Does Twitter Have An Anti-Conservative Bias, Or Just An Anti-Nazi Bias?

from the springtime-for-jack-dorsey dept

In an article for Quillette titled, “It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals,” Columbia University research fellow Richard Hanania offers us proof–once and for all–that social media companies are biased against conservatives. Either that, or it’s the latest in a growing list of bogus, exaggerated or otherwise dubious anti-conservative bias claims (I’ll let you judge for yourself).

“Until now, conservatives have had to rely on anecdotes to make their case,“ Hanania writes. Adding that, “[m]y results make it difficult to take [social media platforms’] claims of political neutrality seriously.” The data he collected (with the help two research assistants, no less) looks at “prominent, politically active” people suspended from Twitter since the company’s launch in 2006.

Accounts included in the data set were selected from individuals and organizations whose suspension was covered in a “mainstream” news outlet, and who expressed a preference for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

Out of 22 (!!!) accounts in the data set that met these criteria, 21 (or 95%) were Trump supporters. Despite the small sample size, the author argues this is compelling evidence for Twitter’s anti-conservative bias. Even if conservatives are more likely to break Twitter’s rules, he argues, it “doesn’t seem credible” the disparity would be so wide.

But let’s look a little more closely at this. These are the 22 accounts make up the data set:

1. Rose McGowan (the list’s lone Clinton supporter)
2. Azealia Banks
3. Tila Tequila
4. James O'Keefe
5. Richard Spencer
6. Baked Alaska
7. Roger Stone
8. Gavin McInnes
9. Candace Owens
10. Alex Jones
11. Chuck Johnson
12. Robert Stacy McCain
13. Milo Yiannopoulos
14. Radix Journal
15. National Policy Institute
16. Craig R. Brittain
17. David Duke
18. American Nazi Party
19. James Allsup
20. American Renaissance
21. Jared Taylor
22. Laura Loomer

Scanning the list, you probably noticed the “American Nazi Party.” This is not an anomaly. The bulk of the list is a who’s who of outspoken or accused white nationalists, neo-Confederates, holocaust deniers, conspiracy peddlers, professional trolls, and other alt-right or fringe personalities (go ahead, pick a couple and Google them). It does not include any mainstream conservatives, unless, I suppose, you count recently-indicted Trump campaign advisor and “dirty trickster” Roger Stone.

Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended.

Kicking off a bunch of Nazis and trolls isn’t very compelling evidence that your average conservative is getting unfair treatment on Twitter. The majority of the “victims” here seem to have been engaged in abuse, and it’s reasonable for a private company like Twitter to kick off people who are undermining the quality of their platform by harassing or threatening other users.

Considering the alt-right’s propensity to scream and yell about getting “deplatformed,” these 22 accounts probably aren’t that representative of Twitter’s 67 million U.S. monthly active users. Nor does their small number (despite the author having two research assistants) indicate a broad, systemic problem.

Of course, social media companies may be not be perfectly neutral when it comes to politics. The Bay Area, where many of these companies are based, is a very liberal place. In 2016, only 9.4% of San Francisco County voted for Donald Trump. It’s entirely plausible that this disposition affects their products and policies in subtle ways. Yet, to date there has not been compelling evidence of systemic bias or a grand conspiracy to silence conservatives (despite this becoming a standard trope in congressional hearings and conservative conferences).

But social media platforms aren’t bastions of free speech, either. Their evolving norms and policies around content moderation raise a host of concerns and issues. At minimum, platforms could do a lot better at being transparent in their enforcement and governance decisions.

For conservatives, as I’ve argued before, crying wolf about censorship is a self-defeating strategy that will only make people not listen when it actually happens. Nazis, while sometimes useful in edge cases around free speech or references to Godwin’s law, are not stand ins for the median conservative American. Targeted abuse or incitements to violence are also not the same thing as free speech. Let’s not get these things mixed up.

Filed Under: bias, conservatives, content moderation, nazis, richard hanania, trolls
Companies: twitter

FOSTA Provides Another Tool For Silencing People You Dislike

from the liability-for-censorship dept

For many years, we've discussed all the different ways that putting liability on intermediaries and internet platforms leads to greater censorship. The liability alone creates strong incentive to shut down speech rather than risk the potential of lawsuits and huge payments. The most obvious example of this for years has been the DMCA process, where the takedown process is quite frequently used for censorship purposes. Indeed, there are many cases where people seem to assume that they can (and should) use the DMCA to take down any content they dislike, whether or not it has anything to do with copyright at all.

This is a big part of the reason why we were so concerned with FOSTA. While the law is officially supposed to be about "sex trafficking" and "prostitution" the bill actually does absolutely nothing to help victims or go after actual traffickers. Instead, it pins massive liability (including criminal liability) on platforms if they're used for trafficking or prostitution. Given that, it now becomes much easier to take down certain content or close certain accounts by merely suggesting that they are involved in trafficking or prostitution.

Case in point: Engadget recently had a story talking about how PayPal (and to a lesser extent, Patreon) appeared to be cutting off the accounts of various ASMR YouTubers. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a condition in which people who hear certain noises -- often whispering or soft scratching -- tend to experience a sort of "tingling" sensation. It's been talked about for years, and a bunch of YouTubers have built up followings making ASMR recordings. Earlier this year, we wrote about China banning some ASMR videos as "pornography." However, most ASMR videos are not sexual or pornographic in any way.

The Engadget article highlights how PayPal began banning a bunch of ASMR video creators, apparently in response to those creators being targeted on 8chan. The article suggests that it's pure trolling on the part of the 8chan users, but reading through the thread there, it's slightly more complicated (though, no less stupid). Many of the posts are misogynistic attacks on the women, and many claim that they're using ASMR as a front to sell "sexual content" and so some of them are arguing that they're really just trying to enforce the terms of service on PayPal and Patreon.

But there's something else -- some of the 8chan users claim that people in the ASMR community have been using the DMCA to silence critics as well, so to them, reporting the ASMR video creators is just a way of fighting back.

As is often the case, all of the motives here are suspect, and none of the narrators are particularly reliable. But what is clear is that intermediary liability laws become a weapon in online wars to try to silence people for whatever reason. The 8channers claim that the ASMR folks are sending bogus DMCA notices, which leads to (accurate or not) reports of ASMR accounts offering up sexual content, and platforms like PayPal and Patreon are then in a position where they're strongly compelled to just take those accounts down, rather than face any potential liability at all from FOSTA (or the DMCA).

Just sorting out who did what to whom in this situation is a total mess (I've wasted an afternoon reading all sorts of things on it, and it's next to impossible to get an accurate picture of what's really going on). But, it has created a world where when someone pisses you off online -- for good or bad reasons -- you can resort to claims that would place liability on the platforms if they don't cut off the users. And thus, people get cut off. No platform has the resources (or desire) to adjudicate what's really going on here at all... and thus, we just end up with widespread censorship.

This is likely to continue and expand, especially as intermediary liability protections are chipped away at on a grand scale. If you give people tools to censor, they will be abused, and those pushing to cut back on intermediary liability continue to play down the risk of widespread censorship and (especially) attacks on speech they actually support. But this kind of thing happens all the time, and punching giant holes in CDA 230 and similar laws will only make the issue much, much worse.

Filed Under: 4chan, asmr, cda 230, copyright, dmca, fosta, free speech, intermediary liability, takedowns, threats, trolls
Companies: patreon, paypal, youtube

New York Times Sues FCC With Eye On Bogus Russian Net Neutrality Comments

from the disinformation-nation dept

So we've pretty well established that somebody flooded the FCC's website with bogus comments during the agency's unpopular attack on net neutrality last year. Many of these comments were made using lifted identities (like Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey, or my own). Other comments were made using the identities of dead people. Many of the comments were made by a bot that pulled some of these fake identities in alphabetical order from a hacked database of some kind. Exactly 444,938 of those comments were made using Russian e-mail addresses.

The general consensus among activists and journalists is that it was broadband providers or a partisan advocacy group linked to broadband providers, though the FCC's total refusal to aid investigations have made proving this rather difficult. This week, the New York Times sued the FCC for its ongoing refusal to adequately respond to FOIA requests regarding the incident. In an interesting twist however, the Times seems more interested in the Russian angle of the story than the wholesale fraud that occurred:

"The request at issue in this litigation involves records that will shed light on the extent to which Russian nationals and agents of the Russian government have interfered with the agency notice-and-comment process about a topic of extensive public interest: the government’s decision to abandon “net neutrality.” Release of these records will help broaden the public’s understanding of the scope of Russian interference in the American democratic system."

It's unclear whether the Times actually thinks the Russian angle to this story is really the heart of the matter, or whether they're using concerns surrounding other Russian disinformation efforts to help bring some additional national security gravitas to the effort to expose home-grown graft and disinformation.

It's certainly possible Russia saw the net neutrality fight as another opportunity to sow division. But it's also worth noting that bogus comments supporting bad, usually anti-consumer policy is something that's been a problem across numerous agencies for several years, from fake consumers supporting efforts to rein in the banking industry, to the NFL submitting fake comments in opposition to efforts to eliminate the so-called black out rule.

On its face, those mostly likely responsible are the companies trying to shape the policies in question, and here too the most likely culprits in the net neutrality fracas are telecom monopolies with long histories of precisely this sort of nonsense.

Regardless, the Times suit makes it abundantly clear that the FCC refused to lift a finger to help reporters (or law enforcement) get to the bottom of the matter, and has routinely tried to use inapplicable FOIA exemptions (6, B5, 7E) to avoid having to share any real data:

"Repeatedly, the FCC has responded to The Times’s attempt to resolve this matter without litigation with protestations that the agency lacked the technical capacity to respond to the request, the invocation of shifting rationales for rejecting The Times’s request, and the misapplication of FOIA’s privacy exemption to duck the agency’s responsibilities under FOIA."

While it will likely take a while, slow progress is being made to force the FCC's hand on this issue. Journalist Jason Prechtel enjoyed a legal victory this week after he also sued the FCC for refusing to adequately respond to FOIA requests, data from which (largely the e-mail addresses and .CSV files utilized in the bot campaign) should surface in a few months. It's pretty obvious that there's something the FCC doesn't want explored here, and that something may just be exposed in time for not only the midterm elections, but also for the wide array of lawsuits headed the FCC's way this fall.

Filed Under: ajit pai, comments, fake comments, fcc, foia, russia, trolls

Reddit Ignored A Year's Worth Of User Warnings About Iranian Propaganda

from the fake-plastic-trees dept

Not to be outdone by their friends over at the Russian Internet Research Agency, Iran has also amped up its online disinformation efforts in a bid to fill the internet with an additional layer of hate and nonsense. Like Russia's efforts, the goal appears to be focused on pouring some gasoline on the United States' deep, existing partisan, racial, and ideological divisions. According to recent analysis by security firm FireEye, the Iranian effort included a rotating crop of fake social media identities and websites, all of which pushed policies of interest to the Iranian government.

The effort included numerous bogus news websites and hundreds of fake accounts on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Earlier this month Facebook announced it had removed hundreds of accounts and pages tied to this effort, with one of the fake organizations ("Liberty Front Press,") having 155,000 Facebook and 48,000 Instagram followers. Twitter also subsequently announced that it had purged 770 different Twitter accounts found to be engaging in "coordinated manipulation" originating in Iran. It's a game of Whac-a-Mole that isn't likely to end anytime soon.

Of interesting note, Reddit users and a moderator had uncovered a number of these accounts more than a year ago. Some of these users were immensely-successful in getting Reddit love, with at least a quarter of the users considered Reddit "power users" with more than 10,000 karma (one of the suspended accounts, elikh13 had the top overall post on Reddit just last week). Iran's effort most heavily targeted r/WorldNews, the site’s third-largest subreddit with more than 19 million subscribers.

From July 2017 onward, a group of volunteers including a Reddit moderator from California named Alex Brown brought the bogus accounts to Reddit's attention more than two-dozen times, but were repeatedly ignored:

"Brown and other amateur researchers notified Reddit, but the website...did not respond." In total, there were more than two dozen times that the group of Reddit power users, led by Brown, notified Reddit employees of the Iranian disinformation operation, starting in July 2017, according to correspondence viewed by NBC News. The two most recent messages identifying Iranian propaganda to Reddit's paid administrators came on Aug. 16 and 18, just days before Facebook's pulldown."

After the FireEye report became publicized, Reddit joined Facebook and Twitter in shutting many of the accounts down. The company acknowledged that it had confirmed 143 accounts that were part of the Iranian effort, 126 of which were created between 2015 and 2018, and 17 of which dated back to 2011. From a post by Reddit CTO Christopher Slowe:

"We believe this type of interference will increase in frequency, scope, and complexity. We're investing in more advanced detection and mitigation capabilities, and have recently formed a threat detection team that has a very particular set of skills. Skills they have acquired...you know the drill. Our actions against these threats may not always be immediately visible to you, but this is a battle we have been fighting, and will continue to fight for the foreseeable future. And of course, we’ll continue to communicate openly with you about these subjects."

Reddit has reached out to Brown and the other volunteer researchers and apologized, and the company says it's continuing to work on standards and procedures to police evolving propaganda efforts moving forward. Brown told NBC News he appreciated the apology, but noted that sites like Reddit still aren't doing enough to police disinformation and propaganda. The website still has no hard rule prohibiting propaganda, though these users may occasionally run afoul of Reddit's restrictions on spamming.

It remains entirely unclear what actual impact these efforts had on the 2016 election and American discourse, but as the recently-revealed Macedonian disinformation efforts make clear, we're only just scratching the service of how deep this particular rabbit hole goes, which countries and governments are involved, and just how much cross-coordination has taken place.

Filed Under: content moderation, iran, trolls, warnings
Companies: reddit

Louisiana Police Appear To Be Using A Hoax Antifa List Created By 8Chan To Open Criminal Investigations

from the cause-is-supposed-to-be-probable,-not-theoretically-possible dept

A public records request sent to the Louisiana State Police has uncovered something disturbing. Although the LSP continues to refuse to release the document in question, it appears this law enforcement agency has been using a bogus list of supposed Antifa members compiled by 8chan users to keep tabs on Americans opposed to Trump.

The public records lawsuit [PDF] filed by Harvard lecturer (and former staff attorney for Orleans Public Defenders) Thomas Frampton on behalf of records requester William Most, alleges law enforcement's refusal to hand over the "antifa.docx" file referenced in obtained emails is an indication the state police actually believe this bogus "Antifa" list -- compiled from a list of signatories to an anti-Trump petition -- is credible enough to be used in ongoing investigations and litigation.

Here's Frampton's summation of the situation, as gleaned from the state police's responses to Most's repeated requests for a copy of the Antifa doc.

On August 27, 2018, while searching through the first batch of 64 emails, Mr. Most noticed several high-ranking LSP officers sharing a document entitled “full list of antifa.docx” in August 2017. The dossier was also shared with non-LSP law enforcement, including an official from the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office.

The LSP “Antifa” emails were sent just days after the conspiracy theory website “8Chan” published a fake dossier of what purported to be a full list of “Antifa.” The hoax was promoted on Neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront. The purported “Antifa” roster contains the names of thousands of ordinary, law-abiding citizens who signed an online petition against President Trump.

LSP has refused to disclose the “full list of antifa.docx” records. The Agency claims that releasing the document could “compromise” an ongoing criminal investigation in which LSP anticipates arrests, and reveal the identity of its “Confidential Informant.”

This suggests two things, neither of which make the LSP look any better. Either it truly believes the hoax doc is real, rather than just names take from an online petition, or it's trying to avoid having to admit it was duped by a confidential informant, even if only temporarily.

The ever-present resistance to transparency by the state police is detailed in the filed motion as well. It's not just the appearance of an undelivered "antifa.docx" file in an email string, but the agency's refusal to meet court-ordered timelines or even begin work on fulfillment when its public records team says it will.

Defendant has completely withheld access to hundreds of records responsive to the Plaintiff's initial and modified request, but this lawsuit deals only with the inspection of five (5) specific records, the attachments to the five emails identified in [Paragraph]l19 of this Petition. Defendant has withheld these records after months of arbitrary and capricious stalling and delay; first negligently, apparently, then intentionally; despite multiple offers by Mr. Most to accept redacted portions of the record; and notwithstanding good-faith pre-litigation efforts by Mr. Most to explain to Louisiana State Police why the records are not exempt from disclosure.

But it's the Antifa doc that's making headlines. Alone it could mean nothing more than something passed around by law enforcement officers and officials before being discarded. Coupled with the LSP's insistence that release of the document would compromise both an investigation and its confidential informant, the refusal to release the docx file suggests the agency has opened investigations predicated on a hoax. However strongly one may feel about the criminality of Antifa's actions, there's nothing in this document justifying investigations and surveillance of people who did nothing more than sign an online petition. If the LSP fell for a hoax and opened investigations based on protected speech (the signing of online petitions), it's going to be facing a lot more litigation in the future.

Filed Under: antifa, hoax, investigation, louisian, louisiana state police, public records, transparency, trolls
Companies: 8chan

Internet Content Moderation Isn't Politically Biased, It's Just Impossible To Do Well At Scale

from the stop-this-dumb-narrative dept

The narrative making the political rounds recently is that the big social media platforms are somehow "biased against conservatives" and deliberately trying to silence them (meanwhile, there are some in the liberal camp who are complaining that sites like Twitter have not killed off certain accounts, arguing -- incorrectly -- that they're now overcompensating in trying to not kick off angry ideologues). This has been a stupid narrative from the beginning, but the refrain on it has only been getting louder and louder, especially as Donald Trump has gone off on one of his ill-informed rants claming that "Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people." Let's be clear: this is all nonsense.

The real issue -- as we've been trying to explain for quite some time now -- is that basic content moderation at scale is nearly impossible to do well. That doesn't mean sites can't do better, but the failures are not because of some institutional bias. Will Oremus, over at Slate, has a good article up detailing why this narrative is nonsense, and he points to the episode of Radiolab we recently wrote about, that digs deep on how Facebook moderation choices happen, where you quickly begin to get a sense of why it's impossible to do it well. I would add to that a recent piece from Motherboard, accurately titled The Impossible Job: Inside Facebook’s Struggle to Moderate Two Billion People.

These all highlight a few simple facts that lots of angry people (on all sides of political debates) are having trouble grasping.

1. If you leave a platform completely unmoderated, it will fill up with junk, spam, trolling and the like, thereby decreasing its overall utility and pushing people away.
2. If you do decide to moderate, you have a set of impossible choices. So much content requires understanding context, and context may be very different, even for the same content when viewed by different people.
3. If you're going to moderate at scale, you're going to need a set of "rules" that thousands of generally low paid individuals will have to be able to put into practice, reviewing pieces of content for just a few seconds (a recent report said that Facebook reviewers were expect to review 5,000 pieces of content per day.
4. It is impossible to make rules like that that can easily be applied to all content. A significant percentage of content falls into gray areas, where it then becomes a judgment call by people in a cubicle in the middle of reviewing 5,000 pieces of content.
5. At that rate, many mistakes are made. It is collateral damage of moderation at scale.
6. People caught in the crossfire of collateral damage will rightly make a big stink about it and the social media companies will look bad.
7. Meanwhile, some of the reasonable moderation decisions will hit trolls hard (see point 1 above) and those trolls will then take to other platforms and make a huge stink about how unfair it all is, and the social media companies will look bad.

Put this all together and it is a no win situation. You can't leave the platform completely unmoderated. But any attempt at moderation at scale is going to have problems. The "scale" part of this is what's the most difficult for most people to grasp. As Kate Klonick (again, author of an incredible paper on content moderation that you should read as well as author of a guest post here on Techdirt) notes in the Motherboard piece:

“This is the difference between having 100 million people and a few billion people on your platform,” Kate Klonick... told Motherboard. “If you moderate posts 40 million times a day, the chance of one of those wrong decisions blowing up in your face is so much higher.”

Later in the piece, Klonick again makes an important point:

“The really easy answer is outrage, and that reaction is so useless,” Klonick said. “The other easy thing is to create an evil corporate narrative, and that is also not right. I’m not letting them off the hook, but these are mind-bending problems and I think sometimes they don’t get enough credit for how hard these problems are.”

This is why I've been advocating loudly for platforms to move the moderation decisions further out to the ends of the network, rather than doing it in a centralized fashion. Let end users create their own moderation system, or adapt ones put together by third parties. But, of course, even that has problems as well.

No matter what choices are made, there are significant tradeoffs. As the Motherboard article also highlights, what seems like a "simple" rule gets hellishly complex quickly when applied to other situations, and then you've suddenly increased the "error" rate and people get angry all over again and the whole mess gets blown out of proportion again.

“There's always a balance between: do we add this exception, this nuance, this regional trade-off, and maybe incur lower accuracy and more errors,” Guy Rosen, VP of product management at Facebook, said. "[Or] do we keep it simple, but maybe not quite as nuanced in some of the edge cases? Balance that's really hard to strike at the end of the day.”

As the Oremus piece notes, the "bias" of platforms when it comes to moderation is not "liberal" or "conservative," it's Capitalist. Having a platform overrun with spam and trolls is bad for business. Hiring enough people who can adequately review content within the correct context is somewhere between insanely cost prohibitive and impossible. So the platforms muddle by with imperfect review processes. Making moderation mistakes is also bad for business, and the platforms would love to minimize them, but "mistakes" are often in the eye of the beholder as well, again reinforcing that this is an impossible task. For everyone screaming about how Alex Jones should be kicked off platforms, there's a similar number of people screaming about how awful the platforms are that do kick him off. There is no "right" way to do this, and that's what every platform struggles with.

And, if you think that these platforms are unfairly silencing "conservatives" (which is the prevailing narrative right now), it's probably because you're not paying enough attention elsewhere. Black Lives Matter and other civil rights groups have complained about "racially biased" moderation in the opposite direction, saying that minority groups are regularly silenced on these platforms. Indeed, it's not hard to find a ton of reports about black activists having content removed from social media platforms. And for all the talk of Infowars being taken off these platforms, how many people noticed that the Facebook page of the Venezuelan socialist TV station Telesur was recently taken down as well.

Yes, it's fine to point out that these platforms (mainly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) are really bad at moderating. But, unless you're willing to actually understand the scale at play, recognize how many mistakes are going to be made (and recognize how trolls are going to go nuts over correct decisions), you're playing into a false narrative to argue that any of these platforms are "targeting" anyone. It's not true.

Filed Under: bias, content moderation, errors, filters, mistakes, scale, social media, spam, trolls
Companies: facebook, google, twitter, youtube

Facebook's Censorship Of Legit Activists Shows The Policing Of Propaganda Is Going To Be A Fucking Mess

from the everybody-loses dept

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it had uncovered a new wave of disinformation attacks ahead of the 2018 elections. To hear Facebook tell it, the new attacks pretty closely mirror Russia's Internet Research Agency attacks during the 2016 election. As in, the culprits are trying to sow distrust and amplify partisan divisions on both sides of the aisle by creating fake organizations, fake people, fake news, and rockin' memes. How much that actually accomplishes is the matter of some debate, but it's also pretty clear we don't yet understand how deep this rabbit hole really goes.

According to Facebook, this latest attack on the nation's gullible shows signs of evolution from the more ham-fisted attacks seen during the 2016 election. And while there's no hard link to Russia yet, Facebook claims there are some connections between Russian Internet Research Agency "troll farm" accounts and this new wave of disinformation:

"For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below."

The problem, as Twitter, Facebook (and Mike, And Tim) have made abundantly clear, these companies are absolutely terrible at policing their own platforms, and simply crying out that they should "do something" without understanding what they're doing isn't likely to work. When these platforms do attempt to address hate speech or propaganda, they repeatedly do a terrible and inconsistent job of it. Said terribleness almost always results in over-reach and collateral damage.

For example, Facebook's response to the discovery of the latest disinformation attack involved taking down at least 32 pages and numerous profiles on Facebook pushing bullshit to partisans on both sides of the aisle. Said "inauthentic operators," as Facebook called them, included groups like "Aztlan Warriors," "Black Elevation," and "Mindful Being." Most of these groups and pages were indeed bogus efforts designed to stoke existing partisan tensions by amplifying many of the most annoying aspects of extreme partisans on both sides.

But in the process Facebook also shut down a group named "Resisters," which had been organizing a “No Unite the Right 2 - DC" counter-protest against a planned white supremacist rally scheduled in Washington DC on August 12. Needless to say, the legitimate activists weren't particularly pleased:

"However, activists who had worked with Resisters said the counterprotest they planned against a far-right rally was legitimate — and that Facebook was harming their ability to combat the rise of white supremacy. The event, called “No Unite the Right 2 DC” and promoted by Resisters along with other left-leaning groups, was collateral damage in Facebook’s battle against disinformation, they said.

Facebook has “delegitimized our whole event — and all the work that folks across the D.C. area have put a lot of time and effort into,” said Caleb-Michael Files, an organizer of the March to Confront White Supremacy, a group that was organized after the Charlottesville protests, and a co-host of the counterprotest event page."

Over at Facebook, one of the justifications for the removal of the page was that an account linked to the Russian IRA disinformation effort had been an administrator for the page for all of seven minutes:

"The IRA engaged with many legitimate Pages, so these leads sometimes turn up nothing. However, one of these leads did turn up something. One of the IRA accounts we disabled in 2017 shared a Facebook Event hosted by the “Resisters” Page. This Page also previously had an IRA account as one of its admins for only seven minutes. These discoveries helped us uncover the other inauthentic accounts we disabled today."

Taking down a whole, legitimate website because one IRA-linked account had admin rights for all of seven minutes seems shaky at best, and Facebook isn't clear on what additional evidence they relied on. The other problem is that Facebook notified all of the group's legitimate members about its move, undermining the effort as a whole. Facebook's blog post is also misleading, in that it suggests that these legitimate activists were somehow conned into participating in a counter-protest they would have been engaged with anyway:

"The Event – “No Unite the Right 2 – DC” – was scheduled to protest an August “Unite the Right” event in Washington. Inauthentic admins of the “Resisters” Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event. These legitimate Pages unwittingly helped build interest in “No Unite Right 2 – DC” and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests."

The event is still scheduled, but the new Facebook group created in the wake of Facebook's actions has far fewer members, and it's unclear how many people who would have otherwise attended were scared off by what feels like over-reach.

It's a bit of a master class on the terrible position Facebook suddenly finds itself in and the need for transparency as we try to craft a solution. The Washington Post quotes somebody inside Facebook that notes the company debated whether or not the bans would harm legitimate activism, but ultimately decided that the harm to these groups from being potentially co-opted by hostile foreign intelligence efforts was worse than the potential censorship.

That was cold comfort to activists, who suddenly found their efforts to undermine white supremacy derailed due to no fault of their own:

“It’s an extremely dangerous situation for free speech when politicians are screaming at web platforms to ‘do something’ about a problem that is difficult to address,” she said. “Censoring an anti-Nazi protest was a particularly egregious example of collateral damage."

The problem here is there's no real consensus on a path forward. We don't honestly know how to combat this yet.

Modern disinformation efforts clearly amplify tensions and sow distrust, and, as intended (check out Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation documentary when you have a few hours to kill some time), help contribute to the undermining of traditional media and traditional institutions, opening the door wider to future disinformation efforts. The impact isn't easily measurable, letting many dismiss the problem as over-hyped and unimportant. But if you've watched as conspiracy goes mainstream and often wanders comically close to White House policy, it should pretty clear there's a very fucking real problem here.

But Facebook and Twitter have both shown they're aggressively incompetent at regulating platforms or being transparent about such behavior. Congress can barely put its pants on in the morning. And despite some healthy debate for the better part of the year by journalists and academics alike, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody that currently has a solution to this particular problem. In part, because none of the solutions are easy, whether it involves shoring up critical thinking training in a country that consistently likes to underfund education, or reconfiguring systems to make spreading bullshit less profitable.

This new wave of disinformation and conspiracy is much like a bacterial infection, and it's going to take time for the culture and body politic to generate an immune response. In the interim, the learning process is going to be ugly as we feel out the best path forward. Whatever that path winds up looking like, hopefully it comes with notably less censorship and a whole lot more transparency.

Filed Under: activists, content moderation, election interference, free speech, trolls
Companies: facebook

Court Tosses Out Silly Trollish Publicity Stunt Defamation Lawsuit

from the but-no-anti-slapp-win dept

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a ridiculous defamation lawsuit filed by a plaintiff who has a history of fairly trollish, attention seeking behavior. I chose not to name the person in the post as I argued that the lawsuit itself was something of a publicity stunt, and I'll continue to do that here, even though it will become clear in the quoted parts of the ruling below. I have no interest in participating in the publicity stunt part of the lawsuit -- but do feel compelled to write about it because of the First Amendment issues that are a key component in the case. Amusingly, the plaintiff had a history of loudly proclaiming her support for free speech and the First Amendment, even going so far as to once state: "I care more about free speech... than almost any other issue."

And yet, she sued a reporter over a tweet. Here's the way I described it last year:

The background is pretty straightforward. The person in question, who is known as a strong Trump supporter (though, in the past also got attention as a strong Bernie supporter, and once said this: "I got called a literal Nazi so many times, I eventually went, Fuck it, I’ll just go all in.") was at the White House and had a picture taken of herself and someone else, standing behind a podium, with both doing the "OK" sign with their hands. There was a stupid little thing a few months back where some 4chan trolls tried to pretend that the OK sign was a symbol for "White Power". The idea was to get the press to report on this kind of thing and then laugh at how silly the press could be. Well, mission accomplished. A reporter for Fusion tweeted about the photo of these two people doing the "OK" sign were "White Power" hand signals being done in the White House.

As we noted last year, among the many, many issues that doomed the plaintiff's case was the fact that she admitted in a tweet that the whole thing was an attempt to troll journalists:

For a defamation case against a public figure to have any chance, a plaintiff needs to show first that the statement was a false statement of fact, but also that it was done with "actual malice." Actual malice has a specific legal meaning that is not just "the person wanted to do something mean." It specifically means that the person making the statement did so knowing it was false or, alternatively, with reckless disregard for whether it was false. Having the plaintiff flat out admit that it was all part of an attempt to trick people kind of undermines the entirety of the "actual malice" part of the lawsuit.

And the court noticed. In a ruling yesterday, the DC district court tossed out the case. And the key reason? A failure to show "actual malice." Oh, it also recognizes she's a troll. In the very first sentence of the opinion.

Plaintiff Cassandra Fairbanks trolled the web through Twitter, releasing a photo of herself and a fellow journalist in the White House press room making a gesture widely recognized as the “okay” hand symbol but also speculated at the time to be a “white power” symbol. Defendant Emma Roller, also a journalist, retweeted the photo with the caption, “just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House.” Ms. Fairbanks sued Ms. Roller for defamation. The First Amendment requires that Ms. Fairbanks’ claim be considered “against the background of a profound national commitment” to the freedom of speech and especially of political speech, which is “essential to the security of the Republic.” See New York Times v. Sullivan... This “fundamental principle of our constitutional system” obligates Ms. Fairbanks, as a public figure, to support her defamation claim by alleging facts that support a finding of actual malice on the part of Ms. Roller.... Because Ms. Fairbanks has failed to allege such facts, Ms. Roller’s Motion to Dismiss under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will be granted.

Oh yeah, note how the court, from the opening, is talking about the First Amendment. I should remind you what the plaintiff said about the lawsuit at one point:

Anyway, back to the case. As we expected, the court noted the Plaintiff's own admission to trolling. It mentions the tweet we showed about "trolling" above and in the discussion part notes that's part of the reason there's no actual malice:

Especially given the public debate about the “okay” hand gesture at the time of Ms. Roller’s tweet, Ms. Fairbanks’ allegations do not provide clear and convincing evidence of actual malice. Indeed, the inescapable conclusion one reaches upon viewing the photo and tweets at issue (including Ms. Fairbanks’ tweets) is that Ms. Fairbanks intended her photo and hand gesture to provoke, or troll, people like Ms. Roller—whether because the gesture was actually offensive or because they would think that it was offensive—not that Ms. Fairbanks was the victim of a malicious attack based on innocent actions. So Ms. Fairbanks has failed to state a claim and her case should be dismissed.

Unfortunately, we were also correct in the second part of our initial post -- that because the case was filed in federal court in Washington DC, it would mean that Washington DC's (pretty strong) anti-SLAPP law would be inapplicable. A horrible ruling from a few years back, which goes against rulings in most other federal courts, found that DC's anti-SLAPP law couldn't be used in federal court. The defendant in this case sought to use it anyway, but the court rejected it:

The District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP statute does not apply in federal court, so Ms. Roller’s Motion to Dismiss and request for attorney’s fees under the anti-SLAPP statute will be denied.

The Defendant had tried to argue that the infamous Michael Mann ruling had overturned that earlier ruling concerning DC SLAPPs in federal courts, but the court disagreed.

Once again, this is another example of why we so badly need a federal anti-SLAPP law.

Oh, and I should note that the plaintiff's lawyer in this case just happens to be the same guy, Robert Barnes, who we wrote about yesterday for his failed arguments that Twitter somehow violated Chuck Johnson's rights in kicking Johnson off its platforms. So while he seems to making a name for himself, it mostly appears to be in filing failed lawsuits that are dumped on First Amendment grounds on behalf of infamous Trump supporting internet trolls. I'm not sure that's a reputation worth having.

Filed Under: anti-slapp, cassandra fairbanks, dc, defamation, emma roller, first amendment, free speech, robert barnes, trolling, trolls

Spinoff: Whatever The Reports About Russian Trolls Buying Ads Is Initially, It's Way, Way Worse

from the multiplication dept

With several reports about data breaches occurring over the past few years, we've developed something of a mantra around here: it's always, always worse than first reported. Yahoo just went through this having finally admitted that literally every email account was compromised way back in 2013 after having first said it was only a few hundred thousand accounts that were impacted. Deloitte and Equifax followed this same playbook with their own breaches, trickling out little by little just how wide an impact those hacks had achieved.

And now we're seeing something of a spinoff of that mantra when it comes to the impact Russian trolls and the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA) advertising buys had on Facebook. You may recall that everything about this story seemed fairly minimalist in the initial reporting. The amount of money spent on the ad-buy itself was low enough to induce eyerolls from many. Facebook itself estimated that 11.4 million people saw ads bought by the IRA over the course of two years or so, which is not the kind of number that sets off all four alarms at the democracy firehouse. But Facebook has now given everyone a better idea of how much reach these ads actually had. And these numbers are far more alarming.

Facebook will inform lawmakers this week that roughly 126 million Americans may have been exposed to content generated on its platform by the Russian government-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency between June 2015 and August 2017, CNN has learned. In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, a copy of which was obtained by CNN, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch says that 29 million people were served content directly from the Internet Research Agency, and that after sharing among users is accounted for, a total of "approximately 126 million people" may have seen it.

Facebook does not know, however, how many of those 126 million people actually saw one of those posts, or how many may have scrolled past it or simply not logged in on the day that one of the posts was being served in their News Feed.

The inability to nail down just how many eyeballs viewed these ads is, of course, due to the nature of social media. Buying the ads and targeting primary viewers of them is one thing, but it's the sharing and re-sharing of those ads that extend their reach exponentially. And it's quite nice of Facebook to come right out and admit that it actually has no idea how many people viewed these ads, even as it offers up estimates to the contrary.

This is a feature of a social media platform like Facebook, not a bug. And, to the IRA's credit, it's a brilliant and inexpensive method for having some measure of influence in a foreign country's democracy. Facebook builds a sharing tool and these folks take advantage of the very nature of that tool.

Which is what makes Facebook's attempt to downplay all of this all the more perplexing.

Nevertheless, Facebook says in its testimony that the posts from those pages represented "a tiny fraction of the overall content on Facebook."

"This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content," Stretch writes. "Put another way, if each of these posts were a commercial on television, you'd have to watch more than 600 hours of television to see something from the IRA."

Except, as Facebook and Colin Stretch damned well know, Facebook doesn't operate anything remotely like television. Nor do its ads. The engagement process of those ads is wildly different. The ability to share those ads is not a feature of television. The granular targeting for eyeballs of those ads is simply not something that can be achieved by television advertising. The geographic targeting specifically, with an eye on influencing votes and the outcome of an election, is simply not a feature available to traditional television advertising. I know why Facebook wants to pretend otherwise in this instance, but it simply isn't true.

So, even as some are trying to downplay the impact, and even the existence, of this foreign intervention into our election cycle, it's worth acknowledging that these things, like data breaches, tend to be worse than first reported. And no obfuscation from Facebook about how much like television it is can change the raw numbers, or its acknowledgement that it doesn't actually know how many people saw this stuff.

Filed Under: russia, social media, trolls
Companies: facebook, internet research agency, twitter

New Whistleblowers Highlight How Russia's Information War On U.S. Was Larger Than Initially Reported

from the pouring-gasoline-on-a-bonfire dept

A few years ago, Russian whistleblowers like Lyudmila Savchuk began to reveal that Vladimir Putin had built a massive new internet propaganda machine. At the heart of this machine sat the "Internet Research Agency," a Russian government front company tasked with operating warehouses filled with employees paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. Initial reports on these efforts were often playful, suggesting little more than shitposting and memes.

Subsequent reports by folks like Adrian Chen at the New York Times highlighted in great detail how deep this particular rabbit hole went. Chen detailed how these efforts often went well beyond routine online trolling, and frequently extended into the real world (like the time online trolls urged American citizens to visit a Russian-operated Chelsea art gallery solely to try and distort and downplay the country's annexation of Crimea). By the summer of 2016, reports began to emerge that these same employees were also posing as Trump supporters to help stoke already raw political divisions in the States.

Fast forward to this week, when Russian newspaper RBC issued a fairly massive and comprehensive report (in Russian, the Guardian has an alternative take here) showing that these efforts went even further than most initial reports indicated. From the creation of popular Texas secessionist Facebook groups to the hiring of more than 100 U.S. activists who had no idea they were working for Russia -- all tasked with stoking division inside the United States:

Perhaps the most alarming element of the article was the claim that employees of the troll factory had contacted about 100 real US-based activists to help with the organisation of protests and events. RBC claimed the activists were contacted by Facebook group administrators hiding their Russian origin and were offered financial help to pay for transport or printing costs. About $80,000 was spent during a two-year period, according to the report.

And while some on both sides of the political spectrum have tried to downplay Russia's propaganda and disinformation efforts as amateurish, unimportant and ineffective, the collective scope of the IRA's work revealed by whistleblowers continues to indicate otherwise:

Today, business site RBC revealed the numbers that allegedly made the company work. It reports that over two years the agency spent $2.3 million on its US operations. Most of that was spent on Russian staff—around 90 employees were working on the US at the height of the trolling campaign in 2016—but it also paid for 100 US activists to travel around America, organizing 40 rallies in US cities, and spent $120,000 spreading their message on Facebook. (The Silicon Valley giant has admitted that thousands of ads were bought under Russian IP addresses during the campaign.) The 100 activists didn’t suspect any Russian involvement in the funding, RBC reports.

In addition to the RBC report, Russian journalists at Dozhd interviewed a new whistleblower named "Maxim" who worked at the Internet Research Agency. According to Maxim, the organization included a "Russian desk," a "foreign desk," a "Facebook desk," and a "Department of Provocations." Whereas the Russian desk operated the country's now infamous Twitter bots and online trolls, the foreign desk was notably more sophisticated in its information assaults, trained in the more nuanced aspects of U.S. politics in order to "set Americans against their own government," and "provoke unrest and discontent."

Meanwhile, the Russian government's Facebook desk was tasked with battling Facebook administrators who would try to delete fake accounts and groups -- and who would often buckle to opposition from Russian trolls who raised First Amendment concerns when challenged:

"The troll farm also had its own "Facebook desk," whose function was to relentlessly push back against the platform's administrators who deleted fake accounts as they began gaining traction. When Internet Research Agency employees argued against having their accounts deleted, Max said, Facebook staffers would write back, "You are trolls." The trolls would in turn invoke the First Amendment right to free speech — occasionally, they won the arguments.

By the latter half of 2016, up to a third of the Internet Research Agency was tasked with stoking existing tensions ahead of the U.S. election, according to yet another report by Russian media outlet Meduza. Another whistleblower claims that the IRA's goal wasn't always specificlly to aid Trump, but to help encourage American infighting, contributing to partisan gridlock in the States (though the IRA's disinformation work is just one prong in Russia's efforts, and the Mueller investigation may obviously have more to say on this subject in time).

The RBC report notes that Chen's 2015 bombshell story in particular forced the Russian government to notably revamp its disinformation efforts, so what it looks like now is far from certain. What is certain is that Russia's online disinformation efforts -- a response to years of equally brazen efforts by the United States -- are just the latest in a multi-generational cold war that perpetually seeks to take horrible ideas to new and obnoxious levels. The biggest concern now isn't just how a country immeasurably susceptible to bullshit combats this kind of attack, but just how ham-fisted and harmful the United States' inevitable response will be.

Filed Under: elections, influence, russia, russian trolls, trolls