Disentangling Disinformation: Not As Easy As It Looks

from the impossibility-theories dept

Body bags claiming that “disinformation kills” line the streets this week in front of Facebook’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. A group of protesters, affiliated with “The Real Facebook Oversight Board” (an organization that is, confusingly, not affiliated with Facebook or its Oversight Board), is urging Facebook’s shareholders to ban so-called misinformation “superspreaders”—that is, a specific number of accounts that have been deemed responsible for the majority of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Disinformation about the vaccines is certainly contributing to their slow uptake in various parts of the U.S. as well as other countries. This disinformation is spreading through a variety of ways: Local communities, family WhatsApp groups, FOX television hosts, and yes, Facebook. The activists pushing for Facebook to remove these “superspreaders” are not wrong: while Facebook does currently ban some COVID-19 mis- and disinformation, urging the company to enforce its own rules more evenly is a tried-and-true tactic.

But while disinformation “superspreaders” are easy to identify based on the sheer amount of information they disseminate, tackling disinformation at a systemic level is not an easy task, and some of the policy proposals we’re seeing have us concerned. Here’s why.

1. Disinformation is not always simple to identify.

In the United States, it was only a few decades ago that the medical community deemed homosexuality a mental illness. It took serious activism and societal debate for the medical community to come to an understanding that it was not. Had Facebook been around—and had we allowed it to be arbiter of truth—that debate might not have flourished.

Here’s a more recent example: There is much debate amongst the contemporary medical community as to the causes of ME/CFS, a chronic illness for which a definitive cause has not been determined—and which, just a few years ago, was thought by many not to be real. The Centers for Disease Control notes this and acknowledges that some healthcare providers may not take the illness seriously. Many sufferers of ME/CFS use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to discuss their illness and find community. If those platforms were to crack down on that discussion, relying on the views of the providers that deny the gravity of the illness, those who suffer from it would suffer more greatly.

2. Tasking an authority with determining disinfo has serious downsides.

As we’ve seen from the first example, there isn’t always agreement between authorities and society as to what is truthful—nor are authorities inherently correct.

In January, German newspaper Handelsblatt published a report stating that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was not efficacious for older adults, citing an anonymous government source and claiming that the German government’s vaccination scheme was risky.

AstraZeneca denied the claims, and no evidence that the vaccine was ineffective for older adults was procured, but it didn’t matter: Handelsblatt’s reporting set off a series of events that led to AstraZeneca’s reputation in Germany suffering considerably. 

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that even the CDC itself—the authority tasked with providing information about COVID-19—has gotten a few things wrong, most recently in May when it lifted its recommendation that people wear masks indoors, an event that was followed by a surge in COVID-19 cases. That shift was met with rigorous debate on social media, including from epidemiologists and sociologists—debate that was important for many individuals seeking to understand what was best for their health. Had Facebook relied on the CDC to guide its misinformation policy, that debate may well have been stifled.

3. Enforcing rules around disinformation is not an easy task.

We know that enforcing terms of service and community standards is a difficult task even for the most resourced, even for those with the best of intentions—like, say, a well-respected, well-funded German newspaper. But if a newspaper, with layers of editors, doesn’t always get it right, how can content moderators—who by all accounts are low-wage workers who must moderate a certain amount of content per hour—be expected to do so? And more to the point, how can we expect automated technologies—which already make a staggering amount of errors in moderation—to get it right?

The fact is, moderation is hard at any level and impossible at scale. Certainly, companies could do better when it comes to repeat offenders like the disinformation “superspreaders,” but the majority of content, spread across hundreds of languages and jurisdictions, will be much more difficult to moderate—and as with nearly every category of expression, plenty of good content will get caught in the net.

Reposted from the EFF's Deeplinks blog

Filed Under: content moderation, control, disinformation, rules

Last Month In An LA Court I Witnessed The Future Of A World Without Section 230; It Was A Mess

from the couldn't-you-have-done-more dept

Disclosure: I was an expert witness for RedBubble in this case (and another case) and submitted some reports regarding this case much earlier in the process, though I did not testify at this trial. I had nothing to do with this trial other than attending it as an interested observer, concerned about litigation involving content moderation. As you can see, however, my opinions on this remain identical to my opinions on content moderation going back basically forever...

There's been a lot of talk lately about "repealing" or "reforming" Section 230. We've explained at great lengthy why this would be a mistake and would lead to a ton of frivolous litigation. Section 230 co-author Senator Ron Wyden has referred to this as creating a situation where website operators would face "death by ten thousand duck-bites." Professor Eric Goldman has explained the procedural benefits of Section 230 in that it helps get rid of these cases more quickly. And while some (including myself) have pointed out that the 1st Amendment would still protect most claims, without the procedural benefits of Section 230, we'd still see a ridiculous number of nuisance lawsuits in which companies would have to defend each and every content moderation decision. This would be made significantly worse if the law changes in a manner proposed by folks like law professor Danielle Citron, to require websites to show that their content moderation practices are "reasonable," which would require expensive litigation to determine.

The thing is: we have an area where we can actually see this in practice. There is something of a loophole within Section 230: trademark law. From the beginning, Section 230(e)(2) has excluded intellectual property law. For copyright, that gap was filled (not particularly well) by the notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA Section 512. But trademark has no official intermediary protections in US law. Experts like Mark Lemley have long advocated for harmonizing the various intermediary laws so that they're all consistent. Many people had thought that perhaps the courts had settled the issue with regards to trademark in the infamous Tiffany case against eBay, in which the courts said that eBay shouldn't be expected to be perfect, and as long as it has some sort of program to deal with counterfeits, then it is no longer liable for counterfeits on its site.

However, last summer, a federal judge in LA effectively re-opened the issue in a case brought by the holding company that controls the "Brandy Melville" clothing brand against print-on-demand website RedBubble. Brandy Melville argued that RedBubble was violating its trademarks (and copyrights) in printing some of its designs, and while the judge did toss out much of the case, he allowed a few parts to move forward to a jury trial. The judge said that the Tiffany v. eBay rule didn't necessarily apply -- since that was a case of users selling physical products, whereas with RedBubble, the company would take designs uploaded by users, and pass them on to various print shops for the actual printing. So the open question, in theory, was whether or not that deeper involvement opened itself up to contributory liability (the judge correctly dismissed the claims about direct infringement). There were a few other oddities about the judge's ruling as Eric Goldman noted at the time:

However, the Ohio State ruling didn’t address contributory trademark infringement, and this court sends that issue to the jury. Unlike Tiffany v. eBay, which involved legitimate used resales of Tiffany items, the court says “Redbubble is not burdened by the need to parse valid uses of Brandy Melville’s trademarks from invalid ones, as Brandy Melville has made clear to Redbubble that there are no legitimate sales of Brandy Melville products through its site. As such, all uses of Brandy Melville’s marks that appear on Redbubble’s website are presumptively infringing.” I doubt the court means this statement so baldly, as it disregards parodies, nominative uses, and other legitimate activities. Similarly, the plaintiff complained that RedBubble hasn’t disabled internal consumer keyword searches for its trademarks, but that doesn’t seem like a right exclusive to the trademark owner in light of MTM v. Amazon.

In practice, however, pretty much the entire trial revolved around whether or not RedBubble "did enough" in its content moderation. Over and over again, the lawyers for Brandy Melville kept trying to insist that any failures by RedBubble's content moderation was proof that it did not do enough. Indeed, in the closing arguments, even after it had been pointed out that RedBubble spent millions of dollars per year on its content moderation efforts, and had removed every example that Brandy Melville's lawyers had sent them within a day or two, the lawyer straight up asked the jury "don't you think RedBubble could have done more?"

There were a number of other oddities that came out during the trial. The trial was explicitly about just three specific trademark designs that Brandy Melville held -- two of which never actually appear on the front of t-shirts or other products (the company said it only used them on clothing hang tags and on store signs), and one that the company registered just weeks before suing. Incredibly, Brandy Melville put on the stand a manager of some of their stores who admitted two incredible things: (1) that she was unable to tell which products on RedBubble were legitimate and which were infringing (so how the hell could they expect RedBubble to just know?!?) and (2) that in many years of working and managing Brandy Melville stores, she could not recall a single time that anyone ever brought in a RedBubble product to "return" it. That latter point really stuck with me because it highlighted the near total lack of confusion, which is a key point in trademark infringement. There needs to be confusion.

Another oddity: Brandy Melville kept focusing on the fact that RedBubble refused to block all tags that included "Brandy Melville" or any search results on "Brandy Melville." But as Goldman noted above (and the judge seemed to miss), that's not a right that trademark law gives a trademark holder. RedBubble pointed out that it actually used the tagging system as part of its content moderation efforts -- and that letting users tag stuff "Brandy Melville" made it easier for its content moderation team to find and review those items to see if they infringed. Also, while it only came up exceptionally briefly, one of the products that was on RedBubble's site was a t-shirt that read: "Fuck Brandy Melville," which is clearly commentary/parody -- and not something anyone would assume came from Brandy Melville itself. Brandy Melville cannot abuse trademark law to say any and all use of the term must be blocked. That's not how trademark law works.

For its part, RedBubble spent plenty of time describing the extreme lengths it goes to try to prevent infringing works on its site, including making use of various technologies, having a large team of human reviewers, and working closely with lots of brands to better understand what is and what is not infringing. But, again, the plaintiff's focused on "is it enough."

And, because they kept focusing on a very few examples where Brandy Melville logos or other designs were found on RedBubble, that was proof that, no, the company did not do enough. And... the jury bought it. At the end of the three day trial, the jury said that RedBubble was liable as a contributory infringer, including not just for trademark infringing, but for counterfeiting. This was particularly bizarre because for there to be counterfeiting, there needs to be an actual copying of a product sold by the trademark holder. And, as already noted, two out of the three designs were never actually used on the front of products by Brandy Melville, and as for the third design (the "LA Lightning" mark -- which, seems like it may have its own trademark issues, considering it was yanked from an independent professional basketball team), they never seemed to show exact copies of it on any RedBubble products either. Instead, somewhat bizarrely, Brandy Melville focused on very distinct and different variations on the logo that appeared on RedBubble products -- including a clear parody one for University of Florida students. And the counterfeiting issue was key to Brandy Melville's case, because it would allow them to ask for statutory damages, running up into multiple millions of dollars.

And this is a clear issue with litigation around content moderation: the jury was primed over and over again to believe that any mistake makes the company liable. Brandy Melville's lawyers just kept showing designs that mention Brandy Melville or looked similar to Brandy Melville (frequently for products that Brandy Melville had no trademark over) and then just kept harping on the fact that Brandy Melville didn't approve any of this, and clearly RedBubble was a "counterfeiting" site. In the end, the jury awarded $520,000 to Brandy Melville ($300k "counterfeiting" for the "Brandy Melville" mark, $200k for "counterfeiting" the LA Lightning mark, and then $20k for trademark infringement.)

At the close of the case, RedBubble immediately sought a judgment as a matter of law to effectively try to take the case out of the jury's hands (arguing that Brandy Melville failed to present enough evidence and the judge could rule on the matter directly without needing the factual deliberation of the jury). This week the judge did in fact rule that the $300k for contributory counterfeiting on the Brandy Melville mark was improper, bouncing the award down to $220,000.

As the judge noted, the fact that RedBubble's products were not the same as anything Brandy Melville made regarding those logos, meant that there couldn't be a legitimate counterfeiting claim for that mark:

Here, Plaintiff failed to present evidence of products that bore a spurious Brandy Melville Heart Mark and were offered for sale on Redbubble.com that were remotely similar to products that Plaintiff offered for sale, let alone "stich-for-stitch copies" of Plaintiff's products. The Court therefore concludes that the evidence presented at trial permits only one reasonable conclusion--Plaintiff failed to establish that Redbubble is liable for contributory counterfeiting of the Brandy Melville Heart Mark.

The end result is way below the many millions of dollars Brandy Melville was seeking, though even the small amount it got seems ridiculous based on an understanding of what actually happened.

But, there's a larger point here: this case was an unfortunate alternate reality universe view of what will happen without Section 230 or if we moved to a Citron-style "reasonable" standard. You'd get a ton of litigation in which everyone was just going back and forth arguing over what the "right" level of content moderation is, and arguing that any mistakes were evidence that "not enough" was being done by the companies. That's a disaster scenario, one in which any simple mistake (even where there's perhaps strong evidence that no mistake was actually made) is subject to the whims of a jury (or a judge) and an expensive, time-consuming trial. I recognize that law professors might not care that much about all of this wasteful litigation, but in the real world it matters a ton. This kind of thing can, and will, kill off smaller companies, even if they can succeed in court. And that doesn't help anyone, except possibly some trial lawyers who can threaten and shake down tons of websites.

Filed Under: content moderation, counterfeiting, intermediary liability, jury trials, print on demand, section 230, trademark
Companies: brandy melville, redbubble

House Republicans Introduce Ridiculous, Contradictory, Unconstitutional Package Of 32 Bills About Section 230 And Content Moderation

from the performative-nonsense dept

If you read Techdirt, you already know that there have been literally dozens of ridiculous Section 230 reform bills introduced over the last few years. On Wednesday, the House Republicans on the Energy & Commerce Committee decided to not just add to the batch, but to flood the entire zone with a package of thirty-two more Section 230 reform bills. I mean, if you're going to go that far, why not go all the way and write 230 reform bills?

I'm not going to go through every bill. That would be a total waste of everyone's time. These bills are not designed to do anything constructive at all. They are not designed to pass. They are not designed to reform Section 230. They are designed for one reason and one reason only: to act as performative grandstanding for a deliberately ignorant base who are kept in ignorance by politicians pushing bills like this nonsense.

What I will note, however, is how many of the bills in this package clearly contradict one another (and just how many are obviously unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment in that they seek to regulate speech). In some ways, the package of 32 bills shows why all this focus on Section 230 is nonsense in the first place, and the difficulties of content moderation itself. For example, you have the "Preserving Constitutionally Protected Speech" bill from Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Jim Jordan. That one would punish websites that remove constitutionally protected speech (which is an unconstitutional attack on those websites' 1st Amendment rights). But, uh, then you have things like bills to require companies to remove cyberbullying and remove doxxing (among a few other things).

Of course, neither cyberbullying nor doxxing are well defined in those bills, but in both cases the speech described is almost certainly protected under the 1st Amendment. So you have some bills saying removing any speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment should lead to punishment, and other bills that say you are required to remove speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment or face massive penalties. Did no one bother to actually look at this collection of bills and realize they don't work together?

There are also a bunch of bills that seem to restate what the law already is. For example, there's one requiring companies to remove child sexual abuse material (though the bill uses the now disfavored term "child porn.") Except, um, that's already the case. Saying it with emphasis in a new law doesn't change that.

Anyway, I'm hard pressed to find anything even remotely sounding like a reasonable idea in all of these bills, but to be fair, I didn't have time to go through all 32 bills in full. Perhaps they can pass a bill to force someone to content moderate these 32 bills to algorithmically show me which ones actually have reasonable ideas, and which ones are just performative nonsense. I fear that the final tally will show that all 32 bills are performative nonsense.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, congress, content moderation, house, house energy and commerce committee, must carry, republicans, section 230

Senator Kennedy Continues To Push My Buttons With His Ridiculously Dumb 'Don't Push My Buttons' Act

from the that's-not-how-any-of-this-works dept

Last fall, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana (a supposedly smart Senator who seems to have decided his political future lies in acting dumber than 95% of all other Senators) introduced an anti-Section 230 bill. He's now done so again in the new Congressional session. The bill is, once again, called the "Don't Push My Buttons" Act and introducing such a piece of total garbage legislation a second time does not speak well of Senator Kennedy.

The bill is pretty short. It would create an exception to Section 230 for any website that... uses algorithms to rank content for you based on user data it collects. Basically, it's taking a roundabout way to try to remove Section 230 from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It is not clear why algorithmic ranking has anything to do with Section 230. While social media sites do tend to rely on both, they are separate things. Indeed, part of the reason why social media sites rely on algorithms is because Section 230 helps make sure they can host so much user-generated content, that there needs to be algorithmic rankings to make those sites useable.

So, in practice, if this became law, all it would really serve to do is to make social media sites totally unusable. Either, websites would have to stop doing algorithmic ranking of content (which would make the sites unusable for many people) or they'd start massively moderating content to avoid liability -- making sites nearly unusable.

And, of course, there's an exemption to this exemption which makes the whole thing useless. The bill will allow algorithms... if the user "knowingly and intentionally elects to receive the content." So, all that will happen is every social media service will show you total garbage with a pop up saying "hey, we can straighten this out for you via our algorithm if you just click here" and everyone will click that button.

And that's not even getting into the constitutional problems with this bill. It's literally punishing companies for their editorial (ranking) choices. That's Congress regulating expression. I don't see how this bill would possibly survive 1st Amendment scrutiny. But, of course, it's not designed to survive any scrutiny at all. It's to serve as ever more grandstanding for Senator Kennedy to pretend to be looking out for a base he knows is ignorant beyond belief -- and rather than educating them, he's playing down to them.

Filed Under: algorithms, content moderation, john kennedy, push my buttons act, ranking, section 230

Freaking Out About Nazi Content On The Internet Archive Is Totally Missing The Point

from the moral-panics dept

The moral panics around anyone finding "bad" content online are getting out of control. The latest is a truly silly article in the San Francisco Chronicle whining about the fact that there is Nazi content available on the Internet Archive, written by the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, Steven Stalinsky, who is quite perturbed that his own personal content moderation desires are not how the Internet Archive moderates.

For the past decade, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) research has been exposing the Internet Archive's enabling of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other jihadi propaganda efforts and its function as a database for their distribution of materials, recruitment campaigns, incitement of violence, fundraising and even daily radio programs. We wrote that ISIS liked the platform because there was no way to flag objectionable content for review and removal — unlike on other platforms such as YouTube. Today, the Internet Archive enables neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the same ways, and its terms of use still deny responsibility for content uploaded to it.

Right, so let's stop right there. Yes, for over a decade, we've written about ongoing complaints among the pearl clutching crew that you could find terrorist content online, along with their demands that websites pull it down, leading to social media sites shutting down the accounts of human rights groups who were documenting war crimes committed by terrorist organizations.

There's a key point in this: just because this information is available does not mean it is only used for nefarious purposes. Indeed, it is often used for important and valuable purposes -- such as documenting crimes. Or creating historical archives that show truly horrific crimes and ignorant thinking. Deleting that and sweeping it under the rug is not a reasonable approach either. But this entire article by Stalinsky seems premised on the idea that every bit of evidence of Nazi-ism should disappear. That seems incredibly counterproductive.

A recent two-year study I co-authored reviews the massive amount of content being uploaded, downloaded and shared by these groups on the Internet Archive and how it is used for recruitment and radicalization. This includes historical Nazi content such as copies of Der Sturmer, the virulently antisemitic Nazi-era propaganda newspaper, and speeches and writings by Adolph Hitler, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi figures.

This historical material is interspersed with neo-Nazi content, including tens of thousands of pages with titles such as "Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Red Pill," "666 Adolf Hitler Quotes" and "Joseph Goebbels, Master of Propaganda, Heil Hitler," and videos and writings by convicted Holocaust deniers.

And the answer to this content is... to set it all on fire? Like that won't come back to bite you?

Extremist works are available on the platform for download — and for radicalization — including seminal white supremacist books, training manuals for carrying out attacks, recruitment videos and several manifestos of white supremacist mass shooters.

And it's also available for activists, journalists, researchers and more to study it and figure out how to counter it.

Yes, these are serious issues and I can understand the concerns about how this information could be misused (though, despite an attention grabbing headline about how the website is a "favorite" for "neo-Nazis", the actual article supplies little to no evidence to support that claim). But simply hiding the information doesn't make it go away--nor does it deal with any of the underlying reasons such information might be appealing to some ignorant people. It is brushing a serious issue under the rug, and doing so in a way that can have seriously bad consequences -- as we've seen with social media sites deleting evidence of war crimes.

Everyone seems to think that content moderation is easy -- just do what I would do -- without ever thinking through the actual trade-offs and challenges of having to actually make these decisions. The article here seems to be written in incredibly bad faith, assuming that removing these historical documents is the only possible and acceptable solution, without bothering to grapple with the serious difficulties and trade-offs involved in making such decisions. Are there ways that the Internet Archive could better handle this content? Probably! Will being scolded as a "favorite" of "neo-Nazis" help make that work better? That seems unlikely.

Filed Under: archive, content moderation, library, nazi content, steven stalinsky, terrorist content, user generated content
Companies: internet archive

Naturopath Sues Twitter After It Bans Her Account For Spreading Medical Misinformation

from the lololololololsuit dept

We recently discussed the case of a man who thought Facebook owed him $10 million per day in damages for moderating his posts in which he deployed the n-word. According to this person, Facebook violated about half of the Constitutional amendments when it decided -- as a private company -- that it would not serve as the plaintiff's bullhorn while he shouted racist terms in a crowded social media platform.

But that was a pro se lawsuit, one the plaintiff -- with no legal training or expertise (despite listing himself as "attorney-in-fact" on his Facebook profile) -- thought would net him millions of dollars a day for being nothing more than his hateful self.

This lawsuit [PDF], however, has an actual lawyer behind it. And by actual lawyer, I mean a lawyer whose representation may be less useful than no representation at all. The lawyer helping the plaintiff bring this constitutional violation lawsuit against Twitter is David Yerushalmi, perhaps best know for being a bit bigoted himself.

David Yerushalmi (born 1956) is an American lawyer and political activist who is the driving counsel behind the anti-sharia movement in the United States.

Wikipedia helpfully notes this Jewish lawyer is highly critical of "liberal Jews, progressive elites, and black people." So, those are his credentials. He is the co-founder of the "American Freedom Law Center," which is really more about pushing its particular take on America than it is about protecting American freedoms. Here's part of its mission statement:

AFLC is first and foremost a public interest litigation firm. It aggressively seeks to advance and defend our Nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage in courts all across our Nation.

Not sure what that has to do with suing Twitter on behalf of someone helping spread disinformation about COVID, but that's where we are. Yerushalmi's client is none other than confirmed quack Colleen Huber, last seen here trying to sue a reformed naturopath for informing readers that Huber's anti-cancer advice (I hesitate to call it "medical") would probably kill any cancer patient who took it.

Colleen Huber does not use conventional chemotherapy or radiation. She treats cancer with intravenous baking soda, vitamin C, and other “natural” substances, while instructing patients to cut out sugar from their diets.

Huber is a "certified" naturopath. The scare quotes are there for this reason:

Nowhere in any of her “research” that I could find did she write that she obtained written, informed consent from her patients/research subjects. Nor did she write that her “research” was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or was registered with ClinicalTrials.gov. These are fundamental ethical requirements for research on human subjects.

But don’t worry, Colleen Huber is a founding member of a naturopathic Institutional Review Board that has apparently approved her research.

Those are some of the words Huber sued about. She filed a defamation lawsuit in Germany targeting reformed naturopath/current skeptic Britt Hermes. The good news is Hermes won, despite being sued in a country where defamation can be (and very often is!) considered a criminal act.

Unsurprisingly, Huber is, shall we say… a vaccine skeptic. During the course of her Twitter affairs, she shared articles and made posts that were considered misinformation by Twitter. Twitter moderated her posts. Then it banned her permanently. That forms the basis for this hilarious lawsuit. For the moment the lawsuit resides in an Arizona federal court. (It will likely be moved to California once Twitter gets involved and invokes the terms it imposes on Twitter users, which include Twitter being able to move all federal legal action to its home state.)

Let us gaze upon this comical masterpiece of stupidity and wtf-ness… perhaps not in all of its glory, but at least the best parts.

You don't have to be a lawyer (at least one not employed by the American Freedom Law Center) to realize what's wrong with this opening statement.

Defendants Twitter and Dorsey, operating jointly and conspiring with Defendants Biden and other federal government officials in the Biden Administration (Defendant John Doe(s)), is engaging in viewpoint discrimination—the most egregious form of content discrimination—in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Hint: it's not just the verb conjugation.

While it's true that Joe Biden could violate rights by getting personally involved in moderating Twitter accounts, it's impossible for Twitter to violate rights, no matter how much viewpoint discrimination it engages in. The First and Fifth are safe when Twitter's involved. Moderation efforts aren't constitutional violations.

The lawsuit moves on to name the defendants and discuss the internet and its current position as the greatest communication tool ever invented. Then it attempts to pin constitutional violations on Twitter by completely (and conveniently) misreading the Supreme Court's Packingham decision.

Consequently, social media, particularly including Twitter, is exceedingly important for worldwide human communication and thus provides important forums for that communication.

As, as stated by the U.S. Supreme Court: While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace—the “vast democratic forums of the Internet” in general, and social media in particular. . . . In short, social media users employ these websites to engage in a wide array of protected First Amendment activity on topics “as diverse as human thought.”

Packingham v. N.C., 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1735-36 (2017) (citations omitted).

While Huber and her lawyer may have misapprehended the gist of the Packingham decision (perhaps deliberately so), it's unlikely a federal judge will. Packingham said the government couldn't prevent people from using social media services, declaring a North Carolina statute that prevented sex offenders from using these services unconstitutional. It says nothing about private companies preventing citizens from using their services. And, unless Huber has a whole lot of evidence saying President Biden is directly participating in Twitter moderation decisions, there's nothing in the Packingham decision that has any bearing on this case.

The idiocy continues directly after the citation of precedent that actually isn't precedential when applied to this complaint.

Denying a person access to this important social media forum based on the content and viewpoint of the person’s speech on matters of public concern is an effective way of silencing or censoring speech and depriving the person or organization of political influence and business opportunities.

Due to the importance of social media to political, social, and commercial exchanges, the censorship at issue in this Complaint is an unmatched form of censorship.

Consequently, there is no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied in this case.

Claiming something is the worst thing that has ever happened doesn't make it legally actionable. There's no First Amendment (or Fifth Amendment) right to a Twitter account, no matter how dire the phrasing in the complaint.

The lawsuit is also stupid about Section 230, seemingly considering this immunity a "power" social media platforms exercise with the government's explicit blessing. But before we get to that, let's pause and admire the heavy lifting the word "belief" is doing in this assertion.

Upon information and belief, Dr. Huber’s suspension from Twitter was a conspiracy and/or joint action between Twitter and unknown officials in the White House, sued herein as John Doe(s), who have engaged in the unlawful conduct alleged herein pursuant to their official government capacities under the direction and, ultimately, control of Defendant President Biden.

Do all the discovery you want, but I doubt you'll find Huber's suspension involved any input whatsoever from Joe Biden or his administration. Twitter is perfectly capable of banning people on its own, even sitting presidents. That Biden may have made comments (which are quoted in this suit) that platforms needed to do better containing the spread of disinformation is not even remotely close to the same thing as "conspiring" with Twitter to shut down Huber and other anti-vaxxers.

Now, here's where Huber and her lawyer say dumb stuff about Section 230.

Section 230 permits content- and viewpoint-based censorship of speech. By its own terms, § 230 permits Twitter “to restrict access to or availability of material that [they] consider[] to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

Section 230 confers broad powers of censorship, in the form of a “heckler’s veto,” upon Twitter censors, who can censor constitutionally protected speech and engage in discriminatory business practices with impunity by virtue of this power conferred by the federal government.

The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any benefit of censorship conferred upon Twitter by the federal government.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Just absolutely wrong. Section 230 immunity is not a "power." It simply shields platforms from being sued over moderation decisions or for content created by users. People who run into this immunity -- which Huber certainly will -- may think it's a "power," but it isn't. It doesn't give platforms new rights. It simply shields them from being used as an easy-to-sue proxy when users are angry about things other users have said or, in this case, when they're angry about being shown the door by the owner of private establishments. In this case, it's Twitter, rather than, say, the local bar, getting sick and tired of someone's endless bullshit.

When you fail to understand the Constitution, the rights of private companies, Section 230 of the CDA, and prior Supreme Court decisions, you end up with word salad for section headers.

FIRST CLAIM FOR RELIEF (Twitter COVID-19 Policy—First Amendment Freedom of Speech)

Salad spinners engage!

Section 230 of the CDA, facially and as applied, permits Defendant Twitter to restrict Plaintiff’s speech, and the speech of those similarly situated, based on the content and viewpoint expressed by Plaintiff’s message, and the respective messages of those similarly situated, in violation of the First Amendment.

Section 230 has caused, and will continue to cause, Plaintiff and those similarly situated to suffer undue hardship and irreparable injury, entitling Plaintiff and those similarly situated to declaratory and injunctive relief.

This will go nowhere. Well, to be fair, it will probably go to a California federal court and then go nowhere. There's nothing in this that can be sued about. If Huber doesn't like being booted from Twitter -- and she clearly doesn't -- she's welcome to take her naturopath business elsewhere. But, sooner or later, she's going to run out of receptive hosts. This isn't Twitter violating rights or Joe Biden personally deciding Huber needs to STFU. It's just business. And Twitter doesn't want hers, for a number of reasons it's under no legal obligation to justify.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, colleen huber, content moderation, david yerushalmi, medical misinformation, naturopath
Companies: twitter

Anti-Vaxxers Countermeasures Show Why It's Not So Simple To Just 'Delete' Anti-Vax Misinfo On Social Media

from the countermeasures-happen dept

It's not a new thing that those without any experience in content moderation assume that it's somehow "easy" to just find and delete misinformation and disinformation online -- but it's often stunning how little they've thought through how all of this plays out. As the White House has stupidly been using its bully pulpit to pressure Facebook into deleting anti-vax misinformation, and elected officials are threatening legislation they must know is unconstitutional, none of them seem to recognize that it's not that easy.

Anyone who has done any work related to content moderation knows this. They know that the vast majority of misinformation is not that easy to spot. First of all, it's not clear what is misinformation. You could have someone who gets something inadvertently wrong. Or, perhaps they just misread something or misunderstand something. Is that misinformation that needs to be deleted? Also, there are things like sarcasm or criticism that frequently repeat the misinformation in order to respond to it. Then there are plenty of things that may seem like misinformation but tend to just be people posting stuff that is technically true, but without the necessary context. Does that need to also be deleted? There are tons of degrees involved in misinformation, and figuring out what should stay up and what should be taken down is not nearly as easy as many commentators make it out to be.

But, on top of that, there's the simple fact that those spreading misinformation know that they may face consequences for it, and thus they adapt their techniques. Ben Collins & Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News' two excellent reporters who focus on misinformation, are noting that anti-vax groups on Facebook are effectively trying to cover their tracks in advance of any possible crackdown on the nonsense and propaganda they spew:

Some anti-vaccination groups on Facebook are changing their names to euphemisms like “Dance Party” or “Dinner Party,” and using code words to fit those themes in order to skirt bans from Facebook, as the company attempts to crack down on misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

The groups, which are largely private and unsearchable but retain large user bases accrued during the years Facebook permitted anti-vaccination content, also swap out language to fit the new themes and provide code legends, according to screenshots provided to NBC News by multiple members of the groups.

They also note that the groups have already set up secret "backup groups" in case their primary groups get shut down, they can immediately just switch over to the other group. And if you think that now that NBC News has reported on this, well, then it'll be easy for Facebook to find, that's silly as well. It assumes that no further countermeasures will be taken.

Beating Facebook’s moderation system “feels like a badge of honor,” the administrator wrote, followed by a crying-laughing emoji. At the end of the post, the administrator reminded users to stay away from “unapproved words,” and pointed them to a code legend on the side of the page.

Using code words to evade bans is not new among the anti-vaccine community, and it borrows from a playbook used for years by extremists on Facebook and elsewhere. The practice leans heavily on “leetspeak,” or modified language used by coders and gamers that frequently replaced letters in words for numbers or symbols during online discussions.

And, the groups seem effective at finding words that will make it more difficult to search them out:

Group members have incorporated a range of coded language to mask their discussions, many of which perpetuate debunked theories about the vaccines. “Danced” or “drank beer” mean “got the vaccine.” References to “Pfizer” generally use the terms “pizza” or “Pizza King,” and Moderna is referred to as “Moana.” Users generally play around with unofficial language about dancing to create more coded language.

For example, one group member said her husband had become sick after going on a “cross country trip where we spent 2 nights with dancers,” referring to two people who had just been vaccinated.

None of this is to say that Facebook should just throw up its hands and do nothing. But it remains stunning to me how people who just don't understand the challenges of content moderation always seem to think that (1) these things are easy to find and (2) if Facebook just took down a few accounts, these people would magically go away and the disinformation would stop spreading.

It's not that simple!

There are important questions to ask about how Facebook should handle this stuff, but anyone coming up with simple solutions that don't take into account reality -- both in the difficulty in identifying what is truly problematic and the kinds of countermeasures people will take -- isn't helping at all.

Filed Under: anti-vax, code words, content moderation, countermeasures, disinformation, misinformation, vaccines
Companies: facebook