As Prudes Drive Social Media Takedowns, Museums Embrace... OnlyFans?

from the didn't-see-that-one-coming dept

Over the last few years, we've seen more and more focus on using content moderation efforts to stamp out anything even remotely upsetting to certain loud interest groups. In particular, we've seen NCOSE, formerly "Morality in Media," spending the past few years whipping up a frenzy about "pornography" online. They were one of the key campaigners for FOSTA, which they flat out admitted was step one in their plan to ban all pornography online. Recently, we've discussed how MasterCard had put in place ridiculous new rules that were making life difficult for tons of websites. Some of the websites noted that Mastercard told them it was taking direction from... NCOSE. Perhaps not surprisingly, just recently, NCOSE gave MasterCard its "Corporate Leadership Award" and praised the company for cracking down on pornography (which NCOSE considers the same as sex trafficking or child sexual abuse).

Of course, all of this has some real world impact. We've talked about how eBay, pressured to remove such content because of FOSTA and its payment processors, has been erasing LGBTQ history (something, it seems, NCOSE is happy about). And, of course, just recently, OnlyFans came close to prohibiting all sexually explicit material following threats from its financial partners -- only to eventually work out a deal to make sure it could continue hosting adult content.

But all of this online prudishness has other consequences. Scott Nover, over at Quartz, has an amazing story about how museums in Vienna are finding that images of classic paintings are being removed from all over the internet. Though, they've come up with a somewhat creative (and surprising) solution: the museums are setting up OnlyFans accounts, since the company is one of the remaining few which is able to post nude images without running afoul of content moderation rules. Incredibly, the effort is being run by Vienna's Tourist Board.

The Vienna Tourist Board said its museums have faced a litany of online challenges. After the Natural History Museum Vienna posted images of the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old Paleolithic limestone figurine, Facebook deleted the images and called them pornographic. The Albertina Museum had its TikTok account suspended in July for showing nudes from the Japanese artist and photographer ​​Nobuyoshi Araki, CNN reported. And the Leopold Museum, which houses modern Austrian art, has struggled to advertise on social media because of the bans on nudity.

Even advertising the new OnlyFans account on other social media proved difficult, the board said. Twitter rejected links to the board’s website because it linked out to the OnlyFans account. (Twitter allows nudity on its platform as long as the account and images are labeled as such.) Facebook and Instagram only allowed ads featuring the Venus of Willendorf and a nude painting by Amedeo Modigliani after the tourist board explained the context to the platforms, but other images by artists Egon Schiele and Peter Paul Rubens were rejected.

This is all kind of ridiculous, but certainly falls into the Masnick's Impossibility Theorem collection of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. Of course, it also recalls the case in France where Facebook took down an classic 1866 oil painting by Gustave Courbet, in which the court initially ruled that Facebook could not take down the image. Facebook has (for many years now) had exceptions to its nudity rule for "art," but figuring out how to enforce that kind of thing is notoriously difficult.

And when you have prudish, moralizing busybodies like NCOSE pressuring companies to wipe out any and all nudity, it's no surprise that this kind of thing is the result. But, really, all of this seems likely to backfire in the end. Cordoning off even artistic nudity into sites like OnlyFans... also means that more and more people may be introduced to OnlyFans "for the paintings," only to discover what else is available there.

Filed Under: content moderation, museums, nudity, paintings, pornography, prudes, social media, vienna, vienna tourist bouard
Companies: onlyfans

Trump's Broken Social Media Venture Is Valued At Billions Of Dollars And Its Breaking Experts' Brains

from the the-nftification-of-stocks dept

Last week we wrote a bit about Trump's new planned social media website, Truth Social (which forbids too many capital letters, so I will oblige by not capitalizing the entire "Truth" part of the name, as Trump's branding apparently prefers). We mostly focused on the ridiculous terms of service (forbidding capital letters among other things), and the fact that it was already kicking people off the system (who only got on the system because Trump's coders apparently failed to properly secure the site pre-launch). We also talked briefly about how it appeared to be a reskin of Mastodon, and that's potentially an interesting legal issue, because it certainly appears to be violating the AGPLv3 license for Mastodon.

But, perhaps a more interesting story right now... is how the grift behind all of this is combining the whole Gamestonk craze and the NFT craze... and the SPAC craze to make absolutely no sense at all.

We had mentioned in passing in the original post that Trump's new company -- Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) -- was formed via a reverse merger using a SPAC. Such deals have become a popular sort of backdoor way to take a private company public, though, they're usually combined with some additional private investment (known as a PIPE -- a Private Investment in Public Equity) in order to afford the "takeover" of the private company that is becoming public. SPACs aren't new -- hell we wrote about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak creating a SPAC back in 2006. But in the last few years, they've been all the rage.

But, Trump's SPAC deal is raising some eyebrows -- or frying some brains. My favorite analysis is the one done by the always excellent Matt Levine at Bloomberg where you can basically hear him tearing his hair out at the absurdity of it all and gradually watch as he comes to terms with the fact that nothing at all matters and it's all nonsense. As Levine notes, the real grift here is that it doesn't matter one bit if Trump has a good business plan for Truth Social or TMTG, because he's going to walk away with tons of cash just from the stock deal.

The point is that if you launch a company with the goal of making it profitable, you have to, like, have a workable business plan and execute on it and deal with a million different operational complexities. If you launch a company with the goal of selling a lot of stock, you have to get people to trust you and give you their money. There is some overlap between those things! But they are different things!

As Levine explains, this whole thing, is kinda like an NFT of Trump. It's a way for Trump fans to throw money at Trump to be part of the Trump brand.

But I think that a more realistic valuation method here is not to worry about cash flows at all — as Trump SPAC clearly does not — and treat the stock simply as a token of public interest in Donald Trump. My guess is that the price of Trump SPAC stock will not, for instance, be much affected by its earnings announcements, unless Trump himself does the earnings calls in which case it will go up no matter what he says. My guess is that the stock will not be particularly correlated with the stocks of other media or technology companies. My guess is that the stock will go up when Trump is on television, or if he announces that he’s running for president again. My guess is that if something bad happens to Trump — if he’s sued or arrested or banned by a new tech company or some new scandal comes out — then that will also make the stock go up, to own the libs or whatever. My guess is that each day that goes by without Trump news, the stock will go down a bit. My guess is that the stock is essentially a bet on Trump’s personal newsiness, on Trump-news volatility.

To be clear I have absolutely no corporate finance basis for these guesses; I don’t think that, like, getting sued for attacking protesters will be good for Trump Thing’s ad revenue or whatever. I don’t have some story of “public interest in Trump increases the expected value of Trump Thing's cash flows so the stock will go up.” I just think that the stock price will have nothing to do with the ad revenue; it will be based entirely on how much attention Trump’s fans are paying to Trump.

And, of course, since Levine wrote that, we've already seen more evidence that this was true. Indeed, as Levine mentioned in his piece, it wouldn't necessarily just be Trumpists buying into DWAC, the stock for the new TMTG, it would also be those assuming that Trumpists would drive the stock up. It didn't take long for WallStreetBets, the Reddit community responsible for the original GameStonks situation to go all in on the stock.

Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch sums it all up best:

None of this makes sense. Even by the standards of 2021 and the SPAC era, this is all very stupid.

Even Matt Levine seems to be about ready to give everything up:

Doesn’t it feel like there has been a paradigm shift, a regime change? Doesn’t it feel like for the last 80 or so years there has been a dominant view of investing, a first-page-of-the-textbook given, that investments are worth the present value of their expected future cash flows? Doesn’t it feel like that world has ended and a new one has begun? I should go buy some Dogecoin.

It is a silly feeding frenzy, and someone will get left holding the bag. It's unlikely to be Donald Trump, of course. It doesn't appear he's put any of his own money behind any of this. No one really believes that Truth Social or TMTG is a "unicorn" worth billions of dollars. But there's a lot of people chasing the greater fool right now, and it's kind of amusing to watch from the sidelines -- though it won't be surprising when the whole thing comes crashing down.

Filed Under: donald trump, fundamentals, grift, nfts, reverse merger, social media, spac, stock
Companies: dwac, tmtg, truth social

Suing Social Media Sites Over Acts Of Terrorism Continues To Be A Losing Bet, As 11th Circuit Dumps Another Flawed Lawsuit

from the this-isn't-making-anything-any-better dept

People suing Twitter and Facebook for acts of violence committed by terrorists have yet to talk a court into agreeing with their arguments. Utilizing federal anti-terrorism laws as a way to circumvent discussion of First Amendment and Section 230 issues has worked to a certain extent. It may not have handed any wins to plaintiffs, but it has prevented precedent that would work against these clients (and their law firms -- both of them) when attempting to define "insanity" through repeated failure.

Via Eric Goldman comes another loss in court for plaintiffs attempting to sue social media companies over an act of terrorism, in this case the mass shooting in an Orlando, Florida nightclub that appears to have no ties to any organized terrorist group.

Despite being given multiple attempts to convert the complaint into something actionable, the plaintiffs failed to do so. This is largely because social media companies aren't even indirectly responsible for acts of terrorism. More specifically in this case, the Pulse Nightclub shooting wasn't even, legally speaking, an act of international terrorism. That means there's no cause of action under the plaintiffs' legal vehicle of choice, the Anti-Terrorism Act.

From the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision [PDF]:

We are deeply saddened by the deaths and injuries caused by Mr. Mateen’s rampage, but we agree with the district court that the plaintiffs failed to make out a plausible claim that the Pulse massacre was an act of “international terrorism” as that term is defined in the ATA [Anti-Terrorism Act]. And without such an act of “international terrorism,” the social media companies—no matter what we may think of their alleged conduct—cannot be liable for aiding and abetting under the ATA.

The shooter was an American citizen. He "self-radicalized" with the alleged assistance of social media platforms. He pledged allegiance to ISIS while barricading himself with hostages following the shooting. ISIS arrived shortly thereafter to claim it supported the shooting and the shooter. But there's nothing "international" about this. And the Appeals Court isn't willing to read the ATA as expansively as the plaintiffs choose to.

The Pulse shooting… did not transcend national boundaries in terms of the persons it was “intended to intimidate or coerce.” The plausible inference from the plaintiffs’ allegations is that a mass shooting on United States soil is meant to terrorize American citizens and residents. To come to the contrary conclusion we would have to say (or infer) that any act of domestic terrorism, anywhere in the world, is meant to intimidate or coerce all of humankind. And if that were the case, we doubt that Congress would have included this limiting language in the ATA.

Because these claims fail to carry the lawsuit, the court takes no note of the Section 230 and First Amendment implications. That's a bit unfortunate because dismissing lawsuits under ATA and state law claims hasn't stopped these law firms and lawyers from filing multiple, nearly identical lawsuits attempting to hold social media companies directly responsible for violent acts committed by their users.

At some point, these issues may be addressed at the federal court level. But today is not that day. And if people still believe this is indicative of Section 230's faults, they should apprise themselves of the unavoidable fact that Section 230 does not immunize social media companies from allegations of federal law violations. Yes, it's almost impossible to sue terrorists for violent acts, but suing social media platforms won't actually result in justice, either.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, blame, liability, section 230, social media, terrorism

Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)

from the because-of-course dept

Last night, Donald Trump sent out a press release announcing (effectively) the launch of his new social network, "Truth Social." The press release shows that it's a bit more complicated than that. Trump is launching "Trump Media & Technology Group" which is entering into a reverse merger agreement to become listed as a public company in order to launch this new service. Apparently, Truth Social will let in "invited guests" next month, followed by a full launch in early 2022. The press release has the expected bombastically ridiculous quote from the former President.

"I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon. TMTG was founded with a mission to give a voice to all. I'm excited to soon beginning sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech. Everyone asks me why doesn't someone stand up to Big Tech? Well, we will soon!"

I mean, first off, it's an interesting world in which you can both claim to be silenced, but also (a) put out a press release read by millions and (b) launch your own damn social network. Doesn't seem that "silent" to me, but what do I know?

Anyway, given that Trump claims that the mission here is "to give voice to all," I was pretty interested in Truth Social's terms of service which (unsurprisingly), make it clear they can kick you off for any reason they want at all. Specifically, it says:

We reserve the right, but not the obligation, to:

(1) monitor the Site for violations of these Terms of Service;

(2) take appropriate legal action against anyone who, in our sole discretion, violates the law or these Terms of Service, including without limitation, reporting such user to law enforcement authorities;

(3) in our sole discretion and without limitation, refuse, restrict access to, limit the availability of, or disable (to the extent technologically feasible) your access or any of your contributions or any portion thereof; or

(4) otherwise manage the Site in a manner designed to protect our rights and property and to facilitate the proper functioning of the Site.

In other words, like every other website out there, Truth Social will moderate content.

Also, there's this:

If we terminate or suspend your account for any reason, you are prohibited from registering and creating a new account under your name, a fake or borrowed name, your email address or the name of any third party, even if you may be acting on behalf of the third party.

In addition to terminating or suspending your account, we reserve the right to take appropriate legal action, including without limitation pursuing civil, criminal, and injunctive redress.

So, it sure sounds like Truth Social, giving voice to all, is pretty damn sure it's going to have to kick people off its site (and maybe even sue them!). And why might they kick you off? Well, there's a very long list of "Prohibited Activities." I'll highlight some of them...

use the Site to advertise or offer to sell goods and services.

How much do you want to bet that Trump himself will violate this?

engage in unauthorized framing of or linking to the Site.

If you LINK TO THE SITE in an "unauthorized" way, they can remove your account.

trick, defraud, or mislead us and other users, especially in any attempt to learn sensitive account information such as user passwords;

MISLEADING OTHER USERS is grounds for having your account banished. So much freedom.

use any information obtained from the Site in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person.

This kind of thing is standard on all social media sites -- but which is notable because it's what many Trumpists get kicked off other platforms for. And yet, here it is.

use the Site as part of any effort to compete with us or otherwise use the Site and/or the Content for any revenue-generating endeavor or commercial enterprise.

Any effort to use the site to make money and they'll shut you down. That's... weird.

harass, annoy, intimidate, or threaten any of our employees or agents engaged in providing any portion of the Site to you.

If you annoy Trump or any of his employees, no more Truth for you!

upload or transmit (or attempt to upload or to transmit) viruses, Trojan horses, or other material, including excessive use of capital letters and spamming (continuous posting of repetitive text), that interferes with any party’s uninterrupted use and enjoyment of the Site or modifies, impairs, disrupts, alters, or interferes with the use, features, functions, operation, or maintenance of the Site.

One of those is not like the others. Excessive use of capital letters? I mean, that's not banned on any other social media platform I know of. Seems a lot less "freedomy" than we were led to believe. Also... excessive use of capital letters? Can I think of a famous social media user who regularly made use of that... hmm... who could that be...?

Also, there's an indemnity clause (a pretty broad one actually), so that if they get sued for something, you may be on the hook for the legal bills:

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless, including our subsidiaries, affiliates, and all of our respective officers, agents, partners, and employees, from and against any loss, damage, liability, claim, or demand, including reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses, made by any third party due to or arising out of: (1) use of the Site; (2) breach of these Terms of Service; (3) any breach of your representations and warranties set forth in these Terms of Service; (4) your violation of the rights of a third party, including but not limited to intellectual property rights; or (5) any overt harmful act toward any other user of the Site with whom you connected via the Site.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, we reserve the right, at your expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter for which you are required to indemnify us, and you agree to cooperate, at your expense, with our defense of such claims. We will use reasonable efforts to notify you of any such claim, action, or proceeding which is subject to this indemnification upon becoming aware of it.

So, when I first wrote this article I had a paragraph noting that once it actually launched I expected that Truth Social would speedrun the content moderation learning curve just like every MAGA-wannabe social network before it. But... of course, it's even faster than that. You see, despite saying it wasn't open, a bunch of fairly enterprising people figured out how to access the site and sign up for accounts via an unadvertised link. So someone set up a Donald J. Trump account. And posted quite an image.

Someone else created their own Donald Trump account:

And a Mike Pence account:

And thus we learned that, indeed, the "freedom loving" Truth Social... is already banning accounts.

Freedom is so fleeting. I mean, it went away even faster than all those other Trumpist social media sites. Oh, and it seems notable that even pre-launch, Trump's "freedom" loving social media site has text ready to go for suspended accounts:

You can no longer use your account, and your profile and other data are no longer accessible. You can still login to request a backup of your data until the data is fully removed, but we will retain some data to prevent you from evading the suspension.

So... it seems that Truth Social has "permanent suspensions" all ready to go. Just like every other social media website, of course. But, at least they don't present themselves as the antithesis of those other social media sites while all doing the same thing.

Either way, this can't be a good week for all those other super thirsty MAGA wannabe social networks. Gab is still out there pretending Trump is posting on its platform (they just repost every one of his press releases on his "verified" account and say they've "reserved" the account for him). Then, of course, there was Parler, who promised not to remove content, but whose former CEO gleefully told reporters that he was suspending "leftist trolls." And, then, of course, there was Gettr, which was taken over and "launched" by former close Trump aide, Jason Miller, and which also speedran the content moderation learning curve. Miller was unable to get his recently former boss to get on his own platform, and now they'll be competitors.

And, hey, competition is a good thing. Let a million social networks bloom. But don't expect one that is actually "taking on Big Tech" or guaranteeing that everyone has a voice. Because that's not Truth Social. It's just more lies.

Oh, and there are even some people suggesting that Truth Social is merely a reskin of Mastodon, as it matches almost exactly. If that's the case, then it's almost certainly violating Mastodon's AGPL license. And, considering that Truth Social's terms of service say that it is forbidden for you to:

copy or adapt the Site’s software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code.

Then it seems that it certainly would violate such an open source license. And, I'm not even going to ask why they're including "Flash" in that list other than to wonder where they copied this list from...

Filed Under: content moderation, donald trump, hacked, mastodon, social media, terms of service
Companies: tmtg, trump media and technology, truth social

New Research Shows Social Media Doesn't Turn People Into Assholes (They Already Were), And Everyone's Wrong About Echo Chambers

from the seems-notable dept

We recently wrote about Joe Bernstein's excellent Harper's cover story, which argues that we're all looking at disinformation/misinformation the wrong way, and that the evidence of disinformation on social media really influencing people is greatly lacking. Instead, as Bernstein notes, this idea is one that many others are heavily invested in spreading, including Facebook (if the disinfo story is true, then you should buy ads on Facebook to influence people in other ways), the traditional media (social media is a competitor), and certain institutions with a history of having authority over "truth" (can't let the riffraff make up their own minds on things).

We've also seen other evidence pop up questioning the supposed malicious impact of social media. Yochai Benkler's work has shown that Fox News has way more of an impact on spreading false information than social media does.

And even with all this evidence regarding disinformation, there are also people who focus on attitude, and insist that social media is responsible for otherwise good people turning awful. Yet, as was covered in an fascinating On the Media interview with Professor Michael Bang Petersen, there really isn't much evidence to support that either! As Petersen explained in a useful Twitter thread, his research has shown that there's no real evidence to support the idea that social media turns people hostile. Instead, it shows that people who are assholes offline are also assholes online.

But in the interview, Petersen makes a really fascinating point regarding echo chambers. I've been skeptical about idea of online echo chambers in the past, but Petersen says that people really have it all backwards -- and that we're actually much more likely to live in echo chambers offline than online, and we're much more likely to come across different viewpoints online.

One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn all of our notions about social media upside down. And here I'm thinking about the notion of 'echo chambers.' So we've been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media creates echo chambers. But, in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one that we live in in our everyday lives.

I'm a university professor. I'm not really exposed to any person who has a radically different world view or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I'm online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with. And that might trigger me if I'm a hostile person and encourage me to reach out to tell these people that I think they are wrong.

But that's because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers. I can see the views of other people -- what they are saying behind my back. That's where a lot of the felt hostility of social media comes from. Not because they make us behave differently, but because they are exposing us to a lot of things that we're not exposed in our everyday lives.

And then this upside down view of echo chambers also explains why people feel like the internet is a more hostile place full of assholes and trolls. It's more that it's because we're now being exposed to these points of view and can respond. As he notes, this kind of hostility actually happens all the time, but it's usually just not witnessed by more than a couple people at a time. Now, online, it's witnessed by a much larger audience, and so we overcorrect and think that it's making people worse.

In our offline lives, there is a lot of hostility as well, but that happens behind closed doors, in private. It happens in bars where we cannot hear what is going on. But we're exposed to all that when we enter the online realm.

Another interesting tidbit in the interview (and in his Twitter thread) is the idea that people who tend to share misinformation often know that it's misinformation, but they don't care because they're just so focused on pissing off the people they don't like (see: "owning the libs") that they don't care. It's more important to anger the "other side" than to share legit info. This was based on a detailed study they did of people on Twitter.

The people who are sharing misinformation are not ignorant. They are used to navigating social media and the internet. They know more about politics than the average person. But where they're really different from the average is they have much more negative feelings towards members of the other party. And that's really what's predicting, not only their sharing of fake news, but also their sharing of real news. They want to derogate people that they don't like, and they are actively searching for information that they can use for that purpose.

So it's not that social media turns people into assholes, nor does it put them into echo chambers where their minds are turned to mush by disinformation. The evidence suggests that some people -- who were already predisposed to such kinds of "us/them" bickering, just jump right into the fray online as a kind of status thing to anger the people they don't like. Because those people can actually hear them now.

Later, he notes that it's not that they're purposefully sharing misinformation -- it's just that whether or not something is true or false is "not part of the calculus." All that matters is basically "will this trigger people I dislike."

And then the interview brings us back around to a similar issue that we noted with Yochai Benkler's research about the problems of Fox News. Petersen notes that his research has shown that Republicans tend to share somewhat more misinformation than Democrats, but it's not because (as some people believe) the relative education levels, but rather that the media ecosystem set up for Republicans (i.e., Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, etc.) is much more designed to feed them the kinds of news that they want to share for this very purpose -- the "own the libs" kind of stories. Though, as he then notes, the fact that these kinds of news sources exist and feed into this is (like the social media panic) more of a symptom, rather than the real problem.

His conclusion?

Misinformation is not, in itself, a big problem. So that's the good news. The bad news is that it's a symptom of a much worse problem. And here we come back to the polarization in society, because that is what's driving the sharing of misinformation. I think we've been focusing a lot on the symptoms -- Fox News, Trump, Facebook -- but I think that there is some evidence that suggests that rising inequality over the last decade has been a fundamental driver of political instability in the US and beyond. It's a problem in many Western Democracies. That's where I would start to look for solutions.

All of this is quite fascinating -- and backed up by his research. And, it does get back to the point that some of us have been making for years. That social media isn't so much "the problem" as it is a mirror that reflects the kinds of societal problems that civilization has been dealing with for centuries. It's just that now it plays out in a way where more people can see it all happen.

Filed Under: echo chambers, michael bang petersen, social media, society, trolls
Companies: facebook

Facebook's Latest Scandals: The Banality Of Hubris; The Messiness Of Humanity

from the it's-not-evil,-it's-not-incompetent dept

Over the last few weeks, the WSJ has run a series of posts generally called "The Facebook Files," which have exposed a variety of internal documents from Facebook that are somewhat embarrassing. I do think some of the reporting is overblown -- and, in rather typical fashion regarding the big news publications and their reporting on Facebook, presents everything in the worst possible light. For example, the report on how internal research showed that Instagram made teen girls feel bad about themselves downplays that the data actually shows a significantly higher percentage of teens indicated that Instagram made them feel better:

But, of course, the WSJ's headline presents it very differently:

None of this is to say that this is okay, or that Facebook shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to minimize people using the sites being made to feel worse about themselves. But the reporting decisions here do raise some questions.

Another one of the articles highlights how Facebook has different rules for different users with regards to content moderation. And, again, on a first pass this sounds really damning:

The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

The report notes that nearly 6 million people are on that list (including, somewhat ironically, some high profile conservatives who have whined about how the site's policies are biased against them). There's simply no way this looks good -- as insiders at Facebook readily admitted in internal documents. But, rather than being particularly nefarious, there are some pretty understandable reasons why this might have come about. As early Facebook content policy guy, Dave Willner, explained on Twitter, such systems are pretty common and "they get proposed spontaneously as a way of controlling the chaos that occurs when moderation affects high-profile or influential accounts."

Another way to think about this is that -- as I've said often -- one of the trickiest parts of content moderation is understanding the wider context of any individual piece of content. This is way more difficult than most people realize. But context actually matters and looking at an individual piece of content outside of the context in which it was created gives you a misleading picture of the intent and impact of that content. And the idea of a sort of "be more careful with these accounts" list is a very inexact, and very messy, but is also a very quick and easy way of adding a contextual layer. It is basically initiated as a tool to say "hey, be careful with these accounts, because making a mistake with them has extra consequences." But, over time, because of human nature, it evolves into "these accounts are protected."

This isn't a defense of the list. As Robyn Caplan and Tarleton Gillespie rightly note in the Washington Post, no matter what the reasons for the list, any sort of setup that is (1) not transparent, and (2) seen to lead to unequal treatment very naturally breeds suspicion and distrust.

In the days since the Facebook Files came out I've been having a few conversations with people about the write-ups and what it all means. There is general agreement that none of this makes Facebook look good. And it shouldn't. There's really nothing in all of this that's good for Facebook. A few of the discussions, though, jumped to the argument that Facebook's executive team is "evil." A lesser version of this is that they're totally incompetent. I don't think either is quite true. Thinking it through, I think Facebook's executive team (1) is in deeper than they realize, and (2) falsely thinks it has a better handle on things than it really does.

This is an issue that is all too common, especially in the internet world, where there's a kind of myth around "visionary" founders. And that's certainly been applied to pretty much every successful internet founder. Indeed, recent research throws some cold water on the idea of brilliant founders leading to big breakthroughs, and suggests more that successful companies are about being in the right place at the right time with minimally competent leaders to keep everything from going off the rails.

This is (quite obviously) from the outside looking in, but my impression of much of Facebook leadership is that they've bought a bit too much into the myth of their own brilliance, and their own ability to work their way through challenges -- at the size and scale of an operation that isn't just providing a service to basically a third of the globe, but which is also seeking to get those people to interact with one another. Nearly all of human history is about our general failures to get along with one another, and many of the problems facing Facebook are also of that very nature.

There is something of an open question about which of these problems are merely revealed or exposed due to Facebook, which are exacerbated by Facebook, and which are actually decreased by Facebook. It seems likely that all three of these forces are at play, and there is no one who has a full grasp on how to deal with the problems that are a part of human nature -- or how to try to minimize humanity's worst impulses across the globe. I don't think Facebook has the answers, but sometimes I fear that some of the leaders at the company think that they do -- or that they can outthink the world in how they approach these problems.

The issues, which become clear in all of this reporting, are not of a company that is nefariously run by evil geniuses toying with people's minds (as some would have you believe). Nor is it incompetent buffoons careening human society into a ditch under a billboard screaming "MOAR ENGAGEMENT! MOAR CLICKS!" It seems pretty clear that they are decently smart, and decently competent people... who have ended up in an impossible situation and don't recognize that they can't solve it all alone.

Over and over again, this recognition seems to explain actions that might otherwise be incomprehensible. So many of the damning reports from the Facebook files could be evidence of evilness or incompetence -- or they could be evidence of a group of executives who are in way too deep, but believe that they really have a handle on things that they not only don't, but simply can't due to the nature of humanity itself.

Facebook and Instagram were never going to cure depression, or keep teen girls from feeling bad about themselves. And, hell, to give the company a tiny bit of credit (don't worry, I'll take it away in a moment), the very fact that they did this research in the first place and realized how shitty some people feel on the site is a step that many, many companies never take. On the flip side, how they actually handled this is a part of the problem. As Will Oremus points out at the Washington Post, the real issue here is in the burying of the findings, not necessarily in the findings themselves.

And, again viewed through the prism of a hubristic "we can fix this, because we're brilliant!" mentality, you can see how that happens. There's a correct realization that this report will look bad -- so it can't be talked about publicly, because Facebook seems to have an inferiority complex about ever looking bad. But the general belief seems to be that if they just keep working on it, and just make the latest change to the UI or the algorithm, maybe, just maybe, they can "show" that they've somehow improved humanity. It's a belief in themselves and their ability that simply isn't realistic. But it does explain how the company handles nearly all of these scandals.

One thing I've grown to appreciate as I've gotten older is how much more complex the world is than it seems at times. More and more often, I've realized how the complex interplay of different variables means that nobody understands anything perfectly. There's always another variable (or several) missing. I'm realizing that I am (increasingly) valuing input from a larger and more diverse set of sounding boards that can point out the giant thing that I'm missing in trying to understand complex topics. But it also makes me that much more skeptical of those who act as though they have figured it all out.

I don't think the Facebook Files show a company that is evil or incompetent. It seems to show a company that is in way too deep, but still thinks it can totally get things back under control.

Filed Under: depression, evil, humanity, incompetence, mark zuckerberg, scandals, social media, social problems
Companies: facebook

Texas' Unconstitutional Social Media Censorship Bill Challenged In Court, Just As Texas Joins The Legal Fight For Florida's Unconstitutional Social Media Bill

from the florida-and-texas;-what-a-pair dept

Texas and Florida. Florida and Texas. Two states with governors who have decided that culture warrioring and "owning the libs" is way more important than the Constitution they swore to protect and uphold. As you'll recall, last month Texas Governor Greg Abbott decided to use the internet services he hates to livestream his signing of the clearly unconstitutional HB20 that seeks to block social media sites from moderating how they see fit.

As we had pointed out, Florida had beaten Texas to the punch on that and a court had already tossed out the bill as an unconstitutional infringement of 1st Amendment rights. Now a state that was looking to actually do things correctly would maybe see that and recognize that maybe it's not worth wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to do the exact same thing, but Texas went ahead.

And, now, the same two organizations that sued to strike down Florida's law, NetChoice and CCIA, have similarly sued to strike down Texas' law.

At bottom, H.B. 20 imposes impermissible content- and viewpoint-based classifications to compel a select few platforms to publish speech and speakers that violate the platforms’ policies—and to present that speech the same way the platforms present other speech that does not violate their policies. Furthermore, H.B. 20 prohibits the platforms from engaging in their own expression to label or comment on the expression they are now compelled to disseminate. And in light of the statute’s vague operating provisions, every single editorial and operational choice platforms make could subject those companies to myriad lawsuits.

These restrictions—by striking at the heart of protected expression and editorial judgment—will prohibit platforms from taking action to protect themselves, their users, advertisers, and the public more generally from harmful and objectionable matter. At a minimum, H.B. 20 would unconstitutionally require platforms like YouTube and Facebook to disseminate, for example, pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, foreign government disinformation, and medical misinformation. In fact, legislators rejected amendments that would explicitly allow platforms to exclude vaccine misinformation, terrorist content, and Holocaust denial.

Additional H.B. 20 provisions will work to chill the exercise of platforms’ First Amendment rights to exercise their own editorial discretion and to be free from state-compelled speech. H.B. 20 will impose operational mandates and disclosure requirements designed to prescriptively manage—and therefore interfere with and chill—platforms’ exercise of editorial discretion. In a series of intrusive provisions, H.B. 20 requires “social media platforms” to publish how they intend to exercise their discretion, document in excruciating detail how they exercise their editorial discretion over potentially billions of pieces of content, and operate inherently burdensome and unworkable individualized complaint mechanisms—all of which together work to compel or otherwise challenge the platforms’ countless daily uses of editorial discretion.

Notably, the lawsuit does not challenge the email filter provisions in the law, which effectively means that on December 2nd, if no one else tries to stop it, spam filters may be in violation of Texas' law. As Prof. Eric Goldman has noted, any spammer whose email is caught in a spam filter will then be able to sue the filter provider and seek statutory damages. Fun stuff!

Meanwhile, also this week, just to show how totally committed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is to unconstitutional restrictions on the free exercise of editorial discretion, he also filed an amicus brief in the appeal of the Florida ruling. A bunch of other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina) all signed on, but this is a Texas product. Also, it's hot garbage. It insists that these bills don't regulate speech -- when they very, very clearly do.

But the district court’s First Amendment analysis is riddled with errors. It veered off course from the outset by concluding that S.B. 7072 regulates speech, when that law instead regulates conduct that is unprotected by the First Amendment: social media platforms’ arbitrary application of their content moderation policies.

I mean, what? Of course, content moderation policies are protected by the 1st Amendment. It's basic editorial discretion.

The entire amicus brief tries to claim that editorial discretion is "conduct" and not speech -- and that would upend basically all 1st Amendment precedent. And if Texas actually got its way with this, then that would enable the government to regulate who could appear on Fox News and other media organizations, claiming that those demands are "conduct, not speech."

Nothing in S.B. 7072’s neutrality and disclosure provisions regulates the speech of Plaintiffs or the members of their trade associations—they “neither limit[] what [Plaintiffs or their members] may say nor require[] them to say anything.” FAIR, 547 U.S. at 60. Instead, at most these provisions regulate the conduct of Plaintiffs and their members: their arbitrary and blunderbuss content-moderation policies

This is... wrong. Requiring them not to moderate certain content (as the Florida bill does for political speech) is absolutely requiring them to associate with speech they may disagree with -- and such compelled association is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Did Ken Paxton actually graduate law school without learning this?

Like Florida did in its case, the Texas Amicus brief relies heavily on Rumsfeld v. FAIR. The district court in Florida rightly pointed out that FAIR does not apply here and is easily distinguished:

The Florida statutes now at issue, unlike the state actions in FAIR and PruneYard, explicitly forbid social media platforms from appending their own statements to posts by some users. And the statutes compel the platforms to change their own speech in other respects, including, for example, by dictating how the platforms may arrange speech on their sites. This is a far greater burden on the platforms’ own speech than was involved in FAIR or PruneYard.

But, Texas insists otherwise -- and now we have to hope that the panel of Judges on the 11th Circuit recognizes the absolute garbage that is Texas' brief.

Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, florida, social media, texas
Companies: ccia, netchoice