiting petitions for commercial endorsements, obscenity, profanity, and “degrading slurs.”

And, from there, he notes that this policy might actually violate the 1st Amendment, given that it is a government site, and the government cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination. Indeed, after last month's Supreme Court ruling that said that it was viewpoint discrimination for the US Patent and Trademark Office to reject trademarks on "immoral and scandalous" marks, following a similar ruling from two years ago barring the rejection of "disparaging" remarks, it's difficult to see how banning petitions that have "degrading slurs" would actually pass Constitutional muster.

But, really, that's an aside to the larger point, which is that in practice the Trump administration appears to be more willing to kick bigots and racists off its own platform than the Obama administration was.

How that policy has been applied is even more concerning. In 2017, a white nationalist group alleged that the We the People content moderator had removed the group’s petition on college funding. I have no love for white nationalists, but kicking them off a White House petition page is plainly viewpoint-based censorship. Ironically, the group noted that the Obama administration had allowed the same petition, so it was the Trump White House that was censoring far-right views.

That links takes you to a white nationalist page whining about the "We The People Moderator" (seriously) rejecting a petition to "defund anti-white colleges that censor criticism of white genocide."

In other words, Trump's own White House is doing exactly the kind of moderation that Trump's own White House is attacking Silicon Valley companies for.

Duan's article makes a further point: if Trump and the White House (or Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley) are really so concerned about the lack of social media sites "respecting" the First Amendment (which they, as private companies, are not bound by), there is literally nothing stopping the White House or Congress from setting up their own sites that would be bound by the First Amendment, as a government project.

Yet if Trump, Cruz, and others want a politically neutral, unbiased platform, there’s a simple solution: They should make one. Call it “freespeech.gov” and guarantee that all ideologies will be treated equally.

[....]

Perhaps counterintuitively, a public social media service actually fits right in to the government’s traditional role. In the real world, traditional public forums include streets, parks, and town halls — all government-run property. Such venues are perfect for political neutrality because the First Amendment demands it. Officials can restrict the time, place, and manner of speech on public grounds, but they cannot discriminate among viewpoints. The village park of Skokie, Illinois, must be as open to neo-Nazis as anyone else.

A freespeech.gov platform would be a virtual public square, so the First Amendment itself would prohibit anti-conservative or other bias. Contrast this to Republicans’ currently favored approach of legislating political neutrality on platforms. Private platforms are emphatically not public forums, as the Supreme Court has explained, and worse yet, this neutrality legislation might be an unconstitutional compelled-speech mandate.

Little stands in the way of building freespeech.gov. The government has its digital consultancies 18F and the U.S. Digital Service to produce the technology. It has already created the “We the People” White House petitions website, a virtual public square where hundreds of thousands of users call for everything from deporting Justin Bieber to building a Death Star. A freespeech.gov site would likely be popular as well — after all, what teenager could resist sharing dank memes under a .gov URL?

This is a valid point all around. If Trump, Hawley and Cruz insist that there needs to be a social media platform that is "neutral," the only place they actually have the Constitutional authority to make that happen is on a site set up by the government itself.

And then, as it appears the Trump administration (and the President himself) recognize, they might finally "understand" why these sites kick people off.

So, the next time you see any government official whining on about private companies not hosting all speech, there's a simple response: the government has the power (and even the skills) to do it itself. The only reason not to, of course, is if this is all stupid political grandstanding and an attempt to "work the refs" into getting social media sites to leave up harassers, abusers, trolls, and propagandists who just happen to be supporting the President and his allies.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, trolls