Twitter Bans Sci-Hub's Account Because Of 'Counterfeit Goods' Policy, As Indian Copyright Case Heats Up

from the plainly-wrong dept

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about an important copyright case in India, where a group of academic publishers is seeking a dynamic injunction to block access to the "shadow libraries" Sci-Hub and Libgen. The person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, has written to Techdirt with an update on the situation:

Sci-Hub account with 180K subscribers with almost everyone supporting it got BANNED on Twitter due to "counterfeit goods" policy. It existed for 9 years and it was frozen once, but I resolved it by uploading my passport scan. But now it is banned without the possibility to restore it, as Twitter support replied! And it happened right after Indian scientists revolted against Elsevier and other academic publishers, after Sci-Hub posted on Twitter about danger of being blocked - thousands of people spoke up against this on Twitter.

Now Twitter said to all of them, SHUT UP!

Although it's impossible at this stage to say whether Sci-Hub's Twitter account was closed as a direct result of action by Elsevier and other publishers, it is certainly true that the Indian copyright case has blown up into a major battle. The widely respected Indian SpicyIP site has several posts on the important legal and constitutional issues raised by the legal action. One of these concludes:

It can only be hoped that the court factors in the different considerations of a developing nation like India as against the developed nations where the defendant websites have presently been blocked, for it will have a massive impact on the research potential of the country.

While another goes further, and insists: "The ongoing litigation, therefore, must, on constitutional grounds if not copyright-related grounds, be decided in the favour of the defendants." Further support for Sci-Hub and Libgen has come from 19 senior Indian scientists and three organizations, and the Delhi High Court has agreed to allow them to intervene, as pointed out by TorrentFreak. In their application, the scientists wrote:

copyright is not merely a matter of private interests but an issue that deeply concerns public interest especially when it comes to access to learning materials... If the two websites are blocked it will effectively be killing the lifeline of research and learning in higher education in the country.

An organization called the Breakthrough Science Society has created a petition in favor of the defendants. The petition's statement says:

International publishers like Elsevier have created a business model where they treat knowledge created by academic research funded by taxpayers' money as their private property. Those who produce this knowledge -- the authors and reviewers of research papers -- are not paid and yet these publishers make windfall profit of billions of dollars by selling subscriptions to libraries worldwide at exorbitantly inflated rates which most institutional libraries in India, and even developed countries, cannot afford. Without a subscription, a researcher has to pay between $30 and $50 to download each paper, which most individual Indian researchers cannot afford. Instead of facilitating the flow of research information, these companies are throttling it.

Alexandra Elbakyan of Kazakhstan has taken an effective and widely welcomed step by making research papers, book chapters and similar research-related information freely available through her website Sci-Hub. Libgen (Library Genesis) renders a similar service. We support their initiative which, we contend, does not violate any norm of ethics or intellectual property rights as the research papers are actually intellectual products of the authors and the institutions.

As these comments from academics make clear, the stakes are high in the current legal action against Sci-Hub and Libgen. Against that background, shutting down Sci-Hub's Twitter account is ridiculous, since it is purely informational, and served as a valuable forum for discussing important copyright issues, including the Indian court case. Whatever you might think of the company's decision to suspend certain other accounts, this one is plainly wrong.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: academic research, content moderation, india
Companies: sci-hub, twitter

Everything Pundits Are Getting Wrong About This Current Moment In Content Moderation

from the pay-attention dept

Since Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump and began “purging” QAnon conspiracists, a segment of the chattering class has been making all sorts of wild proclamations about this “precedent-setting” event. As such, I thought I’d set the record straight.

1. “Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent”

That says:

Deplatforming Donald Trump, a sitting US president, sets a dangerous precedent.

It has less to do with his views and more to do with intolerance for a differing point. Ironically, those who claim to champion free speech are celebrating.

Big tech firms are now the new oligarchs.

First of all, the only “precedent” set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company. I suppose that if your entire worldview is what happens in the United States, you might be surprised. But when you look outside that narrow lens, you would see that Facebook has booted off Lebanese politicians, Burmese generals, and even other right-wing US politicians…nevermind the millions of others who have been booted by these platforms, often without cause, often while engaging in protected speech under any definition.

2020 alone saw the (wrongful, even in light of platform policies) deplatforming of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people using terms related to Iran (including a Los Angeles-based crafter’s “Persian dolls” by Etsy) in an overzealous effort by companies to comply with sanctions, the booting of Palestinian speakers from Zoom on incorrectly-analyzed legal grounds, the deplatforming by Twitter of dozens of leftist Jews and Palestinians for clapping back at harassers, and so much more.

2. “This is the biggest online purge in history!”

That says:

I’ve lost over 15,000 followers today – insane how many accounts are getting terminated in the largest online purge in history

Twitter has been purging accounts of QAnon conspiracists and other right-wing accounts over the past week or more. Many of these accounts engage in dangerous rhetoric, including encouragement of violent insurrection against a democratically elected government. It is indeed interesting, particularly when one compares it to the company’s inaction against similar rhetoric in India and elsewhere. But what it isn’t is the “largest online purge in history”—not by a long shot. I would suggest that that occurred two years ago, when Twitter kicked off more than a million alleged ISIS accounts with zero transparency and the “freeze peach” galaxy brains didn’t blink.

3. “AWS kicking Parler off its servers is a step too far/is unprecedented/marks new territory in the digital rights debate”

That says:

Companies like Amazon should either get out of the hosting business, or remain agnostic about what their customers use their services for. As a very long term user, all the way back to the beginning of S3, their move today is disturbing and unacceptable.

To be completely fair, I am of the belief that infrastructure companies play a different role than platforms designed to host user speech/user-generated content, and that decisions like this should not be taken lightly. But let’s not pretend it hasn’t happened before (to be fair, Dave Winer is not doing that, and he is quite aware of the company’s history on these matters). In 2010, AWS famously booted WikiLeaks after no more than concern from the State Department—that is, WikiLeaks hadn’t been charged with anything—kicking off a series of deplatformings of the group. But WikiLeaks is not the only example here: Sanctions—or at least some legal interpretations of them—have meant that ordinary folks from countries like Iran can’t use AWS freely either. Last January saw a massive purge of Iranian users from various platforms, likely instigated by the Department of Treasury (though thus far, we have no proof of that). Some might suggest that this is a legal requirement of Amazon, but as GitHub demonstrated this week, there are indeed workarounds for companies that care enough about internet freedom.

4. “This is communism!”

Uh no, this is capitalism. Platforms have this much power because unbridled American capitalism is what y’all wanted. It is also not “Orwellian,” I can assure you.

5. “The Google Play store/Apple store booting Parler sets new precedent.”

Uh actually, no it doesn’t. Does anyone remember that Apple forced Tumblr’s hand hardly two years ago by threatening to kick it out of the App store if it didn’t do something about the child sexual abuse imagery it was unknowingly hosting, resulting in a near-total ban on nudity and sexual content on the site? Anyone?

6. “Twitter won’t let you hashtag #1984”

That says:

Twitter won’t let you hashtag #1984, a dystopian novel about an evil Big Tech government that spies on everyone, censors and manipulates speech, punishes wrong-thought, and tortures dissidents for sport.

There’s Orwellian, and then there’s banning references to Orwell Orwellian.

Twitter has never allowed number-based hashtags, next?

Got more examples? Shoot them to me on Twitter.

Republished with permission from Jillian C. York's website.

Filed Under: content moderation, deplatforming, donald trump, precedent, pundits

The Slope Gets More Slippery As You Expect Content Moderation To Happen At The Infrastructure Layer

from the sliding,-sliding dept

What a week the first week of January has been! As democracy and its institutions were tested in the United States, so were the Internet and its actors.

Following the invasion of the Capitol Hill by protesters, social media started taking action in what appeared to be a ripple effect: first, Twitter permanently suspended the account of the President of the United States, while Facebook and Instagram blocked his account indefinitely and, at least, through the end of his term; Snapchat followed by cutting access to the President’s account, and Amazon’s video-streaming platform Twitch took a similar action; YouTube announced that it would tighten its election fraud misinformation policy in a way that it would allow them to take immediate action against the President in the case of him posting misleading or false information. In the meantime, Apple also announced that it would kick off Parler, the social network favored by conservatives and extremists, from its app store on the basis that it was promoting violence associated with the integrity of the US institutions.

It is the decision of Amazon, however, to kick off Parler from its web hosting service that I want to turn to. Let me first make clear that if you are Amazon, this decision makes total sense from a business and public relations perspective – why would anyone want to be associated with anything that even remotely hinges on extremism? The decision also falls within Amazon’s permissible scope given that, under its terms of service, Amazon reserves the right to terminate users from their networks at their sole discretion. Similarly, from a societal point of view, Amazon may be seen as upholding most peoples’ values. But, I want to offer another perspective here. What about the Internet? What sort of a message does Amazon’s decision send to the Internet and everyone who is watching?

There are several actors participating in the way a message – whether an email, cat video, voice call, or web page – travels through the Internet. Each one of them might be considered an “intermediary” in the transmission of the message. Examples of Internet infrastructure intermediaries include Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), cloud hosting services, domain name registries, and registrars. These infrastructure actors are responsible for a bunch of different things, from managing network infrastructure, to providing access to users, and ensuring the delivery of content. These – mostly – private sector companies provide investment as well as reliability and upkeep of the services we all use.

In the broadcasting world, a carrier also controls the content that is being broadcast; with the Internet, however, an actor responsible for the delivery of infrastructure services (e.g., an Internet Service Provider or a cloud hosting provider) is unlikely or not expected to be aware of the content of the message they are carrying. They simply do not care about the content; it is not their job to care. Their one and only responsibility is to relay packets on the Internet to other destinations. Even if, for the sake of the argument, they were to care, at the end of the day, they are not the producers of the content. Like postal and telephone services, they have the essential role of carrying the underlying message efficiently.

Over the past year, the role and responsibility of intermediaries has been placed under the policy microscope. The focus is currently on user-generated content platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In the United States, policy makers on both sides of the aisle have been considering anew the role of intermediaries in disseminating dis- and mis-information. Section 230, the law that has systematically, consistently and predictably shielded online platforms from liability over the content their users post, has been highly politicized and change now is almost inevitable. In Europe, after a year of intense debate, the newly released Digital Services Act has majorly upheld the long-standing intermediary liability regime, but, still, there are implementation details that could see some change (e.g, all of provisions on ‘trusted flaggers’).

It is the actions like the one that Amazon took against Parler, however, that go beyond issues of just speech and can set a precedent that could have an adverse effect on the Internet and its architecture. By denying cloud hosting services, Amazon is essentially taking Parler offline and denying its ability to operate, unless the platform can find another hosting service. This might be seen as a good thing, prima facie; at the end of the day, who wants such content to even exist, let alone circulate online? But, it does send a quite dangerous message: as infrastructure intermediaries can take action that cuts the problem from its root (i.e., getting a service completely offline), regulators might start looking at them to “police” the Internet. In such a scenario, infrastructure intermediaries would have to deploy content-blocking measures, including IP and protocol-based blocking, deep packet inspection (i.e., viewing content of “packets” as they move across the network), and URL and DNS-based blocking. Such measures ‘over-block’, imposing collateral damage on legal content and communications. They also interfere with the functioning of critical Internet systems, including the DNS, and compromise Internet security, integrity, and performance.

What Amazon did is not unprecedented. In 2017, Cloudflare took a similar action against the Daily Stormer website when it stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. At the time, Cloudflare said: “The rules and responsibilities for each of the organizations [participating in Internet] in regulating content are and should be different.” A few days later, in an op-ed, published at the Wall Street Journal, Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince said: “I helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, but since then I’ve wondered whether I made the right decision.[…] Did we meet the standard of due process in this case? I worry we didn’t. And at some level I’m not sure we ever could. It doesn’t sit right to have a private company, invisible but ubiquitous, making editorial decisions about what can and cannot be online. The pre-internet analogy would be if Ma Bell listened in on phone calls and could terminate your line if it didn’t like what you were talking about.”

Most likely Amazon faced the same dilemma; or, it might have not. One thing, however, is certain: so far, none of these actors appears to be considering the Internet and how some of their actions may affect its future and the way we all may end up experiencing it. It is becoming increasingly important that we start looking into the salient, yet extremely significant, differences between moderation happening by user-generated content platforms as opposed to moderation happening by infrastructure providers.

It is about time we make an attempt to understand how the Internet works. From where I am sitting, this past year has been less lonely and semi-normal because of the Internet. I want it to continue to function in a way that is effective; I want to continue seeing the networks interconnecting and infrastructure providers focusing on what they are supposed to be focusing on: providing reliable and consistent infrastructure services.

It is about time we show the Internet we care!

Dr. Konstantinos Komaitis is the Senior Director, Policy Strategy and Development at the Internet Society.

Filed Under: aws, content moderation, infrastructure, slippery slope
Companies: amazon, parler

Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter

from the there's-a-point... dept

When I started writing this post, it was about Facebook's decision to suspend Trump's account indefinitely, and at least until Joe Biden is inaugurated in a couple weeks. I had lots to say on that... and then Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to ban Trump's Twitter account permanently. This is a bigger deal, not just because it's permanent, rather than indefinite, but because so much of Trump's identity over the last four years (and before that) is tied up in his Twitter account and followers.

Certainly, all of this has kicked off a whole new storm from across the political spectrum. You have Trump supporters who are furious and (falsely) claiming that this is "censorship" or unprecedented and heavy handed (it is none of those things). Then you have Trump haters who are screaming about how this is all way too late and is trying to close the barn door after the horses have long since bolted. I think neither argument is accurate. Will Oremus has a long (and very interesting!) look over on OneZero about how Facebook supposedly chucked out its own rulebook to come up with an excuse to suspend Trump's account:

Yet Facebook’s “indefinite” ban on Trump marks an overnight reversal of the policy on Trump and other political leaders that the social network has spent the past four years honing, justifying, and defending. The unprecedented move, which lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along. As I wrote in 2019, there’s just one golden rule of content moderation that every platform follows: If a policy becomes too controversial, change it.

Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook has allowed Trump to use its platform in a manner “consistent with our own rules” is laughable. The only thing that has been consistent, until now, is Facebook’s determination to contort, hair-split, and reimagine its rules to make sure nothing Trump posted would fall too far outside them. The Washington Post wrote a rather definitive account of the social network’s yearslong Trump-appeasement campaign earlier this year. Among other Trump-friendly measures, the Post noted, “Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers.”

And Twitter is also justifying its decision by saying that the reason was a rules violation:

We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This determination is based on a number of factors, including:

I don't need to post the factors. You can take a look yourself if you want. So, Oremus is mostly correct that they're making the rules up as they go along, but the problem with this framing is that it assumes that there are some magical rules you can put in place and then objectively apply them always. That's never ever been the case. The problem with so much of the content moderation debate is that all sides assume these things. They assume that it's easy to set up rules and easy to enforce them. Neither is true. Radiolab did a great episode a few years ago, detailing the process by which Facebook made and changed its rules. And it highlights some really important things including that almost every case is different, that it's tough to apply rules to every case, and that context is always changing. And that also means the rules must always keep changing.

A few years back, we took a room full of content moderation experts and asked them to make content moderation decisions on eight cases -- none of which I'd argue are anywhere near as difficult as deciding what to do with the President of the United States. And we couldn't get these experts to agree on anything. On every case, we had at least one person choose each of the four options we gave them, and to defend that position. The platforms have rules because it gives them a framework to think about things, and those rules are useful in identifying both principles for moderation and some bright lines.

But every case is different.

And no matter what you think of Trump, his case was different.

The regular rules could never apply to Trump because Trump is not a regular person. And, no, not even comparisons to foreign leaders are apt, because as silly as American exceptionalism is, the United States is still different than nearly every other country in the world. And, it's not just the position he's in (for the next few days anyway), but also Trump's willingness to use his account to make pronouncements unlike pretty much any other world leader (or at least, world leader of consequence).

Trump is, perhaps, the perfect example of why demanding clear rules on social media and how they moderate is stupid.

As for the question of why now? Well, clearly, the context has changed. The context is that Trump inspired a mob of goons to invade the Capitol building this week, and there remain legitimate threats that his cultish followers will continue to do significant damage. Certainly some people have insisted that this kind of violence was always a risk -- and it was. But it had not actually erupted to this level in this fashion. Again, we're talking about context. There's always more context.

And given that the situations are always edge cases, that the context always matters, and that things are always shifting, you can totally see why it's a reasonable decision to ban Trump from their platforms right now, based on everything else going on, and the likelihood that he might inspire more violence. I think it's worth reading Ben Thompson's analysis as well. He's long explained the risks associated with banning Trump from these platforms, and suggested why they should not have in the past. But the thing that changed for him, beyond even just the threat to democracy, is the threat to the rights of both individuals and companies to make their own decisions on these things:

Remember my highest priority, even beyond respect for democracy, is the inviolability of liberalism, because it is the foundation of said democracy. That includes the right for private individuals and companies to think and act for themselves, particularly when they believe they have a moral responsibility to do so, and the belief that no one else will. Yes, respecting democracy is a reason to not act over policy disagreements, no matter how horrible those policies may be, but preserving democracy is, by definition, even higher on the priority stack.

Turn off Trump’s account.

But here's the more important point -- especially directed at the people who will falsely claim that this is somehow censorship: President Trump is not being censored. He is not being limited. At any moment of any day (certainly for the next two weeks, and likely beyond) he can walk out of his office and have every major TV news channel (and every internet streaming platform) broadcast whatever he wants to say, and people will see it.

And to those who think that Twitter should have done this earlier, or that it would have made a difference, recognize that your concern is not so much with Twitter, but with Trump himself. Remember that while Trump might not be able to send a tweet right now, he still (literally) has the power to launch nuclear missiles at Twitter's headquarters. And, really, that's the problem. Trump is obviously too toxic for Twitter. But he's also too toxic for the White House. And the real complaint shouldn't be about Twitter or Facebook acting too late, but about Congress failing to do their job and remove the mad man from power.

Filed Under: adaptability, censorship, consequences, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, platforms, rules, section 230, social media
Companies: facebook, twitter

Content Moderation Case Study: Using Copyright To Take Down A Transformative Criticism Video (2019)

from the copyright-as-censorship dept

Summary: In the fall of 2019, talk show host Ellen Degeneres was criticized after being seen attending a professional football game with former President George W. Bush. Degeneres addressed the controversy on her show, saying she was invited by the Dallas Cowboys’ owner, and also suggesting that she was friends with the former President Bush and that people should “be kind” to people they disagree with politically.

Rafael Shimunov took the video of Degeneres giving her side of the controversy and transformed it so that the background showed disturbing images from the Iraq War which was started by President Bush. The clip used approximately half of the video that Ellen herself had posted to YouTube, with the only change being the replacement of the blue background. Soon after that video began to go viral on Twitter, Shimunov and others who had reposted it received notices saying that the video was taken down due to a copyright claim under the DMCA made by someone working for Degeneres’ TV show.

Recipients of the takedown notice said that it appeared to be the work of a social media manager for the show and not an automated takedown.

As the EFF noted in discussing the takedown, the DMCA requires that anyone filing a DMCA takedown notice take into account whether or not the content in question is covered by fair use, and there is little evidence the social media manager filing these notices did so.

Decisions to be made by Twitter:

• Is changing the background in the video transformative enough to make it fair use?
• Should you consider that the images act as commentary on the content of the video?
• How should Twitter deal with copyright holders who ignore fair use in issuing DMCA takedowns of videos?
• Should Twitter re-enable such videos following public controversy?

• Should social media companies be responsible for judging if content subject to a takedown is covered by fair use?
• Are the current rules regarding fair use and filing false takedown notices clear enough to stop such filings?
• How should the law handle takedowns over content that is fair use?

Originally posted on the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, copyright, criticism, ellen degeneres, george bush, transformative use
Companies: twitter