Working With The Private Sector And Hundreds Of Law Enforcement Agencies, ICE Has Assembled A Massive Surveillance Network

from the and-it's-using-it-to-eject-law-abiding-immigrants-as-quickly-as-possible dept

The New York Times has published a lengthy report on ICE's surveillance network it uses to hunt down undocumented immigrants all over the country. The report is based on the results of public records requests, which show ICE's ability to utilize social media networks, dozens of law enforcement databases, and a bunch of private sector options to find the people they're looking for.

This public records investigation mainly focuses on ICE's operations in the Pacific Northwest. The documentation used to compile it includes recordings of phone calls to local law enforcement agencies and interviews with detainees. Together, the hundreds of documents show ICE's breathtaking reach.

[P]ublic records make clear that ICE, like other federal agencies, sucks up terabytes of information from hundreds of disparate computer systems, from state and local governments, from private data brokers and from social networks. It piggybacks on software and sharing agreements originally meant for criminal and counterterrorism investigators, fusing little bits of stray information together into dossiers. The work is regulated by only a set of outdated privacy laws and the limits of the technology.

What the New York Times has obtained only shows part of ICE's operational reach. It includes surveillance of detainees' phone calls from ICE facilities, as well as information compiled from sources both public and private, like DMV databases and data analytics companies like Thomson Reuters.

These efforts began during the Obama administration, which still holds the record for most immigrants removed from the United States in a single year. Of course, this big bump in deportations was a bit of a dodge. For the first time, ICE and CBP began counting migrants whose attempts to cross the borders had failed as being "formally removed," which resulted in an impressive spike in formal removals.

ICE's priorities have shifted under President Trump. Rather than search for the "worst of the worst" -- as the administration claims to be doing -- border agencies are again engaged in numbers games. ICE will now go after anyone, reviving the practice of workplace raids to detain and remove immigrants who are gainfully employed -- something the "worst of the worst" rarely are. Obama shifted ICE away from breaking up families and detaining children, but that's back in play again under an administration that treats every immigration violation as a criminal act, even if some are just civil violations.

The rise in data brokers selling tech and data to the government has resulted in a golden era of third-party surveillance. This has been coupled with the federal government's ongoing efforts to de-silo surveillance efforts to encourage "information sharing." Sounds good in principle, but in execution it means ICE can look at almost anything it wants to, no matter what government agencies holds the data.

Under Obama, the agency signed several key data and analytics contracts that have since drawn controversy, including with Thomson Reuters, the Silicon Valley firm Palantir and the Beltway start-up Giant Oak, and it relied ever more on local-federal data-sharing initiatives that flourished after Sept. 11. Information that was once siloed or tedious to access — driver’s-license photos, phone records, jail bookings — was increasingly at deportation officers’ fingertips.

Even with this wealth of information at their fingertips, the supposedly undermanned agency still lets officers troll for deportees. What should be resulting in streamlined searches for the "worst of the worst" is instead officers just driving around, hoping to find someone they can take into custody. Deportation officers are running nearly 10,000 searches a month against Seattle's Department of Licensing DAPS (Driver and Plate System) database. The public records turned over to the New York Times shows modern day stakeouts still involve a lot of sitting around, but the officers involved don't really seem to have a target.

Officers Miller and Dietz, whose beat also includes parts of Oregon — which DAPS doesn’t cover — used the system regularly in 2017. Together they searched it 4,542 times. They searched it 67 times in the 24 hours before Gladys Díaz was arrested. Roughly half of their searches in 2017 were for names, not plates, implying that they already knew whom they were looking for and simply needed an address or other information. But many days, perhaps the days the officers sat at the side of the road and watched traffic pass, perhaps the days they cruised parking lots outside restaurants or seafood processors or apartment buildings, perhaps the days they saw drivers they decided looked foreign, the searches followed the telltale pattern of a fishing expedition: plate, plate, plate, plate, plate, plate, plate, plate.

This sort of thing is no longer necessary. ICE now works (indirectly) with Vigilant, utilizing its massive license plate database to peruse five years of plate/location data, allowing officers to easily identify probable residences and places of employment, as well as other places their targets spend their time, like the places they worship or the schools they attend.

Of additional interest to ICE is the growing number of facial recognition options at its disposal. When ICE can't find what it needs in federal biometric databases, it just asks local law enforcement to take a look at their own records on ICE's behalf.

But the surveillance doesn't end there. ICE is still trying to get an automated social media vetting program off the ground. It's shelling out federal dollars to analytics companies and buffing up its underlying infrastructure to ensure officers have the connection speed and processing power to take advantage of the agency's multiple data firehoses.

And the surveillance continues even after immigrants are in custody. ICE personnel enter answers obtained during questioning into a database that churns out recommendations for bond amount and other supervision requirements. Phone calls from detention facility phones are recorded and logged and information obtained here feeds either the risk assessment database or fuels more ICE investigations.

But the greatest gift to ICE's surveillance is the work of the private sector. Since it's not subject to federal privacy regulations, ICE has access to a wealth of information about millions of immigrants… and US citizens.

A key benefit of [Thomson Reuter's] CLEAR, even after Trump’s 2017 executive order exempted most foreign visitors and immigrants from the Privacy Act, is that it isn’t restricted by protections on what data the government can collect or keep — because it isn’t government-owned. It has real-time access to address and name-change data from credit reports and to motor-vehicle registrations in 43 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Its utility records, which come from more than 80 electric, gas, water, telephone, cable and satellite television companies nationwide, are updated daily, making it hard for immigrant families — or anyone else — to move into a new home without detection.

Obviously, the government doesn't have the money or manpower to amass all of this itself. But contracts with private companies are somehow exempted from privacy regulations that prevent government agencies from collecting this data for themselves. Nothing restricts this data-gathering on the private side and all the government needs to do to work around its own restrictions is outsource the collection and pay only for access. ICE seems to be a bit spoiled and it shows in its work. It no longer feels the need to make the nation more secure by ejecting hardened criminals with lengthy rap sheets. Instead, it's using this embarassment of data riches to eject anyone it stumbles across while surfing its multi-laned informational highway.

Filed Under: ice, immigration, social media, surveillance

Federal Gov't Gives Customs Officers Permission To Break Social Media Platform Rules Forbidding Fake Accounts

from the all-in-service-of-the-greater-good dept

The scanning of visa and green card applicants' social media accounts during the application process continues to escalate. Even though the program hasn't shown itself to be effective in keeping the country free of terrorists or criminals, the DHS and its components continue to believe this is an essential part of our national security infrastructure.

If the ultimate goal is to create a worldwide chilling effect on speech, then this program is coming along nicely. Knowing immigration and customs officers are going to be taking a deep dive into your social media accounts results in a lot of self-censorship, since it's not entirely clear what screeners are looking for. Presumably, this has been left to officers' discretion, which means it's a "we'll know it when we see it" situation.

Performing a deep dive means having access to as much of an account as possible. Limits placed on site visitors without an account appears to be frustrating customs officers. So, they've officially been given permission to create fake accounts to better access the content they're screening.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers can now create fictitious social media accounts to monitor social media information on foreigners seeking visas, green cards and citizenship.

An updated Homeland Security Department review of potential privacy issues dated July 2019 that was posted online on Friday essentially reversed a prior ban on officers creating fake profiles.

A USCIS statement explaining the change says fake accounts and identities will make it easier for investigators to search for potential evidence of fraud or security concerns as they decide whether to allow someone entry into the U.S.

The federal government may say it's okay for personnel to do this. But it's not okay with the platforms they'll be using. Twitter immediately offered a statement pointing out the creation of fake accounts (and the use of Twitter data for "persistent surveillance") violates its terms of use.

Facebook -- which has already pointed this out to local law enforcement agencies -- said the same thing in the statement it released the day after the USCIS gave customs officers the fake account green light.

“Law enforcement authorities, like everyone else, are required to use their real names on Facebook and we make this policy clear,” Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Pollack told The Associated Press in a statement Tuesday. “Operating fake accounts is not allowed, and we will act on any violating accounts.”

I guess maintaining law and order means breaking the rules. I imagine the DHS and its components will proceed with their fake account creation despite these statements because without an account, passive surveillance of foreigners will be much more limited.

For whatever it's worth, the USCIS has placed some limits on the use of fake social media accounts. They can only be used to passively view targeted accounts and aren't allowed to "follow" or "friend" any targeted accounts. Officers must also undergo annual training, although what that entails hasn't been described in detail.

Foreigners planning to visit the United States are at the mercy of an ultra-vague policy that encourages federal officers to violate the policies of privately-owned social media platforms. No doubt this will turn out well for everyone involved and not result in a ton of abuse.

Filed Under: dhs, fake accounts, social media, surveillance

White House Once Again Circulating A Draft Executive Order On Social Media Bias

from the another-bold-move-by-the-Party-of-Free-Speech dept

Since the White House is convinced social media companies are kicking conservatives off left and (mostly) right, it has decided to do something about it. What this "something" is remains about as vague as the accusations.

Once you remove a handful of grifters and Nazi fans from the list, you're left with not that much to get upset about. But the few who fervently believe this is happening make a lot of noise and have the ears of powerful people, so stuff -- vague stuff -- is being set in motion while the First Amendment is set aside.

A leaked copy of what was supposedly a draft executive order on social media bias appeared late last year. If the leak was legitimate, the White House's proposal would not have been Constitutional. It would have used the pretense of bias to allow the federal government to directly regulate speech on social media platforms. Here's Mike Masnick's take on the draft order:

Basically, the order would task the White House with "investigating" social media platforms for bias and then seek to use antitrust actions (or pass it off to the DOJ or FTC) to punish companies that show loosely defined "bias." The document takes as default that any kind of "bias" on major internet platforms should be taken as anti-competitive (which seems incredibly questionable) and then also requires that various agencies give the President a report on how to "address" social media bias.

How anyone can stretch "bias" into something deserving the DOJ's antitrust attention is beyond me, but this is similar to assertions made in several lawsuits filed against social media platforms by peeved far-right personalities.

The terrible idea appears to be back on the table after (nearly) a yearlong hiatus. Margaret Harding McGill and Daniel Lippman report for Politico that a handful of unidentified White House personnel have seen a new draft executive order being crafted to tackle social media bias.

The White House is circulating drafts of a proposed executive order that would address allegations of anti-conservative bias by social media companies, according to a White House official and two other people familiar with the matter — a month after President Donald Trump pledged to explore "all regulatory and legislative solutions" on the issue.

None of the three would describe the contents of the order, which one person cautioned has already taken many different forms and remains in flux.

Again, the draft is still a draft and no verifiable copies have been released. But this does indicate the White House still wants to take action against social media platforms for their moderation efforts. What's a bit more chilling -- when you consider the voices behind these statements and where they currently reside -- is the comments made by these officials about social media moderation.

“If the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,” the White House official said. “But look, we also think that social media plays a vital role. They have a vital role and an increasing responsibility to the culture that has helped make them so profitable and so prominent."

"Us vs. them," in other words. The White House views social media platforms as the enemy, which puts them on a long, long list of First Amendment-adjacent entities the President doesn't seem to care for. I guess the goal is to force platforms to become "conservative cesspools of venom" as well, aligning them with the Gabs and Voats of the world.

Another unnamed White House official feels this executive order would dovetail nicely into the President's recent demands that social media companies branch out into pre-crime to prevent mass shootings.

“They have a role, if not a responsibility, to monitor the content on their sites to ensure that people aren’t threatened with violence or worse, and at the same time to provide a platform that protects and cherishes freedom and free speech, but at the same time does not allow it to descend into a platform for hate,” the first White House official said when asked about the draft executive order.

It's going to be extremely difficult to "cherish free speech" and prevent sites from "descending into platforms for hate." This is why moderation is best left to social media companies, which can focus on the latter, rather than worrying too much about what the First Amendment does or doesn't allow. And this statement ignores the fact that many of the people companies have deplatformed routinely engaged in hateful speech.

If this executive order ever does actually appear, it's impossible to believe it will find some way to thread the Constitutional needle while still giving the Trump White House what it wants: control of social media platforms.

Filed Under: content moderation, free speech, social media, white house

NY Times Joins Lots Of Other Media Sites In Totally And Completely Misrepresenting Section 230

from the seriously,-guys? dept

So, about a week ago, the NY Times properly mocked politicians for totally misrepresenting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This week it needs to mock itself. Reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi wrote a piece provocatively titled (at least as it was originally published) Why Hate Speech On The Internet Is A Never Ending-Problem, with a subhead saying: "Because this law shields it." And in case you believed it might be talking about some other law, between the head and the subhead it showed part of the text of Section 230 (technically, it showed Section (c)(1)).

If you want to see how badly the NY Times botched this, just check out the current headline on the piece. It's pretty different. Now it says: "Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech." Even that's... not great. Also, the NY Times added the following whopper of a correction notice:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the law that protects hate speech on the internet. The First Amendment, not Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, protects it.

Yeah. So that's kind of a big deal. The original version blamed Section 230 -- a bill currently under attack from both sides of the aisle -- for somehow being the root cause of hate speech online, saying it's what "protected" it. And now the article admits in the fine print that, oh, whoops, actually it's that old 1st Amendment that protects it. Kind of a big difference, and one that completely undermines the entire point and thrust of the original article. That's a pretty massive fuck up

Of course, it's not entirely clear who is to blame here. Editors, not reporters, tend to write the headlines, so it's very likely that the incorrect headline came from the editorial team at the NY Times, and not Wakabayashi himself. After all, the article itself suggested that he had done some research on the matter, including speaking to Section 230 expert Jeff Kosseff, who spends much of his time these days debunking myths about 230. It also notes the actual history of Section 230, and how it was designed in order to encourage content moderation, not block it. Of course, you would not get that from that original headline, which suggested something very, very different.

Law professor and the UN's expert on free speech, David Kaye, wrote an excellent piece in response to the NY Times piece detailing not just the problems with that original headline, but some other important points regarding the idea that Section 230 is somehow responsible for hate speech:

But that headline… Does hate speech persist online because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act “shields it”? I’m sorry, Times readers; if you were looking for an easy fix to online hate, this isn’t it.

From there he goes on to list four important questions anyone looking to regulate "hate speech" online needs to answer. You can read his entire piece for explanations of each question, but I'll just list them out there:

• First, what is “hate speech”?
• Second, who should regulate it? Who decides?
• Third, should there be a global standard and global enforcement?
• Fourth, and finally, what to do about Trump and other public officials who trade in hateful content?

Too often people get stopped at that first one, with some sort of "well, it's obvious" kind of response. And that would be great if that were so, but it's not. And when you combine the first and second questions, we've noticed quite a pattern, in that when governments get to define hate speech, they quite frequently use it to target critics, the marginalized, and the powerless. I mean, it's not like we have a ton of articles showing just that.

And, given that Kaye's final question is what to do about Trump and other public officials, a related "5th" question might be why would you want a government led by someone like Trump, who has shown a propensity to ratchet up tensions and hate, deciding what counts as hate speech? Because he (and his supporters) certainly would argue that nothing he says should count as hate speech. To them it's either everyone else "misinterpreting" him, or it's a joke. Or, I guess, sometimes they'll just lie and claim "fake news."

But there's a bigger point here. Taking away Section 230 certainly doesn't do anything to stop hate speech online. Making platforms liable for content could very likely increase that kind of speech online for a variety of reasons. First of all, as noted, at least in the US, it's protected by the 1st Amendment. And some of the proposals to modify Section 230 are premised on the idea that platforms need to leave up all speech that is protected under the 1st Amendment. That would certainly lead to much more of the kind of speech that the NY Times is apparently concerned about.

Other proposals try to put some sort of "knowledge" standard on the speech. And, in such cases, you go back to a standard where platforms are encouraged to just look the other way and deliberately blind themselves to avoid having any kind of "knowledge." It's hard to see how that makes any sense at all.

The whole point of Section 230 -- which the NY Times of all papers should understand -- is that it created an important balance to try to enable the most "good" speech possible, while limiting the most "bad" speech. And it did so in a very clever way -- by letting the various internet platforms decide how best to meet that balance, rather than by dictating what is and what is not "good" and "bad" speech. Different platforms can and do create their own standards. That has been incredibly valuable not just for free speech online, and not just for innovation on the internet, but also in allowing for widespread experimentation with platform moderation.

It's too bad that rather than educate its readership about all of that, the NY Times decided to jump on the misleading (and simply incorrect) bandwagon claiming that 230 is somehow to "blame" for bad stuff online.

Filed Under: free speech, moderation, new york times, section 230, social media

Gizmodo: Why Can't YouTube Do 'Good' Content Moderation? Answer: Because It's Fucking Impossible

from the super-fucking-impossible dept

We've had something of a long-running series of posts on the topic of content moderation, with our stance generally being that any attempt to do this at scale is laughably difficult. Like, to the point of being functionally impossible. This becomes all the more difficult when the content in question is not universally considered objectionable.

Tech firms tend to find themselves in the most trouble when they try to bow to this demand for content moderation, rather than simply declaring it to be impossible and moving on. The largest platforms have found themselves in this mess, namely Facebook and YouTube. YouTube, for instance, has released new moderation policies over the past two months or so that seek to give it broad powers to eliminate content that it deems to be hate speech, or speech centered on demographic supremacy. Wanting to eliminate that sort of thing is understandable, even if you still think it's problematic. Actually eliminating it at scale, and in a way that doesn't sweep up collateral damage and garners wide support, is impossible.

Which makes it frustrating to read headlines such as Gizmodo's recent piece on how YouTube is doing with all of this.

YouTube Said It Was Getting Serious About Hate Speech. Why Is It Still Full of Extremists?

Because it's fucking impossible, that's why. There is simply no world in which YouTube both successfully eliminates all, or even the majority, of speech that some large group or another considers hate speech or "extreme." That's never going to happen. YouTube never should have suggested it would happen. The screw up here is YouTube not properly setting the public's expectations as to what its policy would achieve. Yeah, there is still a good deal of extremist content on YouTube. Whipping up anger at content that's available at this moment is trivially easy.

Making it more frustrating is Gizmodo's assertion, with a sinister connotation, that all of this is "part of YouTube's plan."

Strangely, this isn’t a simple oversight by YouTube’s parent company, Google. In fact, it’s the policy working as planned. YouTube hosts more than 23 million channels, making it impossible to identify each and every one that is involved with the hate movement—especially since one person’s unacceptable hate speech is another person’s reasonable argument. With that in mind, we used lists of organizations promoting hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Hope Not Hate, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, and the Counter Extremism Project, in addition to channels recommended on the white supremacist forum Stormfront, to create a compendium of 226 extremist YouTube channels earlier this year.

While less than scientific (and suffering from a definite selection bias), this list of channels provided a hazy window to watch what YouTube’s promises to counteract hate looked like in practice. And since June 5th, just 31 channels from our list of more than 200 have been terminated for hate speech. (Eight others were either banned before this date or went offline for unspecified reasons.)

Before publishing this story, we shared our list with Google, which told us almost 60 percent of the channels on it have had at least one video removed, with more than 3,000 individual videos removed from them in total. The company also emphasized it was still ramping up enforcement. These numbers, however, suggest YouTube is aware of many of the hate speech issues concerning the remaining 187 channels—and has allowed them to stay active.

I would suggest that these numbers actually likely represent YouTube blocking too much content, rather than not enough. In a politically divided country like ours getting some significant number of people to state that even a relatively innocuous video is "extreme" would be pretty easy. Add to that fact that the selection bias mentioned above is way understated in this article, and the problem deepens. Layer on top of that the simple fact that some of the sources for this list of "extremist" content -- namely the SPLC -- have been caught quite recently being rather cavalier about the labels they throw around, and this whole experiment begins to look bunk.

Making Gizmodo's analysis all the worse is that it seems to complain that YouTube is only policing the content that appears on its platform, rather than banning all content from uploaders who take nefarious actions off of YouTube's platform.

To understand why these channels continue to operate, it’s important to know how YouTube polices its platform. YouTube’s enforcement actions are largely confined to what happens directly on its website. There are some exceptions—like when a channel’s content is connected to outside criminality—but YouTube generally doesn’t consider the external behavior of a group or individual behind an account. It just determines whether a specific video violated a specific policy.

Heidi Beirich, who runs the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, charges that YouTube’s approach puts it far behind peers like Facebook, which takes a more holistic view of who is allowed to post on its site, prohibiting hate groups and their leaders from using the social network.

“Because YouTube only deals with the content posted, it allows serious white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke to keep content up,” Beirich said. “In general, our feeling is that YouTube has got to get serious about removing radicalizing materials given the impact these videos can have on young, white men.”

It's an insane request. Because a person or group says some things that are obviously objectionable, we want their voices silenced on YouTube, even when the content there isn't objectionable? That's fairly antithetical to how our country operates. YouTube is of course not governed by the First Amendment and can take down whatever content it chooses, but the concept of free speech and the free exchange of ideas in America is much more global as an ideal than the specific prescriptions outlined in the Constitution. Silencing all potential speech from a party simply because some of that speech is objectionable is quite plainly un-American.

Gizmodo then complains about the inconsistencies in enforcing this impossible policy.

The apparent inconsistencies go on: The channel of South African neo-Nazigroup AWB was terminated. Two others dedicated to violent Greek neo-Naziparty Golden Dawn remain active. The channel of white nationalist group American Identity Movement, famous for distributing fliers on college campuses, is still up. As is a channel for the white nationalist group VDARE. And, notably, none of the 33 channels on our list run by organizations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-LGBTQ hate groups have been removed from the platform.

In addition to giving many hateful channels a pass, this agnosticism to uploaders’ motives means that some channels with no interest in promoting white supremacy have been punished as YouTube enforces its policies.

Unlike what Gizmodo -- and even YouTube -- says, this is a bug, not a feature. We cannot say this enough: there is no good way to do this. Frankly, save for criminal content, YouTube probably shouldn't even be trying. Alternatively, if it does want to try, it probably would be more satisfying if YouTube's public stance was something like: "We'll block whatever we want, because we're allowed to. If those blocks don't seem to make sense to you, deal with it." At least that would set the proper expectations with the public.

And then maybe there would be less consternation as to why YouTube hasn't yet achieved the impossible. Impossible, in this case, being both doing content moderation at scale and simultaneously making everybody happy.

Filed Under: moderation, social media
Companies: youtube

Trump Calls On Social Media Companies To Become Pre-Crime Agents

from the paging-Tom-Cruise dept

Every time there are mass shootings in America, the public discourse disolves into a muck of tribal finger-pointing. We blame guns, video games, past Presidents, Congress, homosexuality, the decline of the nuclear family, mental illness, the internet, and on and on. Nothing gets done, no proposed solutions are adopted, and those proposed solutions gradually become all the more insane. The truth is more nuanced than can fit into a soundbite on some cable news program, but somehow the debates soaked in blood and grief never acknowledge this. If there is to be a sea change in the rate of incidents of mass violence in this country, this will have to change.

Or, if you're President Trump, you just tell the same social media companies you've regularly railed against for being biased to be your pre-crime agents instead.

After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters.

While delivering a speech on the recent violence, Trump said “we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs,” and he suggested social media companies could develop new ways of catching “red flags.”

“I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local state and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,” Trump said in the speech.

This is one of those things that, to the lay person, sounds reasonable. It isn't. Being in the industry of corporate IT services, I find myself far too often informing business owners that I cannot solve their Human Resources problems with technology. This is similar: we aren't going to solve the nuanced problem of mass shootings by throwing technology at it.

And we should know that by now. All kinds of law enforcement agencies have engaged in so-called "predictive policing" and it's been routinely discussed just how problematic these practices are. Traditionally, these programs have involved feeding algorithms historical crime data in order to get a sense of where that data suggests more violent crime will take place and by whom. If you don't already see the problem with that, you don't know the history of how justice has been meted out differently among the masses in America. The problem here isn't the machine or the algorithm, but the human decisions that go into the data that is feeding that algorithm.

In the case of social media companies partnering with law enforcement to do this sort of behavioral pre-crime, the problems will be all the worse. Algorithms aren't great at nuance, nor are they good at such subtleties as humor, embellishment, vernacular, and different cultural norms. People talk to each other, and post on social media, in different ways. The number of folks that will be caught up for otherwise innocent behavior, garnering visits from law enforcement worried that they will be shooting up their local big box store, is going to be enormous.

And that would be the case even if Trump had an actual plan rather than these vague proclamations, which he very much does not.

While the president did not specify what those “tools” might look like, Trump seemed to be suggesting that companies could use predictive software to single out potential shooters based on their activity on a platform. Crucially, this would mean taking action before a person commits violent crimes. Data-mining tools are in wide use, but creating a detection system for violence would inevitably raise a host of privacy and accountability issues.

In other words, this is pablum designed to distract the public from the fact that he isn't talking about any interests he wants to protect in the debate on mass shootings. It's meaningless foot-shuffling, rather than anything resembling an actual plan.

GOP responses to the shootings writ large has ranged thus far from "video games are evil!" to "nerd harder, social media!" Whatever those stances are, they are most certainly not agents of change.

Filed Under: algorithms, donald trump, mass shooting, social media, surveillance

UK Lobbyist's Long-Running Astroturf Efforts Shows Facebook Will Never Be Able To Stop Fake News, Ban All Conservatives

from the Facebook-shows-users-the-radar,-provides-low-altitude-flying-tools dept

For all the talk about social media platforms and their supposed anti-conservative bias, it seems like plenty of conservatives are doing just fine. Once you eliminate a short list of fringe grifters and Nazi fans, you're left with plenty of big name conservatives who still enjoy the use of multiple platforms. Even Dennis Prager of PragerU is struggling to make a federal case of YouTube's moderation of a small percentage of his videos; asking the court to ignore the forest of views for a few pruned trees.

Moderation at scale is hard and every new wrinkle demanded by politicians and activists results in another string of failures. Jim Waterson of The Guardian digs in deep into the details of another Facebook moderation failure -- one that allowed newly-minted Prime Minister Boris Johnson's lobbying buddy to skirt rules meant to inform users about paid political campaigning efforts.

The news follows the Guardian’s April report that Crosby’s company was behind a series of hugely influential pro-Brexit Facebook groups, which spent as much as £1m seeding the idea of a no-deal exit from the EU in the minds of the British public.

But the latest revelations reveal that the company has pursued that approach more broadly, in the service of previously unreported corporate interests and foreign governments.

And they expose a major flaw in Facebook’s political transparency tools, which make it possible for Crosby’s company – which boasts on its website that it deploys “the latest tools in digital engagement” – to use the social network to run professional-looking “news” pages reaching tens of millions of people on highly contentious topics, without apparently disclosing that they are being overseen by CTF Partners on behalf of paying clients.

The loophole CTF used to engage in multiple astroturfing campaigns isn't really a loophole. It's part of the design. That it was used in this fashion makes it appear to be a loophole, but when the business is engagement, it only makes sense to allow businesses to run multiple pages from a single account.

The minimal reporting requirements on campaign pages only requires a public face for pages -- one person who can be viewed as the entity behind the content. Business manager pages don't even require this. The astroturf campaigns originated from a business manager account. Most of the pages posted legitimate news articles, making them appear to be purely concerned with spreading information. Behind the scenes, CTF was gathering data on views, reactions, and sharing, figuring out which hot buttons to start pushing once the objective facade was dropped.

The Guardian's reporting has resulted in many of these pages being memory-holed by CTF. Even so, Facebook's view on the coordinated astroturf campaigns is that they did not violate Facebook's terms of use, or even its new focus on disrupting the flow of "fake news."

[Facebook] said the network of pages pretending to be news sources on behalf of corporate and state clients did not break their rules on “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, a term used to shut down disinformation networks overseen by foreign governments in Russia and Iran. This is because Crosby’s employees used their real names on internal Facebook administration tools – information that is not available to the general public.

Real names make everything OK. So, it's not even a loophole. It's just the way the ecosystem works. In Facebook's case, everything on the backend looked fine, as did the facade-building on the front end. When the facade was torn off by this investigation, Facebook's response isn't so much defensive as it is "this is how our platform works." That everything working correctly meant the construction and deployment of coordinated disinformation is indicative of the limitations of moderation, not necessarily Facebook's tacit endorsement of fully utilizing the tools it provides to businesses.

But that's how Facebook users end up viewing pages purporting to provide news about the war in Yemen that are run by UK lobbyists on behalf of their Saudi government patrons. And that's how persecuted conservative-adjacent entities continue to flourish, despite their protestations otherwise. The sad truth is at-scale moderation will never work well enough to banish one end of the political spectrum. It can't even limit the stuff it's supposed to be limiting at this point. And that's after several years and millions of dollars.

Filed Under: boris johnson, censorship, free speech, moderation, social media, uk
Companies: facebook