Congressman Nadler Throws The World's Worst Slumber Party In Order To Destroy The Internet

from the not-the-last-sleepless-night-this-nonsense-will-cause dept

House Judiciary Chairman Congressman Nadler really does not like "big tech" companies, and four of them (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) in particular. His antipathy has led him to bypass any further subcommittee inquiry to identify which issues raised by these companies might be suitable for regulation, or to develop careful language that could remediate them without being an unconstitutional and counter-productive legislative attack on the entire Internet economy.

Instead he called a full committee hearing this past Wednesday to debate and markup a slate of six bills that are, in their current form, an unconstitutional and counter-productive legislative attack on the entire Internet economy. (Here's where we'd normally include an embed of the hearing, but for reasons that are not at all clear, after the session was live-streamed via YouTube, it is currently blocked from showing the recording -- perhaps the session that was a debate about how best to break Google, has literally broken Google by streaming a video too long for YouTube to deal with).

Although the hearing lasted over 24 hours(!), from midday Wednesday into midday Thursday (with just one three-hour recess and a few other breaks for floor votes), there was little illumination on whether anything these bills target is truly an infirmity at all, an infirmity that Congress hasn't itself created, or an infirmity particular to just these targeted companies. Or whether any of these proposed "remedies" won't hurt the very interests they are ostensibly supposed to help.

Over the course of the hearing he did, of course, get some bi-partisan pushback. Some of the most credible seemed to come from Reps. Lofgren and Issa, who tried to alert the bills' proponents to many of the bills' defects, and also Rep. Spartz, who kept noticing all the due process and doctrinal shortcuts built into the bills. And some of the language did get amended. But no evidence was considered and no experts were consulted. The committee was not interested in building any further record that might challenge (or even potentially support) the foregone conclusions that something must be done and these bills should be the something.

As a result, the fundamental problems with the bills remain because the fundamental problem remains: even after all that effort the Committee still lacks a meaningful understanding of how and why tech companies get big, including any reasons why we either value that bigness or otherwise force it to happen. The kindest read of the situation – as with most tech policy regulation, it seems – is that it's a bit like the story of the blind men and the elephant, where each man has a different perception of what an elephant must look like depending on whether they are holding its trunk, its ear, or its tail. Here the House Judiciary Committee is holding tightly to the tail and refusing to even contemplate that there might be any more elephant to consider. As a result it also can't recognize how some of the problems they are worried about are actually problems of their own making.

One conspicuous example that came up during this marathon bill markup session was the outrage expressed by some members of the committee that Amazon sometimes kicks off independent vendors using its marketplace services. But instead of asking why Amazon might do that, the committee chose to presume that it was due to nothing more than some nefarious anti-competitive instinct. And in making that presumption the committee ignored its own role in forcing Amazon's hand.

For instance, how does it make sense for Congress to think that Amazon should potentially be liable for counterfeit or defective goods vendors use their platforms to sell, and yet simultaneously criticize Amazon for denying vendors with potentially problematic products access to their platform? Answer: it doesn't make any sense at all. Congress needs to decide: if it wants Amazon to be more open to more small business users, it has to make it safe for them to be.

Yet instead of fortifying laws that offer platforms protection to make it safe for them to be open to more users, including smaller businesses and potential competitors, Congress is instead hard at work crafting bills to further put the screws to the bigger platforms if they give access to the wrong third party user who does something with their platforms that Congress also doesn't like. It is deliberately creating a no-win situation for platforms that forces them to make only bad choices that no one will like – and that Congress will only want to further punish them for.

Filed Under: antitrust, big tech, competition, jerry nadler, markup
Companies: amazon, apple, facebook, google

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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal

Stop Using Content Moderation Demands As An Effort To Hide The Government's Social Policy Failures

from the look!-squirrel! dept

We've been seeing over and over again lately that politicians (and, unfortunately, the media) are frequently blaming social media and content moderation for larger societal problems, that the government itself has never been able to solve.

In other words, what's really happening is that the supposedly "bad stuff" that shows up on social media is really indicative of societal failures regarding education, mental health services, criminal law, social safety nets, and much much more. All social media is really doing is putting a spotlight on those failures. And the demands from politicians and the media for content moderation to "solve" these issues is really often about trying to sweep those problems under the rug by hiding them from public view, rather than looking for ways to tackle those much larger, much more difficult societal questions.

Over in Wired, Harvard law lecturer (and former Techdirt podcast guest), Evelyn Douek, has one of the best articles I've seen making this point. First, she describes how -- contrary to the narrative that still holds among some that social media companies resist doing any moderation at all -- these days, they're much more aggressive in seeking to strike down disinformation:

Misinformation about the pandemic was supposed to be the easy case. In response to the global emergency, the platforms were finally moving fast and cracking down on Covid-19 misinformation in a way that they never had before. As a result, there was about a week in March 2020 when social media platforms, battered by almost unrelenting criticism for the last four years, were good again. “Who knew the techlash was susceptible to a virus?” Steven Levy asked.

Such was the enthusiasm for these actions that there were immediately calls for them to do the same thing all the time for all misinformation—not just medical. Initially, platforms insisted that Covid misinformation was different. The likelihood of harm arising from it was higher, they argued. Plus, there were clear authorities they could point to, like the World Health Organization, that could tell them what was right and wrong.

But the line did not hold for long. Platforms have only continued to impose more and more guardrails on what people can say on their services. They stuck labels all over the place during the US 2020 election. They stepped in with unusual swiftness to downrank or block a story from a major media outlet, the New York Post, about Hunter Biden. They deplatformed Holocaust deniers, QAnon believers, and, eventually, the sitting President of the United States himself.

But, as the article notes -- especially on topics where we're learning new stuff every day, and early ideas and thinking may prove incorrect later -- it's proven that relying on content moderation to deal with these issues might not be that great an idea.

The chaos of 2020 shattered any notion that there’s a clear category of harmful “misinformation” that a few powerful people in Silicon Valley must take down, or even that there’s a way to distinguish health from politics. Last week, for instance, Facebook reversed its policy and said it will no longer take down posts claiming Covid-19 is human-made or manufactured. Only a few months ago

The New York Times had cited belief in this “baseless” theory as evidence that social media had contributed to an ongoing “reality crisis.” There was a similar back-and-forth with masks. Early in the pandemic, Facebook banned ads for them on the site. This lasted until June, when the WHO finally changed its guidance to recommend wearing masks, despite many experts advising it much earlier. The good news, I guess, is they weren’t that effective at enforcing the ban in the first place. (At the time, however, this was not seen as good news.)

She separately highlights how these efforts in the US are being used as an excuse for authoritarian governments around the globe to ramp up actual censorship and suppression of activists and dissident voices.

But the key point is that sweeping larger societal issues under the rug by hiding them doesn't solve the underlying issues.

“Just delete things” removes content but not its cause. It’s tempting to think that we can content-moderate society to a happier and healthier information environment or that the worst social disruptions of the past few years could have been prevented if more posts had just been taken down. But fixing social and political problems will be much harder work than tapping out a few lines of better code. Platforms will never be able to fully compensate for other institutional failures.

There's a lot more in Douek's write-up, but I think it's important for anyone who is debating the content moderation space to have read this piece and to at least account for it in any of these debates and discussions. It is not saying not to do any moderation. It is not saying that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. But it is making the very, very important point that content moderation alone does not solve underlying social issues, and yet so much of the focus on questions around social media and content moderation really are discussions about those failures. And we're not going to make progress on any of these issues if people don't understand what's the symptom and what's the actual disease.

Filed Under: content moderation, government failures, institutional failures, societal issues

Federal Judge Says FBI Obtained Twitter Employee's Emails Illegally

from the sliding-under-the-low-bar-of-probable-cause dept

In late 2019, the federal government indicted a Twitter employee, accusing him of acting as an agent of Saudi government. The allegations were pretty ugly.

Defendants Ahmad Abouammo, Ali Alzabarah, and Ahmed Almutairi were charged by Indictment on November 19, 2019 for acting as agents of the government of Saudi Arabia without notification to the Attorney General as required by law. Abouammo and Alzabarah, while employees at Twitter, accessed without authorization and provided to officials of the government of Saudi Arabia nonpublic information about Twitter users that were of interest to the government of Saudi Arabia, including dissidents and critics of the government.

No one needs to be helping the Saudi government hunt down dissidents. This is a government that has actually killed a journalist critical of the Saudi prince -- a killing followed by a dismemberment that occurred in the Saudi government's Istanbul consulate.

The accusations were that Abouammo used his position as media partner manager for Twitter's Middle East presence to access information about accounts the Saudi government wanted to spy on. The government has been pursuing a conviction for a couple of years now and has just been hit with a little bad news. It appears the FBI colored outside the constitutional lines while compiling evidence against Abouammo. Here's Nicholas Iovino with more details for Courthouse News Service:

In August 2016, the FBI seized Abouammo’s Google account records, which revealed that a Saudi foreign official had emailed the defendant around the same time Abouammo started suddenly and frequently accessing a prominent Saudi critic’s user account, according to federal prosecutors.

Prosecutors say the email exchange also coincided with Abouammo meeting the Saudi foreign official in London, receiving a $20,000 watch from that same official and having numerous phone conversations with the Saudi representative.

Abouammo asked U.S. District Judge Edward Chen to throw out that evidence, arguing the FBI failed to establish probable cause in a search warrant application before confiscating his personal data.

On Tuesday, Chen partly granted Abouammo’s request.

The ruling [PDF] says the FBI used a bit of guesswork in a warrant affidavit, allowing presuppositions to replace facts. That sort of thing doesn't comply with the Fourth Amendment.

Even assuming a deferential scope of review of the magistrate judge’s determination, see United States v. Wright, 215 F.3d 1020, 1025 (9th Cir. 2000), it is clear there was no probable cause to support the 2016 search. While there was probable cause to believe Defendant Ali Alzabarah accessed Twitter user information without authorization and that it was done at the behest of Foreign Official-1, there was no such probable cause with respect to Defendant Abouammo.

The indictment says one thing, but the affidavit the FBI used to obtain information says another.

There is no allegation that Defendant Abouammo, a U.S. citizen born in Egypt with no personal ties to Saudi Arabia, obtained unauthorized access to Twitter users, much less at the behest of the Saudi government. The circumstantial evidence of communications reveal little more than sporadic unremarkable communications with these subjects which does not fit any pattern with the illicit conduct of Defendant Alzabarah or Official-1.

And there may not even be any conspiracy… or at least none alleged sufficiently in the warrant affidavit seeking information from Google.

Other than being reciprocal Twitter followers, there is no evidence of any communication between Defendant Abouammo and Defendant Alzabarah. Similarly, there is little communication between Defendant Abouammo and Defendant Almutairi cited in the affidavit – i.e., two text messages in December 2014 prior to the alleged unlawful conduct of Defendant Alzabarah which started in January 2015.

From what the judge can see, there's hardly any connective tissue between the allegations made by the government and the justifications it put in its affidavit when seeking a search warrant.

Defendant Abouammo’s emails to other senior Twitter directors who were located in other countries (outside the U.S. and Saudi Arabia) in December 2015 and January and February 2016 also prove nothing. There is no allegation that these directors were involved in any unauthorized access to use accounts or were connected with Official-1 or the Saudi government. Furthermore, the emails were sent to these directors’ Twitter email accounts, hardly a way to solicit participation in an illicit scheme as the government now suggests. That certain Saudi officials (other than Official-1) were brought into conversations in email exchanges with one of the Twitter directors again proves nothing. The sporadic patternless communications described in the affidavit – which include no direct communications with Defendant Alzabarah and two early (2014) text messages with Defendant Almutairi – are insufficient to establish probable cause to believe Defendant Abouammo had accessed without authorization Twitter user accounts at the behest of the Saudi government.

The results of this search will be suppressed. The government simply doesn't have enough to justify this search. And the warrant is so deficient the court doesn't see how the government could say it relied on it in good faith. Everything derived from this search is suppressed.

But that doesn't mean Aboumammo is in the clear. Subsequent searches appear to have turned up other usable evidence and those still stand for the time being. The FBI's 2018 search warrant (and the results of that search) is still in play, even when everything derived from the 2016 search is stripped from the affidavit.

Given what's said in this short suppression order, it appears the FBI turned a hunch into a fishing expedition at Google HQ. If the government wants to prosecute federal crimes, it needs to remember all the rights it said were inalienable. Searches based on speculation aren't acceptable. And hey, FBI: maybe don't be evil.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, ahmad abouammo, ahmed almutairi, ali alzabarah, email, espionage, fbi, probable cause, saudi arabia, warrant
Companies: twitter

Streamer Raptors Continue To Test Twitch's Appropriate Content Guideline Fencing

from the wet-willy dept

It's no secret that we've dinged streaming giant Twitch over and over again these past months. Frankly, it was done with good reason, as the Amazon-owned company continues to respond to crisis after crises, conflict after conflict, with pure confusion and callous behavior. While some of those conflicts were Twitch-specific, the company is also dealing with the more common problem of attempting to have a coherent content policy when it comes to what is appropriate to stream and what is not. For instance, Twitch recently found itself in the headlines yet again first by yanking advertising revenue from so-called "hot tub meta" streamers, where streamers live-stream in bathing suits from hot tubs or kiddie pools. Kaitlyn "Amouranth" Siragusa was one of the more prominent names impacted by this move, which again came with no warning. As a result of the public backlash over Twitch choosing not to communicate with its own creative community, the platform announced a "hot tub channel" category, as though that solved anything.

But now this has moved on from just a situation where Twitch sucks at communication with streamers, its most important asset. With all of the above having occurred, it seems that the raptors are now going about testing their fencing when it comes to what content is appropriate and what is not. And, if you want to get a sense of just how weird these tests can get, you need only dive into the latest Twitch trend: ear lick meta streams. Perhaps not surprisingly, Amouranth is once again leading this charge.

Perpetual Twitch provocateur Amouranth, along with model indiefoxxlive, have been temporarily taken off the livestreaming service following some delightfully bizarre video clips going viral on social media. While Twitch never comments on bans, the timing coincides with the proliferation of a clip in which Amouranth wears a horse mask. Neighing, the controversial Twitch streamer sometimes takes the entire mic into her mouth to make slurping sounds.

Similarly, if you click on Twitch’s “ASMR” tag at the moment, the most popular streamer is a woman whispering with the occasional wet sound thrown in. The community has taken to calling such shticks “ear lick streams,” as that is basically what these broadcasts sound like.

"Delightfully bizarre" appears to be exactly the right phrase for all of this. ASMR is not specifically meant to have any sexual connotation to it. That being said, it seems quite clear that what Amouranth and the like are doing is in part at least attempting to rope some measure of sexuality into behavior that would otherwise not necessarily have any sexual connotation to it. And, of course, adding a dash of the absolutely absurd just for shits and giggles.

In other words, if you want to argue that there is clear sexual connotation to these specific videos (you can find them in the link above if you're curious), I won't argue with you all that much. But -- and this is a big caveat -- finding precisely where and how any of this violates Twitch's streaming guidelines on what's appropriate is very much an exercise in subjectivity.

The general idea predates Twitch, of course, but it’s certainly true that Amouranth is savvy enough to command attention wherever she goes. Whether or not viewers approve of her methods is beyond the point. Twitch’s Community Guidelines have multiple pages dedicated to sexually suggestive content on the site, but the general gist is that it’s not allowed on the platform.

“Evaluations on the sexual suggestiveness of a behavior or activity are independent of user attire and are instead based on the overall surrounding framing and context,” the rules read. “This policy also applies to embedded media, augmented reality, creative broadcasts, and channel content—such as banners, profile images, emotes, and panels—that are focused on provocative images or video.”

But this leaves us still with two issues. The first is yet again how Twitch doles out these punishments and changes without any real communication with streamers or the public. It all just kind of happens and we get to play the game of attempting to interpret what it all means after the fact. The second issue is common among online platforms that do a shit job of having clear content guidelines: nobody actually knows where the lines are and these punishments tend to be doled out asymmetrically.

For example, the above guidelines would appear to prohibit, oh I don't know, a liveplay of Dungeons and Dragons in which the players creatively act out to one degree or another sexual situations. And, yet, shows like Critical Role which stream on Twitch have had such content in one degree or another on the regular. Is that considered as graphic as a woman in a horse mask engulfing a microphone in her mouth?

Maybe? This feels like less of an obvious answer and more of a discussion open to interpretation. But, since Twitch has the final say for what occurs on its platform, only its opinion actually matters. But that doesn't change the fact that Twitch's guidelines are vague and unhelpful, its communication method neutered, and its handing out of punishment arbitrary and capricious.

Good times. Sluuuuuurp!

Filed Under: appropriate content, content moderation, streamers, streaming
Companies: twitch

New NTIA Broadband Map Exposes Expensive, Patchy US Broadband

from the deregulate-ALL-the-things! dept

We've noted for a very long time that despite a lot of lip service about broadband, the U.S. government still doesn't have a very good idea of where broadband is or isn't available. There's a long line of reasons for this, including political pressure by regional monopolies that very much don't want a lack of competition and high prices to be apparent (somebody might get the crazy idea to try and fix the problem!). The FCC has also long been criticized for methodology that declares a census block (which can be hundreds of square miles) "served" with broadband if just one home can theoretically get service from an ISP.

The problem is made fairly apparent if you spent a few minutes with the FCC's $350 million broadband availability map, which just outright hallucinates available competitors and speeds, and can't be bothered to include an essential metric: prices.

Telecom mono/duopolies like AT&T and Comcast want policymakers looking at the problem through rose-colored glasses. The illusion protects up a broken US telecom subsidization process that mindlessly throws money at them for projects that make no coherent sense or often don't materialize. All propped up by zero accountability, and this belief that if you "deregulate" telecom, magic happens. But deregulating a broken captured industry dominated by natural monopolies doesn't result in magic. It results in those dominant monopolies behaving worse than ever. There's thirty years of evidence to that point.

It's a very profitable mess that a select group of large companies work very, very hard to keep intact.

Enter the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which earlier this month put a stick in the front wheel of this dysfunction by releasing a new broadband map that tracks both median speeds and affordability, the latter being a subject big ISPs and captured regulators never want to talk about. The map integrates data from a wide variety of sources including Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, and the FCC. The red in the shot below represents places where the median broadband speeds fall below 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up (the FCC's current definition of broadband). It's not pretty:

There's a button on the left of the NTIA's map that lets you overlap lower income areas and see how ISPs like AT&T have routinely neglected marginalized communities, something also documented by several past reports. This is the net result of what countless billions in poorly managed subsidies and rampant, often mindless deregulation delivered. Basically, a US broadband market dominated by regional monopolies and overseen by captured, feckless regulators. The data is the data, and for decades those who've coddled entrenched monopolies have tried very, very hard to pretend that this problem doesn't exist.

One amusing bit: if you zoom in and look at North Dakota, you'll find that it breaks the national trend of substandard, sluggish broadband:

Why? Because a group of communities grew tired of the apathy of their regional monopolies and bought up their networks to form a massive, interconnected group of cooperatives. Like many community broadband networks, it was a project born out of frustration, resulting in fiber networks that deliver faster, cheaper speeds. Studies keep showing that locally-owned community projects like this routinely offer better, cheaper, faster service at more transparent price points. Such networks often tend to be more accountable because they're owned and operated by people who live in those communities.

Yet instead of embracing these niche solutions as a creative way to drive an essential service to more people for less money, these projects are routinely demonized by those (like recent FCC boss Ajit Pai) who'd prefer broadband remain monopolized and expensive. There's an entire cottage industry funded by the telecom sector singularly tasked with pretending that US broadband is perfectly healthy, and attacking absolutely any effort to do anything differently. And they've been dominating telecom policy for decades. It's this monopolization and corruption that results in the "digital divide" still being a problem in 2021.

Community broadband isn't some mystical panacea. Like any other business plan they're dependent on the quality of the planning and people involved. But these networks do frequently drive better, cheaper broadband to underserved parts of the United States, and they repeatedly force apathetic regional monopolies to try a little harder. It doesn't have to be an either/or equation. There's room for various solutions and players, and numerous ways these home-grown efforts can be integrated into adult broadband policy (cooperatives, piggybacking on existing utilities, private/public partnerships).

But instead of doing that, we let entrenched monopolies write shitty state laws that ban such efforts entirely. We let captured regulators demonize an organic, grass roots response to market failure as "government run amok" or "socialism." It's a stupid, self-defeating mess we can fix with enough momentum, but only once people recognize that it's happening. But when you read most major news reports and hear most politicians talk about "the digital divide," regional monopolization (and the state and federal corruption that protects it) is bizarrely and routinely never even mentioned.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband maps, coverage, maps, ntia

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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal