Day After Senator Lindsey Graham Is Credibly Accused Of Trying To Undermine The Election, He Hosts Hearing Attacking Social Media For Undermining Election

from the this-is-all-so-dumb dept

The timing on this is quite incredible. On Monday, Georgia's (Republican) Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, spoke out, saying that Senator Lindsey Graham had called him and implied that Raffensperger should look to throw out ballots that were legally cast in the state. On Tuesday morning, in trying to defend his efforts to undermine the election, Graham tried to shake off his calls with Raffensperger as no big deal, saying that he also spoke to Arizona and Nevada election officials. This does not make things better. Indeed, it actually seems to make things worse (and that's even after Arizona's Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, claimed that Graham's claims were "false" and she never spoke to him.

All of this certainly seems like cause for concern about election interference and tampering. Indeed, it's the kind of thing a good government would at least investigate. And, in a stroke of good timing, the Senate Judiciary Committee was all set up on Wednesday to host a hearing about the 2020 Election and "suppression." Except... this hearing was organized and chaired by the very same Senator Lindsey Graham, and was yet another dog and pony show of internet CEOs having to defend specific content moderation choices.

Now a sane person who loosely follows the news might be saying "wait, didn't we just do that last month?" And you'd be right. Just a few weeks ago, there was an almost identical hearing. Both hearings had Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (the earlier hearing also had Google's Sundar Pichai). Both hearings featured a bunch of grandstanding and often clueless Senators demanding to know specific answers to why the websites did or did not moderate specific pieces of content.

But this time it was the Senate Judiciary Committee, as compared to the Senate Commerce Committee last time. There were a few overlapping guests -- including Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Marsha Blackburn. This one also included Senator Josh Hawley who grandstands with the best of them over this issue. Cruz and Lee basically did a warmed over, half-baked rehash of their performances from a few weeks ago. Hawley's performance was particularly stupid. He claimed to have heard from a "whistleblower" inside Facebook and posted two grainy screenshots of internal Facebook tools. One was its "Tasks" tool, which is a general company-wide task manager tool, which Hawley used to imply that Facebook, Twitter and Google are some how colluding to figure out which users, hashtags, and content they're going to suppress.

This is not how any of this works. Hawley demanded that Zuckerberg turn over every mention of Google or Twitter in their Tasks tool, and Zuck quite reasonably pointed out that he couldn't commit to that without knowing what sort of sensitive information might be involved. This is basically the equivalent of Hawley asking for every email that mentions Twitter or Google. It's an insane and intrusive request, though he threatened to subpoena the company if Zuckerberg wouldn't comply. Hawley then demanded to know if any Facebook employees ever communicate with Twitter or Google.

Zuckerberg, again, quite reasonably, pointed out that he's sure that people who work in trust and safety at some point or another know of people in similar roles at other companies and he's sure at some point or another some of them communicate with each other, but that's quite different than plotting over what content to block as Hawley kept insisting. Hawley then trotted out another screenshot of some other internal tool that Zuckerberg says he didn't recognize and thus couldn't answer any questions about -- which Hawley again pretended to be some damning evasiveness from the CEO. What it actually suggested is that this is not a very important tool, and Hawley is clearly overstating what it's used for.

Oh, and Hawley, ridiculously, insisted on calling the trust and safety teams at these companies "censorship teams," and implying that they deliberately try to silence ideological content (they do not). Of course, what's truly crazy is that many of the half-dozen or so different Section 230 reform bills that Hawley has introduced in the Senate would actually require more content takedowns than we have today. But you can't be a demagoguing populist without demagoguing while the cameras are on, and Hawley played his part.

If you'd like to read my play-by-play response to the entire hearing as it happened, I have a very long Twitter thread:

Or if you're truly a glutton for punishment, you can watch the entire 4 hours and 43 minutes of the hearing but I do not recommend that for your own sanity:

Like other hearings involving the internet, this hearing was big on rhetoric, ignorance on the part of the senators and no clear urgent need for such a hearing right now. For the most part, you had Republican senators mad about choices to moderate certain content (or to make decisions too quickly that later turned out to be mistaken), while Democratic senators were mad about choices not to moderate other content (or to make decisions too slowly). In other words, they see this debate as a sort of tug o' war, with the companies as the rope, and their main hope is to influence content moderation to work the way they want it to work, if they could wave a magic wand and just enable the content that they and their supporters want.

We should see this entire thing as an affront to the 1st Amendment. Demanding changes (in either direction) to the content moderation practices of private websites is a massive 1st Amendment issue. Imagine if Democratic senators called in Fox News execs to complain about story choices? Or Republicans did the same with the NY Times. 1st Amendment and free press people would be reasonably up in arms over this gross abuse of power over something that the Constitution deliberately and clearly says Congress has no authority over.

So why do we let them do this to social media companies?

Much of the hearing was little more than moral panic claim after moral panic claim, highlighting the nature and problems of society itself -- and then pinning the blame on social media. It's the same moral panic we've seen play out over and over again for centuries. Some new medium comes about, and people use it. Some people use it for things that upset other people, and rather than look at the underlying causes, it's easier to blame the messenger.

It's as disappointing as it is predictable.

And chances are it's only going to continue. Towards the end of the hearing Senator Thom Tillis (and Senator Chris Coons) suggested that both Zuckerberg and Dorsey should commit to returning again next month. And Senator Richard Blumenthal even laughed mirthfully in closing out the hearing by saying he fully expected there to be many, many more hearings with these execs.

It's all for show. The senators want to be seen to be doing something and picking on these platforms is a welcome distraction from actual problems in society -- including a president who refuses to concede in the election he lost, the quarter of a million (and climbing) dead people from a botched COVID response (and the lack of any real effort to deal with COVID as it sweeps across the country again), and so many other things. Rather than facing actual problems facing society, Senator Lindsey Graham and his colleagues have decided that it's best to play "look! squirrel!" and insist that the biggest problem of today is that Twitter and Facebook want to fact check the president when he spews nonsense and dangerous conspiracy theories.

Filed Under: congress, content moderation, jack dorsey, josh hawley, lindsey graham, mark zuckerberg, marsha blackburn, section 230, senate judiciary committee, ted cruz
Companies: facebook, twitter

FCC Boss Pai Urged To Accept Trump Loss, Pause Dumb Attack On Social Media

from the can't-hear-you-I-have-a-banana-in-my-ear dept

With the Biden victory, FCC boss Ajit Pai is being urged to pause all controversial rulemaking, including the agency's absurd and now likely doomed attempt to regulate social media and undermine Section 230 via the FCC. With a Biden win, Pai's guaranteed to lose his spot as top commissioner, and is likely to exit the agency altogether.

Energy and Commerce Committee heads Frank Pallone and Mike Doyle this week wrote to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joseph Simons, urging them to, as is tradition, pause any controversial rulemaking in preparation for the incoming Biden administration:

"With the results of the 2020 presidential election now apparent, leadership of the FCC will undoubtedly be changing. As a traditional part of the peaceful transfer of power — and as part of our oversight responsibilities — we strongly urge the agency to only pursue consensus and administrative matters for the remainder of your tenure."

The message to adhere to civility and norms was also mirrored by Jessica Rosenworcel, who'll likely be the next FCC boss (at least on an interim basis):

"I welcome the letter from Chairman Pallone and Chairman Doyle. Historically, the FCC has honored the transfer of power from one Administration to the next by pausing any controversial activity. I urge FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to follow this past practice in order to ensure an orderly transition of agency affairs. I look forward to continuing to work on the routine and consensus matters currently before the agency."

Granted, Ajit Pai is the same FCC boss that actively blocked law enforcement inquiries into Trumpland and the broadband industry's use of fake or dead people to generate bogus support for unpopular polices at the agency. He also spent years parroting false telecom lobbyist data as he happily dismantled the agency from within at the behest of AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. He also rubber stamped competition and job-eroding telecom mergers without even bothering to look at the data. And, who can forget the time Pai thought it was a good idea to make a dance video with a pizzagater after giving the public a giant middle finger.

As such, any idea that the FCC intends to adhere to norms here as they simultaneously deny obvious and clear election results is likely wishful thinking. Even though Pai himself made such a request shortly after Trump won. Still, former FCC staffers like Wheeler advisor Gigi Sohn urged the agency to at least try to consistently adhere to norms:

From the sound of things, it seems unlikely that the FCC's bumbling attempt to regulate social media at Trump's request has a long shelf life either way.

You'll recall that Trump fired Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly for very politely pointing out the FCC lacks the authority to regulate social media and that undermining 230 would likely create more censorship, not less. As his replacement, Trump nominated the NTIA's Nathan Simington, the very guy that wrote Trump's ridiculous EO demanding the FCC "reinterpret" Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Simington's appointment to the FCC is going through all the usual processes, including a hearing this week designed to provide media sound bytes supporting the completely bogus claim that social media unfairly censors Conservatives (data and reality often indicate the exact opposite). But everything I'm hearing is that Simington isn't likely to obtain an actual vote, in part because the GOP realizes Trump's 230 gambit is likely doomed, and they're more interested in others getting the FCC seat (Crystal Tully, Deputy Staff Director at the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation is a name that keeps coming up in my conversations this week).

It's one of several indications that while the GOP publicly is pretending the election is contested (to fundraise, avoid angering Trump's adoring fans, and keep supporters engaged for the Georgia runoffs), they're privately positioning and strategizing with the full knowledge the Biden Presidency is a done deal. Either way, there's every indication that the dumb FCC attempt to regulate social media (and the rank hypocrisy required to embrace such a move after bitching about net neutrality as "government overreach" for four years), is likely dead as a doornail.

Filed Under: ajit pai, fcc, frank pallone, ftc, joseph simons, mike doyle, rulemaking, section 230

What The Election Means For Tech

from the take-your-pick dept

If Trump Wins...

For Republicans, bashing “Big Tech” has become as central to the Culture War as bashing the “Big Three Networks” once was. Demanding “neutrality” from social media companies has become what “net neutrality” has been for Democrats: the issue that sucks up all the oxygen in the room — except far more politically useful.

ISPs aren’t in the content moderation business, but social media would be unusable without it. (Just try using 8Kun or Gab!) Democrats have always struggled to identify real-world examples of net neutrality violations, but Republicans find “anti-conservative bias” everywhere, everyday. Content moderation at the scale of billions of posts is wildly imperfect, so anyone can find examples of decisions that seem unfair. But Republicans won’t settle for mere “neutrality.” They want to end Section 230’s legal protections for moderating hate speech, misinformation, using fake accounts to game algorithms, and most foreign election interference. All of these tend to benefit Republicans, so moderating them seems to prove the claim that “Big Tech” is out to get conservatives.

This won’t just be empty rhetoric anymore. Making every tech issue about “bias” will make most tech legislation impossible, but Trump won’t really need new legislation. He’ll finally weaponize the two independent agencies that regulate tech: the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Their current chairmen are traditional Republicans and serious lawyers uninterested in playing political games. But in August, Trump abruptly withdrew the renomination of Republican stalwart Mike O’Rielly after he obliquely criticized Trump’s Executive Order demanding political “neutrality” of social media. Trump quickly nominated the junior administration staffer behind the White House’s crackdown. No one should doubt that the next FCC and FTC chairmen will be Trump loyalists unencumbered by legal or constitutional scruples — and eager to turn the screws on Trump’s “enemies.” Each agency will become ever more a political battleground in which "tech" issues serve as proxy war for deeper cultural conflict.

If Biden Wins...

Trump called “Sleepy Joe” a tool of the “radical, socialist left.” Biden insisted his primary victory was a mandate for centrist pragmatism. Perhaps nowhere will Biden’s leadership be tested more than in tech policy.

Congress hasn’t passed substantial tech legislation since 1996 — and even that overhaul of the Communications Act (of 1934!) mostly reflected pre-Internet assumptions and fears. Congress used to make regular course-corrections through biennial reauthorization of federal agencies — but stopped in 1998, the year Congress became pure political spectacle. The FCC and FTC have since been left to improvise. The FCC’s long been a “junior varsity Congress” — same political baggage, no electoral accountability. The more serious FTC is trending that way. Each change of the White House means increasingly large shifts in tech policy.

These problems are as thorny as our broken judicial nomination process — and equally unlikely to be corrected through our broken legislative process. If Biden wants to be remembered for resolving them, he’ll need to do for tech what he’s proposed for the courts: convene an expert bipartisan commission with a clear mandate to develop once-in-a-century legislation, and then get ‘er done.

Biden’s nominations for FCC and FTC Chairs will reveal whether he’s genuinely interested in leading on tech — or content, like Trump and Obama, to exploit tech issues to excite his base. Strong Chairs in Biden’s mold could build Congressional consensus for significant, but viable, and therefore moderate, legislation. But if he picks bomb-throwers over problem-solvers, we’ll have four more years of the same digital culture wars — and creating a stable digital-era regulatory framework may have to wait several more presidencies.

If Trump Wins...

Republican fulmination about “anti-conservative bias” will continue to escalate. Don’t expect Republicans to pass any legislation. But they’ve always been more interested in stoking resentment among their base — and using threats of legal action to coerce large tech companies to change their content moderation practices in ways that help Republicans.

The FCC will proceed with a rulemaking to sharply limit Section 230’s protections. The only question is whether Ajit Pai issues a more restrained proposal on transparency mandates before he leaves the FCC. If not, Brendan Carr (or whoever Trump might appoint to replace Pai) could propose most or all of what NTIA has asked for. This dynamic will make it difficult for bipartisan legislation to pass amending 230, but something like the EARN IT Act and other amendments targeted at unlawful content might pass.

If Biden Wins…

Many Republicans will blame “Big Tech” for their losses, and claim that “election interference” (by Big Tech) delegitimized the new administration. They’ll do everything they can to deter content moderation beyond narrow categories of porn, dirty words, illegal content, promoting terrorism, self harm, and harassment (narrowly defined). Most Democrats want exactly the opposite: to coerce tech companies into moderating misinformation as a condition of maintaining their 230 protections. There simply is no common ground here.

So unless Democrats win enough Senate seats to abolish the filibuster, the debate over content moderation won’t be resolved anytime soon. Instead, Democrats will focus on liability for third-party content that isn’t moderated — which is what nearly all 230 cases are actually about. The EARN IT Act already has bipartisan support, as does making 230 protection contingent on removing unlawful content, and requiring websites to prove that their practices are “reasonable.” Each is deeply problematic, but practical details of real-world implementation don’t seem to matter much.

Biden has said he wants to “revoke” Section 230 “immediately,” but there’s little reason to expect repeal to happen. Instead, expect him to focus on “hold[ing] social media companies accountable for knowingly platforming falsehoods,” as a Biden spokesman put it after Trump’s Executive Order in May.

Here, more than in any other area, an expert commission is the only way out of this debate. The issue is simply too complicated — both legally and technically — for Congress to handle.

If Trump Wins...

Status quo: The FCC will maintain its hands-off approach to broadband regulation and net neutrality legislation will remain stalled in Congress. At most, a Democratic House and Senate might pass legislation purporting to revive the 2015 Open Internet Order, but Trump would veto it — and it’s far from clear that’s even a valid way to legislate. Instead, expect activists to focus on pushing for state-level broadband legislation. The courts are unlikely to allow that so long as the FCC retains broad preemption. But for some activists, the point has always been to keep the fight going forever, not to actually win in court.

If Biden Wins…

Even a centrist FCC Chair would face overwhelming activist pressure to revive the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. But will they want to be remembered merely for playing yet another round of Title II ping-pong — or for finally convincing Congress to resolve this issue? There’s been a bipartisan consensus on the core of net neutrality since Republican Chairman Michael Powell gave his “Four Freedoms” speech in 2004. Democratic Chairman Genachowski pushed hard for legislation. He resorted to issuing the 2010 Open Order only after Republicans pulled out of legislative talks, calculating that they’d have more leverage after the midterms.

Resolving this issue could be the key to broader telecom reforms that Congress has been unable to tackle since passing the 1996 Telecom Act — a law based on markedly pre-digital assumptions about the future. Democrats should be careful not to overplay their hand: the D.C. Circuit decision upholding the FCC’s 2015 Order made clear that the FCC’s rules only applied to companies that held themselves out as offering “unedited” services anyway, meaning that ISPs could opt-out of Title II if they really wanted to.

If Trump Wins...

Expect more antitrust lawsuits like the Google suit. But if the Google suit is the strongest case this Administration has, they’re unlikely to win any significant remedies in court. And even if those suits do succeed, they’re unlikely to significantly address Republicans’ real concerns about “bias.” So don’t expect Republicans’ current “litigate but don’t legislate” approach to last long. Trump is famous for turning on a dime, and Congressional Republicans will face enormous pressure, especially if Democrats take the Senate, to “strengthen” the antitrust laws. Ken Buck’s minority report indicates where populist Republicans might find common ground with anti-corporate populists on the left.

If Biden Wins…

There’s enormous political pressure from all quarters to “do something” about antitrust. But don’t assume that legislation will be anywhere near as radical as what Congressional Democrats have proposed. Even Rep. David Cicilline’s much-hyped proposal to turn antitrust law on its head is careful to note that it represents only the views of his staff — not the Committee or its members.

It’s one thing for Democrats to talk about flipping the burden of proof in merger cases, but giving the government such leverage would have, for example, made it easy for Trump to force AT&T to spin off CNN — or to make editorial changes as implicit conditions of the Time Warner deal. Democrats pushing such ideas simply haven’t thought through the implications of what they’re proposing. Do they really want to make it easier for Republicans to use the antitrust laws as political weapons against the media, both new and old? A more considered, serious approach from the administration would focus on increased funding, more aggressive enforcement, and carefully targeted statutory changes.

If Trump Wins…

Status quo: Absent a court decision striking down state privacy laws on dormant commerce grounds — hard cases to win, which usually take years — Republicans will continue to insist on national privacy legislation to prevent every state from layering its own set of data rules on top of California’s. But Democrats have little political incentive to negotiate for any legislation that would displace California’s approach, which they claim as a win despite its glaring amateurishness and many practical pitfalls.

If Biden Wins…

If Democrats also take the Senate, they’ll have no excuse for not finally passing the comprehensive baseline privacy legislation they’ve talked about for years. Preemption should be an easier “give” for Democrats if they have more leverage in writing the legislation and are assured of handling at least the crucial first 3-4 years of enforcing the new law. Passing a federal law, even if it overlaps significantly with California’s, would allow the Administration to take credit for addressing the top complaint about “Big Tech”: not bigness per se, but a perceived lack of control over data collection.

If Trump Wins…

Status quo: The White House will raise legitimate concerns about Chinese tech companies giving the Chinese government access to private user data and influence over content moderation decisions. They’ll hype “deals” like TikTok’s partnership with Oracle, but Chinese entities will retain control. The only real winners will be American companies favored by the White House. It’ll be cronyist mercantilism veiled in talk of privacy and free speech. Republicans will increasingly find themselves in a quandary: the greatest beneficiaries of their push to hamstring American “Big Tech” companies will be Chinese companies that have achieved the scale necessary to expand into the U.S. market, as TikTok has done.

If Biden Wins…

Republicans will hammer the Biden Administration for any perceived weakness on China — especially when it comes to tech. Expect the White House to try to depoliticize CFIUS and treat the review process as more of a law enforcement exercise than policymaking driven by the White House. If Democrats are smart, they’ll try to insulate themselves from inevitable Republican attacks by drawing clearer statutory lines about foreign ownership of tech companies serving the U.S. market. The real test will come the first time CFIUS declines to take action against a Chinese company: will the White House intervene under political pressure?

If there’s no clear, quick election result, the stage will be set for the “mother of all battles” over online speech. If Trump and his supporters claim victory and insist that ballots that “changed the result on election night” must be fraudulent, “Big Tech” companies will apply warning labels to such content — and block paid ads making the same claims. Republicans will go absolutely ballistic. They’ll throw every legal theory they can against the wall. Don’t expect any of it to stick: website operators have a clear First Amendment right to reject, or put disclaimers around, third party content — just as newspapers do with letters to the editor. But that won’t stop Republicans from filing multiple lawsuits and complaints with federal regulators, including the Federal Election Commission. Expect the Trump administration to get creative in finding ways to “stick it” to tech companies in interregnum.

As ugly and politicized as tech policy is today, if tech policy becomes wrapped up in a “Florida recount but worse” fight, we’ll quickly come to look back at today’s tech policy battles as mild by comparison.

Filed Under: antitrust, china, donald trump, intermediary liability, joe biden, net neutrality, predictions, privacy, section 230, tech policy

Changing Section 230 Won't Fix Politicians' Issues With Section 230

from the these-are-not-the-solutions-you-are-looking-for dept

In the week leading up to a potentially extremely consequential election, Congress is once again setting its sights on its favorite whipping boy, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Section 230 clarifies that users are responsible for the content they post online, not the websites that host it. Yet, this simple law was the subject of a hearing which brought the CEO’s of Twitter, Google and Facebook to the hill to be questioned over the law. These companies have been blamed for everything from increasing hate speech online, promoting election disinformation, and censoring conservative speech.

Seemingly sensing the winds of change are blowing against them, some of the companies brought to the hill have acquiesced that Section 230 will be reformed and will support some changes to the law. What exact changes to the law they will support remains unclear, but what does have clarity is that this tactic is a monumental mistake.

The problem is supporting the reform of Section 230, or even changing the law, will do nothing to get Congress off their back, as any change to the law will fail to address the concerns of those demanding reform. If anything, changing Section 230 will only exacerbate those problems, leading to further scrutiny and calls for reform.

Examine the standard Democratic and Republican complaints. Democrats are concerned that there is far too much hate speech, disinformation, and fake news allowed on various platforms. They want the websites to proactively remove more content they believe is poisoning the civil discourse. Republicans, meanwhile, are upset that websites are removing too much content. Twitter blocked the posting of the Hunter Biden laptop story for days, leading to claims of election interference. Similarly, posts from the satirical Babylon Bee have also been subject to removal. These actions place no doubt in the minds of many on the right that big tech is out to censor them.

Listening to these complaints, it seems Section 230 is the cause of both too much and not enough content being removed? How can this possibly be? One thing is certain--the problem is not Section 230. The problem lies with the fact that platforms aren’t conforming to one side or the other’s content moderation preferences. But rather than admitting that, both sides are using Section 230 as a pretext to haul the companies before Congress and question them on moderation decisions.

It’s likely that our political leaders already know this. If, by chance, they were able to agree and Section 230 disappeared tomorrow, websites would be left with two choices. They can moderate at an incredibly high rate to attempt to avoid liability, thus angering Republicans. Or, they can choose to not moderate at all, leaving any conspiracy theory, offensive speech or disinformation up, which would certainly anger Democrats.

Any other proposal that attempts to cut the baby in half will similarly fail to leave both sides happy, and we will be stuck right back where we started. Giving in to these political demands is a mistake. The Congressional approval rating remains dramatically low, while technology companies are more popular than ever in wake of COVID-19. The general public does not care about this issue, and reforms will not fix the problems of those that have a bone to pick with certain tech companies. Any changes to Section 230 will not only fail to get Congress off their back, but they also threaten the very internet ecosystem that has made them rich and enriched the lives of people across the globe.

Congress should leave Section 230 alone, and tech companies should be prepared to fight back against the disinformation spouted about the law.

The law is working exactly as intended.

Eric Peterson lives in New Orleans where is he the Director of the Pelican Center of Technology and Innovation

Filed Under: content moderation, politics, section 230

Free Market Advocate Switches Sides, Calls For Direct Government Interference In Online Moderation Decisions

from the hypocrisy,-thy-name-is-one-easily-confused-with-a-basketball-icon dept

There's something in the air. Call it TDS. Trump Derangement Syndrome. To acolytes of Trump, this means everyone opposed to Trump will find some reason to blame anything on him. But the derangement affects the acolytes more than it affects his opponents.

Former free speech warriors have started calling for government interference in private companies' handling of third-party speech. Lawyers that used to defend even seemingly indefensible people from bogus defamation lawsuits are now filing bogus defamation lawsuits of their own. Far too many Trump fans are convinced the First Amendment should override moderation decisions by social media companies. Some of these Trump fans are actually in the legislative business, which means they have the power to harm -- perhaps permanently -- the First Amendment and the immunity given to social media companies that extends to moderation decisions.

It's hypocrisy. It's blatant. And it just keeps spreading. Recently, Newsweek allowed Will Chamberlain to publish an op-ed in support of direct government interference in private companies' moderation efforts. That name might not ring a bell, so let's take a look at Will Chamberlain.

Chamberlain now works for the "Internet Accountability Project." It describes itself this way:

Our Mission is to lend a conservative voice to the calls for federal and state governments to rein in Big Tech before it's too late.

The site contains a page called "Google is Evil." It hosts a video with the same title and links to articles about supposed Big Tech "bias" that deals with companies other than Google.

Chamberlain's bio says he formerly worked as an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The CEI presents itself as a "libertarian think tank." Here's how the CEI describes itself (emphasis added):

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. CEI's mission is to promote both freedom and fairness by making good policy good politics. We make the uncompromising case for economic freedom because we believe it is essential for entrepreneurship, innovation, and prosperity to flourish.

So, what does Chamberlain really stand for? Is it this?

advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty

Or is it this?

calls for federal and state governments to rein in Big Tech

Apparently, it's whatever Chamberlain wants it to be, depending on who he's working for and who he supports politically.

Given his cognitive dissonance, it's unsurprising his op-ed is a hot mess full of bogus assertions and incoherent arguments.

First, Chamberlain claims Twitter's blocking of the New York Post's story on supposedly damning Hunter Biden emails is the platform "running interference for the Biden-Harris ticket." That's a stretch. There appears to be very little limiting Trump and his supporters from campaigning for Trump. That they've been forbidden from propping up some unvetted claims from [checks notes] a computer repair service owner isn't really doing much to prevent pro-Trump electioneering. It was a bad decision, but it's not the conspiracy Chamberlain feels it is.

Chamberlain then moves on to deliver a wholly disingenuous reading of Section 230 immunity.

Section 230 "works" only to the extent that it gives tech platforms carte blanche to run their platforms unconstrained by tort law. In the early days of the internet, that was defensible, to create space for innovation, experimentation—and even protection. But social media is now a mature market, and Section 230's liability shield now does more to foster censorship than anything else. The shield also acts as a sword—giving tech giants the power to censor certain speakers using arbitrarily applied and unexplained community standards.

Chamberlain acts as though the "late days" of the internet no longer require this immunity. But that's only if you limit your view to the largest platforms that could survive the removal of this immunity. Smaller startups and competitors would likely be forced to shut down as they'd be unable to absorb the legal costs of defending themselves from the flurry of vexatious litigation that would follow the removal of this immunity. If Chamberlain wants the biggest platforms to consolidate their power, he should definitely work towards repealing these protections.

He moves on to completely misrepresent the arguments of Section 230 defenders.

Critics of Section 230 reform often focus on defending the publisher-versus-platform distinction, arguing for the importance of not treating social media platforms as the "publisher or speaker" of the content posted on their platforms.

Bullshit. Only critics of Section 230 focus on this nonexistent distinction. The law contains nothing about a "publisher-versus-platform" distinction, much less any wording that suggests immunity relies on neutral presentation of third-party content. Chamberlain is wrong about Section 230 and should have been directed to this Mike Masnick post before crafting this misleading and stupid op-ed.

Chamberlain pretends the administration can do better. He touts Bill Barr's recommendations that platforms should be more limited in their moderation efforts, removing only what is "objectively" objectionable content. We can all agree platforms should be more transparent about their moderation efforts, but allowing the government to define (most likely through expensive litigation smaller competitors can't afford) what is "objectionable" enough to be removed would allow presidential administrations to control the narrative via social media outlets.

Then there's the overuse of an incorrect term by Chamberlain -- a use designed to dupe people into believing private companies are violating the Constitution by moderating content.

Section 230 was not designed to provide blanket immunity for companies that use their power to censor political speech.

Private companies are incapable of censorship, at least in terms of the Constitution. No private company is obligated to allow individuals to say whatever they want whenever they want -- no more than private individuals are required to allow people to stand inside their house and say things the homeowners find objectionable.

And I can't even to begin to explain what this batch of word salad is supposed to mean:

Our society has recognized that the right of Americans to participate in society comes before the free association rights of common carriers. That principle undergirds our civil rights laws and our common carrier laws, and should be the basis of our laws regulating censorship on large social media platforms. Society is freer when Americans can speak freely without the Sword of Damocles (meaning a potential Twitter ban) hanging over their heads.

Society says participants have a right to society… or something. I think Chamberlain is trying to say the rights of individuals trumps the rights of corporations. Even if he's correct (which he isn't), he further clouds the issue by dropping in stuff about "common carrier laws," which has nothing to do with moderation efforts and everything to do with, say, phone companies being obligated to hook you up with a landline, if that's your kink. Society is still as free as ever and if certain trolls and dipshits don't like swords hanging over their head, they probably should stop doing stuff that summons the sword-bearer.

This shitshow closes with some more Chamberlain hypocrisy. This guy once advocated (as, you know, an actual legal advocate) for "advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty." Now, with his boy in the White House and his "I'm being censored" fever dreams, he's pounding out ridiculous sentences like this:

Big Tech's unprecedented level of control in modern life allows social media oligarchs to reign over the digital marketplace, filtering the flow of online information and censoring viewpoints—and even news—that disrupt their preferred narrative. Such unfettered discretion in a private group of companies is contrary to the values held by a civil society.

Chamberlain was for "unfettered discretion" before he was against it. Say what you will about a leftist rag like Techdirt and its contributors, but at least we've always been for Section 230 immunity and against government interference in First Amendment activities. That hasn't changed no matter who's occupying the Oval Office. I hope people like Chamberlain remember how much they wanted to strip these protections away when there's someone whose views they disagree with running the nation.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, free market, government interference, intermediary liability, section 230, will chamberlain
Companies: iap, internet accountability project

Transparency Is Important; Mandated Transparency Is Dangerous And Will Stifle Innovation And Competition

from the a-distinction dept

While much of yesterday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing was focused on the pointless grievances and grandstanding of sitting Senators, there was a bit of actual news made by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. As we discussed earlier this week, Zuckerberg agreed for the first time that he was in support of Section 230 reform, though he declined in his opening remarks to specify the nature of the reforms he supported. And while the original draft of Jack Dorsey's opening testimony suggested full support of 230, in the given remarks he also suggested that Twitter would support changes to Section 230 focused on getting companies to be more transparent. Later in the hearing, during one of the extraordinarily rare moments when a Senator actually asked the CEOs how they would change 230, Zuckerberg also focused on transparency reports, before immediately noting that Facebook already issued transparency reports.

In other words, it appears that the "compromise" the internet companies are looking to throw to a greedy Congress regarding Section 230 reform is "transparency." I've heard from a variety of policymakers over the last few months who also seem focused on this transparency issue as a "narrow" way to reform 230 without mucking up everything else, so it seems like mandating content moderation transparency may become "a thing."

Mandating transparency, however, would be a dangerous move that would stifle both innovation and competition.

Cathy Gellis has covered this in detail in the past, and I addressed it in my comments to the FCC about Section 230. But it seems like we should be a little clearer:

Transparency is important. Mandated transparency is dangerous.

We've been celebrating lots of internet companies and their transparency reports going back to Google's decision nearly a decade ago to start releasing such reports. Over time, every large internet company (and many medium ones) has joined the bandwagon. Indeed, after significant public pressure, even the notoriously secretive giant telcos started issuing transparency reports as well (though they often did so in a secretive manner that actually hid important details).

So, at the very least, it certainly looks like public pressure, good business practices, and pressure from peers in the industry have already pushed the companies into releasing such reports. On top of that, many of the internet companies seem to try to outdo each other in being more transparent than their peers on these reports -- which again is a good thing. The transparency reports are coming and we should celebrate that.

At the very least, though, this suggests that Congress doesn't need to mandate this, as it's already happening.

But, you might say, then why should we worry about mandates for transparency reports? Many, many reasons. First off, while transparency reports are valuable, in some cases, we've seen governments and government officials using them as tools to celebrate censorship. Governments are not using them to better understand the challenges of content moderation, but rather as tools to see where more censorship should be targeted. That's a problem.

Furthermore, creating a "baseline" for transparency reports creates two very large issues that could damage competition and innovation. First, it creates a clear compliance cost, which can be quite burdensome for new and smaller websites. Facebook, Google and Twitter can devote people to creating transparency reports. Smaller sites cannot. And while you could, in theory, craft a mandate that has some size thresholds, historically that leads to gaming and other tricks.

Perhaps more importantly, though, a mandate with baseline transparency thresholds locks in certain "rules" for content moderation and creates real harm to innovative and different ideas. While most people seem to think of content moderation along the lines of how Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter handle it -- with large (often outsourced) content moderation teams and giant sets of policies -- there are many, many other models out there as well. Reddit is a decently large company. Yet it handles content moderation by pushing it out to volunteer moderators who run each subreddit and get to make their own content moderation rules. Would each subreddit have to release its own report? Would Reddit itself have to track how each individual subreddit is moderated and include all of that in its report?

Or how about Wikipedia? That's one of the largest sites on the internet, and all of its content moderation practices are already incredibly transparent, since every single edit shows in each page's history -- often including a note about the reasoning. And, again, rather than being done by staff, every Wikipedia edit is done by volunteers. But should Wikipedia have to file a "standardized" report as well about how and why each of those moderation decisions were made?

And those are just two examples of large sites with different models. The more you look, the more alternative moderation models you can find -- and many of them would not fit neatly into any "standards" for a transparency report. Instead, what you'd get is a hamfisted setup that more or less forces all different sites into a single (Facebook/YouTube/Twitter) style of content moderation and transparency. And that's very bad for innovation in the space.

Indeed, as someone who is quite hopeful for a future where the content moderation layer is entirely separated from the corporate layer of various social media sites, I worry that mandated transparency rules would make that much, much more difficult to implement. Many of the proposals I've seen to build more distributed/decentralized protocol-based solutions for social media would not (and often could not) be fit into a "standardized" model of content moderation.

And thus, creating rules that mandate such transparency reporting for companies based on the manner in which those three large companies currently release transparency reports would only serve to push others into that same model, creating significant compliance costs for those smaller entities, while greatly limiting their ability to experiment with new and different styles of moderation.

Filed Under: competition, innovation, jack dorsey, mandated transparency, mark zuckerberg, section 230, transparency, transparency report
Companies: facebook, twitter

The Senate Snowflake Grievance Committee Quizzes Tech CEOs On Tweets & Employee Viewpoints

from the this-is-not-how-any-of-this-works dept

On Wednesday morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a nearly four hour long hearing ostensibly about Section 230 with three internet CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Sundar Pichai from Google, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter. The hearing went about as expected: meaning it was mostly ridiculous nonsense. You had multiple Republican Senators demanding that these CEOs explain why they had taken actions on certain content, with some silly "whataboutism" on other kinds of content where action wasn't taken. Then you had multiple Democratic Senators demanding these CEOs explain why they hadn't taken faster action on pretty much the same content that Republicans had complained some action had been taken on.

The shorter summary was that Republicans were demanding that their own lies and propaganda should be left alone, while Democrats demanded that lies and propaganda should be removed faster. Both of these positions are an anathema to the 1st Amendment, and the people advocating for them on both sides should be embarrassed. While each platform has the right, under the 1st Amendment, to host or not host whatever speech they want, based on whatever policies they set, Congress cannot and should not, be in the position of either telling companies what content they need to host or what content they must take down. And yet, we saw examples of both during the hearing. On the Democratic side, Senators Markey and Baldwin, among a few others, pushed the companies to take down more content. This is extremely troubling on 1st Amendment grounds. On the Republican side, many, many Senators demanded that certain content should be unblocked -- in particular the NY Post's Twitter account.

And there were a few (very limited) good points from both sides of the aisle. Senator Brian Schatz noted that the entire hearing was being done in bad faith by Senate Republicans to try to bully the companies into not removing disinformation in the final week of the election. He noted that, while he had many questions for the three CEOs, he would not participate in this "sham" by asking questions during this particular hearing. Kudos to him. On the Republican side, Senator Jerry Moran noted that changes to Section 230 were the kinds of things that the three companies before the Committee could handle, but which would hamstring smaller competitors (to be fair, Jack Dorsey made this point in his opening testimony as well).

But I wanted to focus on some specific grandstanding by a few key Senators who made particularly ridiculous statements. And, I will point out upfront that these all came from Republicans. I'm not pointing that out because I'm "biased" against them, but because of the simple objective fact that it was these Republican Senators who made the most ridiculous statements of the day. The key theme between them was a ridiculous sense of grievance, and a false belief that the company's moderation practices unfairly targeted "conservatives." Except nearly all of them assumed that because more Republicans were moderated, that was proof of bias -- and not the idea that, perhaps, Republicans do more things that violate the policies of these companies. In the same manner that I'm picking on mostly Republican Senators here, that has more to do with their own actions, than any personal "bias."

What was most frightening, however, in the comments from these Senators is how at home they would have been in the days of Joseph McCarthy. Multiple Senators demanded to know about the personal ideological viewpoints of people who worked for these companies. Both Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg correctly pointed out that they do not ask their employees about their political leanings (Pichai stated that they hire from all over, implying that there was a diverse ideological pool within their workforce).

It is stunning and dangerous for Senators to be demanding to know the political leanings of employees at any particular company. Senators Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn all asked questions along these lines. Lee, who historically has been aligned with libertarian viewpoints, completely misrepresented the content moderation policies of these companies and insisted that they disproportionately target conservatives. They do not. If conservatives are violating their policies more than others, then that's on those people violating the policies, and not on the policies themselves. Lee also fell into the ridiculous myth that Google's policies directly targeted conservatives in demonetizing The Federalist. As we've discussed multiple times, that's utter bullshit. We received identical treatment to The Federalist. So did Slate and Buzzfeed. Lee, ridiculously, argued that the companies saying -- accurately -- that they do not target moderation decisions based on ideology perhaps violated laws against "unfair or deceptive trade practices." Basically because Lee falsely believes these companies target conservative speech (because he's so deep in his own filter bubble he doesn't even know it hits others as well), that they're engaging in deceptive practices.

Lee demanded that each company list "left leaning" accounts that had received similar treatment, and the various CEOs promised to get back to him, but this was a nonsense argument.

However the most ridiculous part of Lee's grandstanding was his disingenuous framing of content moderation. He started asking about how these companies "censor" content. In the past, we've discussed how moderation and censorship differ, but Lee stretched the definition to insane levels:

I think the trend is clear, you almost always censor -- meaning.... uh... when I use the word censor here I mean block content, fact check or label content, or demonetize websites.

In what fucking world does Senator Lee live in that fact checking is censorship? This is utter nonsense. Indeed, when Sundar Pichai actually pushed back and said "we don't censor," Lee jumped in obnoxiously to say that "I used the word censor as a term of art there and I defined that word." That's not how it works. You can't redefine a term to mean the literal opposite of what it means "as a term of art" and then demand that everyone agrees that they "censored" when your own definition includes fact checking or responding to a statement with more speech.

Senator Ron Johnson's time was particularly egregious. He read the following tweet into the record.

It's a tweet from a "Mary T. Hagan" saying:

Sen Ron Johnson is my neighbor and strangled our dog, Buttons, right in front of my 4 yr old son and 3 yr old daughter. The police refuse to investigate. This is a complete lie but important to retweet and note that there are more of my lies to come.

Yes, he read that whole thing into the record, and then whined directly to Jack Dorsey that this should not have been left up, and that people might not go to the polls and vote for him if they read it. It's hard to know where to begin on this one. Especially since it came right after Johnson was mad about other moderation choices Twitter had made to takedown content. But the most incredible bit was that the obvious point of this tweet (which seemed to fly right over Johnson's head) is to make fun of Johnson's own willingness over the past few months to push Russian-originated propaganda talking points, and then whine that the media won't do anything about it and that law enforcement won't investigate.

So, a simple question for Johnson to answer would be: if he wants this tweet removed, how about removing his own efforts at pushing unverified propagandistic nonsense about Joe Biden?

But, really, this was par for the course for so much of the hearing. Senators (both Democrats and Republicans) showing a vast misunderstanding of how content moderation works, would call up a single example of a content moderation choice and demand an explanation -- often ignoring the explanations from Dorsey and Zuckerberg who would calmly explain what their policy was, why a certain piece of content did or did not violate that policy -- and then scream louder as if they had found some sort of "gotcha" moment.

But honestly, the most insane moment of the hearing most likely involved Senator Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee. Blackburn has a long history of saying the complete opposite argument depending on which way the wind blows at any particular time. For example, during the net neutrality fight she screamed about how it was an example of government interference with innovation and that if we had net neutrality it would destroy "Facebook, YouTube, Twitter" (literally those three companies). Yet a few years later, she supported a bill to regulate the internet in the form of PIPA, a pro-censorship copyright bill.

Then, four years ago, she insisted that internet services had an obligation to delete "fake news." Yet, in the hearing on Wednesday, she flipped out at the companies for trying to moderate any news at all.

And then she took it one step further, and demanded to know if a Google engineer who made fun of her was still employed at the company.

Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked CEO Sundar Pichai whether Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher, still has a job at Google.

“He has had very unkind things to say about me and I was just wondering if you all had still kept him working there,” Blackburn said during the hearing, where she and other GOP lawmakers accused tech companies of squelching free speech.

Pichai said he did not know Lemoine’s employment status.

Breitbart News reported in 2018 that Lemoine had criticized Blackburn’s legislative record in excerpts of internal company messages and said Google should not “acquiesce to the theatrical demands of a legislator.”

“I’m not big on negotiation with terrorists,” Lemoine said, according to Breitbart.

Having a sitting US Senator specifically call out an employee for criticizing her, and asking to know his employment status is fundamentally terrifying. It is, again, reminiscent of the McCarthy hearings, and having elected officials targeting people for their political viewpoints. If people were serious about calling out "cancel culture," they'd be screaming about how dangerous it is that Blackburn was saying something like this.

The end result of the hearing was a lot more nonsense grandstanding that demonstrated that too many Senators simply do not understand the nature of content moderation, and because they personally disagree with certain policies, or the implementation of certain policies, it means that the companies are somehow doing it wrong. But this is the very nature of content moderation. No single human being will agree with every decision. To immediately leap to the assumption of bad intent (or bad policies) because you disagree with a small sample set of decisions is intellectually lazy and dishonest.

Oh, and Ted Cruz also did some theatrical bullshit, that was mostly performative idiocy, but since he only did it to get a few social media snippets and headlines, we're not going to play that game, and just say simply that Senator Cruz came off like a total disingenuous jackass, who wanted to make the hearing about himself, rather than anything even remotely substantive.

Filed Under: content moderation, ed markey, grandstanding, jack dorsey, mark zuckerberg, marsha blackburn, mike lee, ron johnson, section 230, senate commerce committee, sundar pichai, ted cruz
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Another Section 230 Reform Bill: Dangerous Algorithms Bill Threatens Speech

from the another-problem dept

Representatives Malinowski and Eshoo and have introduced a Section 230 amendment called the “Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act” (PADAA). The title is somewhat of a misnomer. The bill does not address any danger inherent to algorithms but instead seeks to prevent them from being used to share extreme speech.

Section 230 of the Communications Act prevents providers of an interactive computer service, such as social media platforms, from being treated as the publisher or speaker of user-submitted content, while leaving them free to govern their services as they see fit.

The PADAA would modify Section 230 to treat platforms as the speakers of algorithmically selected user speech, in relation to suits brought under 42 U.S.C. 1985 and the Anti-Terrorism Act. If platforms use an “algorithm, model, or computational process to rank, order, promote, recommend, [or] amplify” user provided content, the bill would remove 230’s protection in suits seeking to hold platforms responsible for acts of terrorism or failures to prevent violations of civil rights.

These are not minor exceptions. A press release published by Rep. Malinowski’s office presents the bill as intended to reverse the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit’s ruling in Force v. Facebook, and endorses the recently filed McNeal v. Facebook, which seeks to hold Facebook liable for recent shootings in Kenosha, WI. These suits embrace a sweeping theory of liability that treats platforms’ provision of neutral tools as negligent.

Force v. Facebook concerned Facebook’s algorithmic “Suggested Friends” feature and its prioritization of content based on users’ past likes and interests. Victims of a Hamas terror attack sued Facebook under the Anti-Terrorism Act for allegedly providing material support to Hamas by connecting Hamas sympathizers to one another based on their shared interests and surfacing pro-Hamas content in its Newsfeed.

The 2nd Circuit found that Section 230 protected Facebook’s neutral processing of the likes and interests shared by its users. Plaintiffs appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The 2nd Circuit’s held that, although:

plaintiffs argue, in effect, that Facebook’s use of algorithms is outside the scope of publishing because the algorithms automate Facebook’s editorial decision‐making.

Facebook is nevertheless protected by Section 230 because its content-neutral processing of user information doesn’t render it the developer or author of user submissions.

The algorithms take the information provided by Facebook users and “match” it to other users—again, materially unaltered—based on objective factors applicable to any content, whether it concerns soccer, Picasso, or plumbers.

The court concludes by noting the radical break from precedent that that plaintiffs’ claims demand. The PADAA would establish this sweeping shift as law.

Plaintiffs “matchmaking” argument would also deny immunity for the editorial decisions regarding third‐party content that interactive computer services have made since the early days of the Internet. The services have always decided, for example, where on their sites (or other digital property) particular third‐party content should reside and to whom it should be shown

Explicitly opening platforms to lawsuits for algorithmically curated content would compel them to remove potentially extreme speech from algorithmically curated feeds. Algorithmic feeds are given center stage on most contemporary platforms – Twitter’s Home timeline, the Facebook Newsfeed, and TikTok’s “For You” page are all algorithmically curated. If social media platforms are exposed to liability for harms stemming from activity potentially inspired by speech in these prominent spaces, they will cleanse them of potentially extreme, though First Amendment protected, speech. This amounts to legislative censorship by fiat.

Exposing platforms to a general liability for speech implicated in terrorism and civil rights deprivation claims is more insidiously restrictive than specifically prohibiting certain content. In the face of a nebulous liability, contingent on the future actions of readers and listeners, platforms will tend to restrict speech on the margins.

The aspects of the bill specifically intended to address Force v. Facebook’s “Suggested Friends” claims, the imposition of liability for automated procedures that “recommend” any “group, account, or affiliation,” will be even more difficult to implement without inhibiting speech and political organizing in an opaque, idiosyncratic, and ultimately content-based manner.

After I attended a Second Amendment Rally in Richmond early this year, Facebook suggested follow-up rallies, local town hall meetings, and militia musters. However, in order to avoid liability under the PADAA, Facebook wouldn’t have to simply refrain from serving me militia events. Instead, it would have to determine if the Second Amendment rally itself was likely to foster radicalism. In light of their newfound liability for users’ subsequent actions, would it be wise to connect participants or suggest similar events? Would all political rallies receive the same level of scrutiny? Some conservatives claim Facebook “incites violent war on ICE” by hosting event pages for anti-ICE protests. Should Facebook be held liable for Willem van Spronsen’s firebombing of ICE vehicles? Rep. Malinowski’s bill would require private firms to far reaching determinations about diverse political movements under a legal Sword of Damocles.

Spurring platforms to exclude organizations and interests tangentially linked to political violence or terrorism from their recommendation algorithm would have grave consequences for legitimate speech and organization. Extremists have found community and inspiration in everything from pro-life groups to collegiate Islamic societies. Budding eco-terrorists might be connected by shared interests in hiking, veganism, and conservation. Should Facebook avoid introducing people with such shared interests to one another?

The bill also fails to address real centers of radicalization. As I noted in my recent testimony to the House Commerce Committee, most radicalization occurs in small, private forums, such as private Discord and Telegram channels, or the White Nationalist bulletin board Iron March. The risk of radicalization – like rumor, disinformation, or emotional abuse, is inherent to private conversation. We accept these risks because the alternative – an omnipresent corrective authority – would foreclose the sense of privileged access necessary to the development of a self. However, this bill does not address private spaces. It only imposes liability on algorithmic content provision and matching, and wouldn’t apply to sites with fewer than 50 million monthly users. Imageboards such as 4 or 8chan are too small to be covered, and users join private Discord groups via invite links, not algorithmic suggestion.

The Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act attempts to prevent extremism by imposing liability on social media firms for algorithmically curated speech or social connections later implicated in extremist violence. Expecting platforms to predictively police algorithmically selected speech a la Minority Report is fantastic. In practice, this liability will compel platforms to set broad, stringent rules for speech in algorithmically arranged forums. Legislation that would push radical, popularly disfavored, or simply illegible speech out the public eye via private proxies raises unavoidable First Amendment concerns.

Filed Under: algorithms, anna eshoo, bias, cda 230, padaa, rankings, section 230, tom malinowski

Zuckerberg And Facebook Throw The Open Internet Under The Bus; Support Section 230 Reform

from the because-of-course dept

This shouldn't be much of a surprise, unfortunately, but it appears that once again Facebook is the first to crack under political pressure, and has decided to sell out the open internet and free speech online. In testimony Mark Zuckerberg is planning to give tomorrow to the Senate Commerce Committee, he's going to say a few nice things about Section 230, immediately followed by him saying the company now supports reforming the law. The praise for Section 230 is accurate, but it doesn't much matter when he takes it back immediately:

However, the debate about Section 230 shows that people of all political persuasions are unhappy with the status quo. People want to know that companies are taking responsibility for combatting harmful content—especially illegal activity—on their platforms. They want to know that when platforms remove content, they are doing so fairly and transparently. And they want to make sure that platforms are held accountable.

This ignores that people are unhappy for contradictory reasons. Some are unhappy because sites are taking down propaganda and disinformation. Others are upset that they're not taking down propaganda and disinformation (or not taking it down fast enough). NOTHING will satisfy everyone. Pretending that there's some magical reform that will work is crazy talk.

But here's the real problem. Whatever nuance there is to be discussed here, whatever recognition of the problems this will cause, the following paragraph will be seen as declaring open season on Section 230 because "even Facebook supports changing the law."

Section 230 made it possible for every major internet service to be built and ensured important values like free expression and openness were part of how platforms operate. Changing it is a significant decision. However, I believe Congress should update the law to make sure it’s working as intended. We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals, and I look forward to a meaningful dialogue about how we might update the law to deal with the problems we face today.

This is nonsense. It is working as intended. It's allowing companies to make their own decisions, and to experiment with different moderation regimes. That many people are unhappy with those choices is the very nature of content moderation. It's not like Congress is going to step in and create rules that work any better. It will only create rules that work worse.

At Facebook, we don’t think tech companies should be making so many decisions about these important issues alone. I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators, which is why in March last year I called for regulation on harmful content, privacy, elections, and data portability. We stand ready to work with Congress on what regulation could look like in these areas. By updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what’s best about it—the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things—while also protecting society from broader harms. I would encourage this Committee and other stakeholders to make sure that any changes do not have unintended consequences that stifle expression or impede innovation.

And, yes, he's repeating what he's said before, knowing full fucking well that any regulations that Congress puts in place will simply serve to lock in Facebook's position. Facebook can handle the compliance costs. The upstart companies that might disrupt Facebook will have a much harder time.

Make no mistake about it: this is Mark Zuckerberg pulling up the innovation ladder he climbed behind him.

This probably isn't a huge surprise. Facebook's vocal support for FOSTA -- the law that amended Section 230 and put lives at risk -- was only a first step. I was told, point blank, by a Facebook lobbyist that the company needed to support that "minor" change to Section 230 or Congress would have passed something even worse. And here we are, with Congress seeing Facebook's initial caving not as a way to be satiated, but rather as the go-ahead to continue dismantling the framework of an open internet.

And, once again, here's Facebook, happily willing to go along with it.

Facebook is throwing the open internet under the bus -- in part gleefully, as so-called "critics" of Facebook stupidly demanded "reforms to Section 230" incorrectly believing that 230 was a "special subsidy" for Facebook. Facebook doesn't need it any more, but all of the people who called for such reforms are now going to help cement Facebook's position of dominance.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be the focus of tomorrow's hearing, with Senators taking this as permission to destroy the open internet. It is likely that they will ignore fellow panelist Jack Dorsey giving the opposing message that Section 230 is necessary to enable new competitors and free speech on an open internet:

As we consider developing new legislative frameworks, or committing to self-regulation models for content moderation, we should remember that Section 230 has enabled new companies—small ones seeded with an idea—to build and compete with established companies globally. Eroding the foundation of Section 230 could collapse how we communicate on the Internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies.

We should also be mindful that undermining Section 230 will result in far more removal of online speech and impose severe limitations on our collective ability to address harmful content and protect people online. I do not think anyone in this room or the American people want less free speech or more abuse and harassment online. Instead, what I hear from people is that they want to be able to trust the services they are using.

That's the right message and an accurate one. And it will be stomped on by the message from Zuckerberg agreeing to throw the open internet under a speeding bus.

Filed Under: free speech, jack dorsey, mark zuckerberg, open internet, section 230
Companies: facebook, twitter