Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices

from the deplatforming-and-denialism dept

Warning 1: I'm about to talk about an issue that has a lot of nuance in it and no clear "good" answers -- and it's also one that many people have already made up their minds on one way or the other, and both sides will probably not really like at least part of what I have to say. That's cool. You get to live your own life. But, at the very least, I hope people can acknowledge that sometimes issues are more complex than they appear and having a nuanced discussion can be helpful, and I hope people can appreciate that.

Warning 2: This is a long post, so I'm going to provide a TLDR at the top (right under this, in fact), but as noted above, a part of the reason it's long is because it's a complex issue and there's a lot of nuance. So I strongly advise that if your initial response to my TLDR version is "fuck you, you're so wrong because..." maybe try reading the whole post first, and then when you go down to the comments to write out "fuck you, you're so wrong..." you can explain yourself clearly and thoroughly and address the actual points in the post. Thanks!

TLDR: Internet sites have every right in the world to kick people off their platforms, and there's no legal or ethical problem with that. No one's free speech is being censored. That said, we should be at least a bit concerned about the idea that giant internet platforms get to be some sort of arbiter of what speech is okay and what speech is not, and how that can impact society more generally. But there are possible solutions to this, even if none are perfect and some may be difficult to implement, and we should explore those more thoroughly, rather than getting into screaming fights over who should or shouldn't be allowed to use various internet platforms.

So, this post was originally going to be about the choices that Facebook and other internet platforms make concerning who is allowed on their platforms, specifically in response to an interview that Mark Zuckerberg gave back in July, in which he noted that he didn't think Facebook should remove Holocaust deniers from its platform, saying:

I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened.

I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think... it’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.”

This created a huge furor of people talking about trolling, Holocaust denialism, Overton windows and a bunch of other things. But it's a complex, nuanced topic, and I was trying to write a complex nuanced post. And just as I was getting somewhere with it... this week, a bunch of platforms, including Apple, YouTube and Facebook, removed at least some of Alex Jones accounts or content. This created another furor in the other direction, with people talking about deplatforming, censorship, free speech, monopoly power, and policing truth. And then when Twitter chose not to follow the lead of those other platforms, we were right back to a big furor about keeping hateful wackjob conspiracy theory assholes on your platform, and whether or not you should want to do that.

Chances are no matter what I say is going to piss off pretty much everyone, but let's do the stupid thing and try to address a complex and extremely nuanced topic on the internet, with unflagging optimism that maybe (just maybe) people on the internet will (for a moment at least) hold back their kneejerk reactions of "good" or "bad" and try to think through the issues.

Let's start with a few basic principles: no matter what crazy legal analysis you may have heard before, internet sites have every right to remove users for nearly any reason (there may be a few limited exceptions, but none of them apply here). Whether you like it or not (and you should actually like it), corporations do get rights, and that includes their First Amendment rights to have their sites appear how they want, along with deciding who not to associate with. On top of that, again, despite what you may have heard online about Section 230 of the CDA, platforms not only have the right to moderate what's on their platform without legal liability, they are actually encouraged to do so by that law.

Indeed, if anyone knows this, it's Alex Jones, since Infowars' own terms of service makes it clear that Infowars can boot anyone it wants:

If you can't read that, there's a long list of rules and then it says:

If you violate these rules, your posts and/or user name will be deleted. Remember: you are a guest here. It is not censorship if you violate the rules and your post is deleted. All civilizations have rules and if you violate them you can expect to be ostracized from the tribe.

One of the rare cases where I can say that, hey, that Alex Jones guy is absolutely right about that (and we'll leave aside the hypocrisy about him now flipping out about other sites applying those same rules on him).

A separate point that also is important, and gets regularly ignored, is that "banning" someone from these platforms often has the opposite impact of what was intended. Depending on the situation, it might not quite be a "Streisand Effect" situation, but it does create a martyr situation, which supporters will automatically use to double down on their belief that they're in the right position, and people are trying to "suppress the truth" or whatever. Also, sometimes it's useful to have "bad" speech out in the open, where people can track it, understand it... and maybe even counter it. Indeed, often hiding that bad speech not only lets it fester, but dulls our ability to counter it, respond to it and understand who is spreading such info (and how widely).

So, really, the question comes down to whether or not these platforms should be removing these kinds of accounts. But, before we should even answer that question, there's a separate question, which is: What options are there for platforms to deal with content that they disfavor? Unfortunately, many people assume that it's a binary choice. You either keep the content up, or you take it down. But that hardly gets at the long list of possible alternatives. You can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior (say, with prompts if the system senses you're doing something bad, or with reminders, or by a community calling you out for bad behavior or lots of other options). Depending on the platform, you can minimize the accessibility or findability of certain content. You can minimize the reach of certain content. You can append additional information or put a "warning flag" on content. You can "shadow ban" content. You can promote "good" content to go with any content you deem to be bad. Or you can do nothing. Or you can set things up so that your users are able to help promote or minimize good or bad content. Or you can create tools that allow your users to set their own preferences and thresholds. Or you can allow third parties to build tools that do the same thing. The list goes on and on and on.

And, yet, so much of this debate seems to ignore much of this (other than shadowbanning, which some people pretend is somehow evil and unfair). And, indeed, what concerns me is that while various platforms have tried some combinations of all of these things, very few seem to have really committed to these ideas -- and just get bounced back and forth between extreme pressure on two sides: "ban all the assholes" v. "how dare you fucking censor my favorite idiot."

So with the question of Alex Jones or holocaust deniers, internet platforms (again) have every right to kick them off their platforms. They don't want to be associated with assholes? Good for them. But, at the same time, it's more than a bit uncomfortable to think that anyone should want these giant internet platforms deciding who can use their platforms -- especially when having access to those platforms often feels close to necessary to take part in modern day life*. It's especially concerning when it reaches the level that basically online mobs can "demand" that someone be removed. And this is especially worrisome when many of the decisions are being made based on the claim of "hate speech," a term that not only has an amorphous and ever-changing definition, but one that has a long history of being abused against at risk groups or those the government simply dislikes (i.e., for those who advocate for rules against "hate speech" think about what happens when the person you trust the least gets to write the definition).

* Quick aside to you if you're that guy rushing down to the comments to say something like "No one needs to use Facebook. I don't use Facebook." Shut up. Most people do use Facebook. And for many people it is important to their lives. In some cases, there are necessary services that require Facebook. And you should support that rather than getting all preachy about your own life choices, good or bad.

On top of that, I think that most people literally cannot comprehend both the scale and complexity of the decision making here when platforms are tasked with making these decisions. Figuring out which pieces of content are "okay" and which are "bad" can work when you're looking at a couple dozen piece of content. But how about a million pieces of content every single day? Or more? Back in May, when we ran a live audience "game" in which we asked everyone at a Content Moderation Summit to judge just eight examples of content to moderate, what was striking was that out of this group of professionals in this space, there was no agreement on how to handle any piece of content. Everyone had arguments for why each piece of content should stay up, be taken down, or have flag appended to it. So, not only do you have millions of pieces of content to judge, you have a very subjective standard, and a bunch of individuals who have to make those judgment calls -- often with little training and very little time to review or to get context.

Antonio Garcia Martinez, who worked at Facebook for a while, and has been a fairly outspoken critic of his former employer (writing an entire book about it), has reasonably warned that we should be quite careful what we wish for when asking Facebook to cut off speech, noting that the rest of the world has struggled in every attempt to define the limits of hate speech, and it's an involved and troubling process -- and yet, many people are fine with handing that over to a group of people at a company they all seem to hate. Which... seems odd. Even more on point is an article in Fortune by CDT's Emma Llanso (who designed and co-ran much of that "game" we ran back at the content moderation summit), warning about the lack of transparency when platforms determine this kind of thing, rather than, say, the courts. As we've argued for years, the lack of transparency and the lack of due process is also a significant concern (though, when Mark Zuckerberg suggested an outside due process system, people completely freaked out, thinking he was arguing for a special Facebook court system).

In the end, I think banning people should be the "very last option" on the table. And you could say that since these platforms left Jones on for so long while they had their internal debates about him, that's what happened. But I don't think that's accurate. Because there were alternative solutions that they could have tried. As Issie Lapowsky at Wired pointed out in noting that this is an unwinnable battle, the "do nothing, do nothing, do nothing... ban!" approach is unsatisfying to everyone:

When Facebook and YouTube decided to take more responsibility for what does and doesn't belong on their platforms, they were never going to satisfy all sides. But their tortured deliberations over what to do with Jones left them with only two unenviable options: Leave him alone and tacitly defend his indefensible actions, or ban him from the world's most powerful platforms and turn him into the odious martyr he now is.

Instead, we should be looking at stronger alternative ideas. Yair Rosenberg's suggestion in the Atlantic is for counterprogramming, which certainly is an appealing idea:

Truly tackling the problem of hateful misinformation online requires rejecting the false choice between leaving it alone or censoring it outright. The real solution is one that has not been entertained by either Zuckerberg or his critics: counter-programming hateful or misleading speech with better speech.

How would this work in practice?

Take the Facebook page of the “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust,” a long-standing Holocaust-denial front. For years, the page has operated without any objection from Facebook, just as Zuckerberg acknowledged in his interview. Now, imagine if instead of taking it down, Facebook appended a prominent disclaimer atop the page: “This page promotes the denial of the Holocaust, the systematic 20th-century attempt to exterminate the Jewish people which left 6 million of them dead, alongside millions of political dissidents, LGBT people, and others the Nazis considered undesirable. To learn more about this history and not be misled by propaganda, visit these links to our partners at the United State Holocaust Museum and Israel’s Yad Vashem.”

Obviously, this intervention would not deter a hardened Holocaust denier, but it would prevent the vast majority of normal readers who might stumble across the page and its innocuous name from being taken in. A page meant to promote anti-Semitism and misinformation would be turned into an educational tool against both.

Meanwhile, Tim Lee, over at Ars Technica, suggested another possible approach, recognizing that Facebook (in particular) serves multiple functions. It hosts content, but it also promotes certain content via its algorithm. The hosting could be more neutral, while the algorithm is already not neutral (it's designed to promote the "best" content, which is inherently a subjective decision). So, let bad content stay on the platform, but decrease its "signal" power:

It's helpful here to think of Facebook as being two separate products: a hosting product and a recommendation product (the Newsfeed). Facebook's basic approach is to apply different strategies for these different products.

For hosting content, Facebook takes an inclusive approach, only taking down content that violates a set of clearly defined policies on issues like harassment and privacy.

With the Newsfeed, by contrast, Facebook takes a more hands-on approach, downranking content it regards as low quality.

This makes sense because the Newsfeed is fundamentally an editorial product. Facebook has an algorithm that decides which content people see first, using a wide variety of criteria. There's no reason why journalistic quality, as judged by Facebook, shouldn't be one of those criteria.

Under Facebook's approach, publications with a long record of producing high-quality content can get bumped up toward the top of the news feed. Publications with a history of producing fake news can get bumped to the back of the line, where most Newsfeed users will never see it.

Others, such as long-time free speech defender David French, have suggested that platforms should ditch concepts like "hate speech" that are not in US law and simply stick to the legal definitions" of what's allowed:

The good news is that tech companies don’t have to rely on vague, malleable and hotly contested definitions of hate speech to deal with conspiracy theorists like Mr. Jones. The far better option would be to prohibit libel or slander on their platforms.

To be sure, this would tie their hands more: Unlike “hate speech,” libel and slander have legal meanings. There is a long history of using libel and slander laws to protect especially private figures from false claims. It’s properly more difficult to use those laws to punish allegations directed at public figures, but even then there are limits on intentionally false factual claims.

It’s a high bar. But it’s a bar that respects the marketplace of ideas, avoids the politically charged battle over ever-shifting norms in language and culture and provides protection for aggrieved parties. Nor do tech companies have to wait for sometimes yearslong legal processes to work themselves out. They can use their greater degree of freedom to conduct their own investigations. Those investigations would rightly be based on concrete legal standards, not wholly subjective measures of offensiveness.

That's certainly one way to go about it, but I actually think that would create all sorts of other problems as well. In short, determining what is and what is not defamation can often be a long, drawn out process involving lots and lots of lawyers advocating for each side. The idea that platforms could successfully "investigate" that on their own seems like a stretch. It would be fine for platforms to have a policy saying that if a court has adjudicated something to be defamatory, then they'll take it down (and, indeed, most platforms do have exactly that policy), but having them make their own determinations of what counts as defamation seems like a risky task, and that would end up in a similar end state as where we are today with a lot of people angry at the "judgments from on high" with little transparency or right of appeal.

As for me, I still go back to the solution I've been discussing for years: we need to move to a world of protocols instead of platforms, in which transparency rules and (importantly) control is passed down away from the centralized service to the end users. Facebook should open itself up so that end users can decide what content they can see for themselves, rather than making all the decisions in Menlo Park. Ideally, Facebook (and others) should open up so that third party tools can provide their own experiences -- and then each person could choose the service or filtering setup that they want. People who want to suck in the firehose, including all the garbage, could do so. Others could choose other filters or other experiences. Move the power down to the ends of the network, which is what the internet was supposed to be good at in the first place. If the giant platforms won't do that, then people should build more open competitors that will (hell, those should be built anyway).

But, if they were to do that, it lets them get rid of this impossible to solve question of who gets to use their platforms, and moves the control and responsibility out to the end points. I expect that many users would quickly discover that the full firehose is unusable, and would seek alternatives that fit with how they wanted to use the platform. And, yes, that might mean some awful people create filter bubbles of nonsense and hatred, but average people could avoid those cesspools while at the same time those tasked with monitoring those kinds of idiots and their behavior could still do so.

I should note that this is a different solution than the one that Twitter's Jack Dorsey appeared to ham-fistedly suggest this week on his own platform, in which he suggested that journalists need to do the work of debunking idiots on Twitter. He's not wrong, but what an awful way to put it. Lots of people read it to mean "we set up the problem that makes this giant mess, and we'll leave it to journalists to come along and sort things out for free."

Instead, what I'm suggesting is that platforms have to get serious about moving real power out to the ends of their network so that anyone can set up systems for themselves -- or look to other third parties (or, even the original platforms themselves for a "default" or for a set of filter choices) for help. In the old days on Usenet there were killfiles. Email got swamped with spam, but there were a variety of anti-spam filters that you could plug-in to filter most of it out. There are ways to manage these complex situations that don't involve Jack Dorsey choosing who stays on the island and who gets removed this week.

Of course, this would require a fundamental shift in how these platforms operate -- and especially in how much control they have. But, given how they keep getting slammed on all sides for the decisions they both do and don't make, perhaps we're finally at a point where they'll consider this alternative. And, hey, if anyone at these big platforms wants some help thinking through these issues, feel free to contact us. These are the kinds of projects we enjoy working on, as crazy and impossible as they may feel.

Filed Under: alex jones, content moderation, deplatforming, free speech, holocaust deniers, mark zuckerberg, platforms, policing content, protocols
Companies: facebook, twitter, youtube

Facebook Ranking News Sources By Trust Is A Bad Idea... But No One At Facebook Will Read Our Untrustworthy Analysis

from the you-guys-are-doing-it-wrong-again dept

At some point I need to write a bigger piece on these kinds of things, though I've mentioned it here and there over the past couple of years. For all the complaints about how "bad stuff" is appearing on the big platforms (mainly: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter), it's depressing how many people think the answer is "well, those platforms should stop the bad stuff." As we've discussed, this is problematic on multiple levels. First, handing over the "content policing" function to these platforms is, well, probably not such a good idea. Historically they've been really bad at it, and there's little reason to think they're going to get any better no matter how much money they throw at artificial intelligence or how many people they hire to moderate content. Second, it requires some sort of objective reality for what's "bad stuff." And that's impossible. One person's bad stuff is another person's good stuff. And almost any decision is going to get criticized by someone or another. It's why suddenly a bunch of foolish people are falsely claiming that these platforms are required by law to be "neutral." (They're not).

But, as more and more pressure is put on these platforms, eventually they feel they have little choice to do something... and inevitably, they try to step up their content policing. The latest, as you may have heard, is that Facebook has started to rank news organizations by trust.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time," he said. "We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

But, as with the lack of an objective definition of "bad," you've got the same problem with "trust." For example, I sure don't trust "the system" that Zuckerberg mentions above to do a particularly good job of determining which news sources are trustworthy. And, again, trust is such a subjective concept, that lots of people inherently trust certain sources over others -- even when those sources have long histories of being full of crap. And given how much "trust" is actually driven by "confirmation bias" it's difficult to see how this solution from Facebook will do any good. Take, for example, (totally hypothetically), that Facebook determines that Infowars is untrustworthy. Many people may agree that a site famous for spreading conspiracy theories and pushing sketchy "supplements" that you need because of conspiracy theory x, y or z, is not particularly trustworthy. But, for those who do like Infowars, how are they likely to react to this kind of thing? They're not suddenly going to decide the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are more trustworthy. They're going to see it as a conspiracy for Facebook to continue to suppress the truth.

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug, and Facebook trying to push people in one direction is not going to go over well.

To reveal all of this, Zuckerberg apparently invited a bunch of news organizations to talk about it:

Zuckerberg met with a group of news media executives at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel in Menlo Park after delivering his keynote speech at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference Tuesday.

The meeting included representatives from BuzzFeed News, the Information, Quartz, the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, the Daily Beast, the Economist, HuffPost, Insider, the Atlantic, the New York Post, and others.

We weren't invited. Does that mean Facebook doesn't view us as trustworthy? I guess so. So it seems unlikely that he'll much care about what we have to say, but we'll say it anyway (though you probably won't be able to read this on Facebook):

Facebook: You're Doing It Wrong.

Facebook should never be the arbiter of truth, no matter how much people push it to be. Instead, it can and should be providing tools for its users to have more control. Let them create better filters. Let them apply their own "trust" metrics, or share trust metrics that others create. Or, as we've suggested on the privacy front, open up the system to let third parties come in and offer up their own trust rankings. Will that reinforce some echo chambers and filter bubbles? Perhaps. But that's not Facebook's fault -- it's part of the nature of human beings and confirmation bias.

Or, hey, Facebook could take a real leap forward and move away from being a centralized silo of information and truly disrupt its own setup -- pushing the information and data out to the edges, where the users could have more control over it themselves. And not in the simplistic manner of Facebook's other "big" announcement of the week about how it'll now let users opt-out of Facebook tracking them around the web (leaving out that they kinda needed to do this to deal with the GDPR in the EU). Opting out is one thing -- pushing the actual data control back to the end users and distributing it is something entirely different.

In the early days of the web, people set up their own websites, and had pretty much full control over the data and what was done there. It was much more distributed. Over time we've moved more and more to this silo model in which Facebook is the giant silo where everyone puts their content... and has to play by Facebook's rules. But with that came responsibility on Facebook's part for everything bad that anyone did on their platform. And, hey, let's face it, some people do bad stuff. The answer isn't to force Facebook to police all bad stuff, it should be to move back towards a system where information is more distributed, and we're not pressured into certain content because that same Facebook thinks it will lead to the most "engagement."

Push the content and the data out and focus on the thing that Facebook has always been better at at it's core: the connection function. Connect people, but don't control all of the content. Don't feel the need to police the content. Don't feel the need to decide who's trustworthy and who isn't. Be the protocol, not the platform, and open up the system so that anyone else can provide a trust overlay, and let those overlays compete. It would take Facebook out of the business of having to decide what's good and what's bad and would give end users much more control.

Facebook, of course, seems unlikely to do this. The value of the control is that it allows them to capture more of the money from the attention generated on their platform. But, really, if it doesn't want to keep dealing with these headaches, it seems like the only reasonable way forward.

Filed Under: confirmation bias, fake news, mark zuckerberg, metrics, news, ranking, trust, trustworthy
Companies: facebook

Ted Cruz Gets Section 230 All Wrong, While Zuck Claims He's Not Familiar With It

from the nobody-looks-great dept

There's plenty to say about Mark Zuckerberg's first congressional hearing this week (like Senator Thune's thinly-veiled threat of more SESTA-like laws, or Senator Cantwell's strange, unfocused tangent about Palantir and WhatsApp) but one exchange stands out as so utterly ridiculous that it bears special note.

Senator Cruz used his time in an attempt to shift the focus onto Republican fears that Facebook is a liberal propaganda machine, and specifically tried to box Zuckerberg into declaring whether Facebook was "a first amendment speaker expressing your views", or a "neutral public forum" — and then explicitly claimed that being the latter is a prerequisite of CDA Section 230 protections.

This is blatantly untrue, as that language appears nowhere in the law, and Section 230 is (as we've reiterated many times during the SESTA debate) designed to encourage moderation. But Zuckerberg's reply was, well, absurd:

"I'm not that familiar with the specific legal language of the law that you speak to, so I would need to follow up with you on that."

That's the CEO of Facebook — a service that not only relies on Section 230 to a staggering degree, but just played a major role in developing and supporting a law that drastically alters it — professing ignorance on the letter of the law, as though it were some obscure statute that only his legal department would be fully familiar with.

Uh-huh.

Now, to be fair, Cruz was trying to box him in with a loaded and ultimately meaningless question — and when you're being grilled by a panel of Senators, you've got to be pretty choosy about if and when you're actually going to say "you are incorrect, that's not true" in response to one of their questions. But... could anyone in that room possibly believe him? Or any of the rest of us? SESTA — which, again, Facebook played a major role in — had already been mentioned several times during the hearing, even alongside expressions of appreciation that Facebook helped refine and ultimately supported the bill. Even if we somehow contorted our brains to believe he is genuinely unfamiliar with the language (again: uh-huh...) that would just paint an equally terrible picture in which Zuck has been only vaguely aware of his company's policy positions all year.

So, that was weird. Senate hearings like this are, of course, mostly theatrical — but that clunky bit of dialogue certainly eviscerated any remaining suspension of disbelief.

Filed Under: mark zuckerberg, privacy, section 230, sesta, ted cruz
Companies: facebook

Broadband Industry Aims To Use Facebook Fracas To Saddle Silicon Valley With Crappy New Laws

from the we-own-the-pen dept

For years now, the nation's broadband industry has clung to one, consistent message: anti-competitive giants like Comcast are innocent, ultra-innovative daisies, and Silicon Valley companies are a terrible, terrible menace. From Ajit Pai's bizarre attacks on Netflix to an endless wave of ISP-payrolled consultants falsely accusing Google of stealing bandwidth, major ISPs have long made it clear they see Silicon Valley not as a collaborator, but as a mortal enemy. Given ISPs routinely try to use their last-mile monopolies to harm disruptive new services with arbitrary barriers and higher, extortion-esque costs, the feeling is generally mutual.

As companies like Comcast NBC Universal and AT&T (and soon Time Warner) grow and push into the internet ad industry, the ISP lobbying message has been consistent: more regulation for Silicon Valley, and virtually no regulation for the broadband industry. Given many of these ISPs are growing natural monopolies, the rules governing them have been (and should be) notably different, and sometimes stronger. After all, however bad Facebook is, you can choose not to use them, whereas if you're like more than half of America, Comcast is your only option if you're looking for real broadband.

Needless to say, the entire (justified) Facebook and Cambridge Analytica fracas has given ISP lobbyists a wonderful new opportunity to push for bad legislation they'll likely be writing. Former FCC boss turned top cable lobbyist Mike Powell has been beating the "regulate Silicon Valley" drumbeat for several weeks now, blaming rising social media "mindshare" for all manner of evils. And I've noticed the arrival of several new astroturf groups calling for regulation of Facebook and Google that are tied to co-opted "minority" organizations with a history of helping AT&T covertly lobby.

With Zuckerberg headed to a hearing this week, the broadband industry has ramped up its tap dance. This blog post by USTelecom, an AT&T backed lobbying organization, proclaims that we should look to the same industry that gave us zombie cookies for examples of exemplary behavior moving forward:

"And, in the search for privacy best practices, Congress need look no further than America’s broadband providers. For over twenty years, internet service providers (ISPs) have protected their consumers’ data with strong pro-consumer policies. ISPs know the success of any digital business depends on earning their customers’ trust on privacy."

From charging users more for privacy to using credit data to provide customers even worse customer service, the broadband industry has been a privacy circus for decades, making this USTelecom's apparent attempt at comedy.

Charter CEO Tom Rutledge this week also joined the festivities by penning a new blog entry proclaiming that Charter really, really wants a new, comprehensive privacy law:

"Tomorrow, Congress will begin important hearings to examine who is collecting what, how that data is shared and sold, and how best to protect and secure personal data when much of our lives are increasingly taking place online. As a company with over 95,000 employees that has the privilege of providing Internet service to 22.5 million homes across 41 states, we at Charter have an important stake in this conversation."

Keep in mind, Charter was one of several major ISPs that lobbied the GOP and Trump administration to kill modest broadband consumer privacy protections before they could take effect last year. Those rules, crafted after endless examples of bad ISP behavior, simply would have required that ISPs clearly disclose what data is being collected and sold. They also would have required that ISPs provide working opt-out tools, and (the biggest reason ISPs opposed the rules) they would have required that consumers opt in to the sharing of more sensitive data.

Yet mysteriously here is Charter, now calling for the creation of new privacy regulations:

"Charter believes individuals deserve to know that no matter where they go online or how they interact with online services, they will have the same protections. Different policies leading to inconsistent protections sow confusion and erode consumer confidence in their interactions online, threatening the Internet’s future as an engine of economic growth. And as an Internet Service Provider, that’s bad for business. So we are urging Congress to pass a uniform law that provides greater privacy and data security protections and applies the same standard to everybody in the Internet ecosystem, including us."

Again, Charter knows it has enough political power right now under the Trump administration and GOP that it will likely be one of the companies that gets to write whatever new privacy legislation gets proposed. And given Charter and Comcast's history, you can be pretty damn sure their version of a "uniform law" likely includes massive loopholes for ISPs, while hamstringing many of the companies large ISPs plan to compete with in the video ad wars to come.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric about "applying the same standards" to everybody in the chain again hopes to confuse folks that don't understand that natural monopolies may need tougher consumer protections (which is what net neutrality was all about). It's much like the calls on some fronts for things like "search neutrality" by people that usually have no earthly understanding of what net neutrality's actually about: protecting consumers from last mile monopoly harms.

As we've been noting, the broadband industry has been attempting to neuter FCC authority over ISPs, then shovel any remaining authority to an FTC that's ill-equipped to handle it. Applauding the FTC as the exclusive handler of telecom privacy concerns actually weakens oversight of telecom monopolies, (especially given AT&T is trying to gut all FTC oversight over ISPs entirely).

Of course Google and Facebook are not innocent victims here either, and they don't want tough, meaningful privacy protections any more than the telecom industry does.

In fact, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter have recenty put aside some of their animosity to work hand in hand with Google and Facebook to scuttle meaningful privacy rules in California. This entire call for "privacy legislation" may serve multiple functions for ISPs: put a bullet in any efforts to restore tougher and more meaningful FCC authority over ISPs, while working with Facebook and Google on privacy legislation that simply doesn't do much, but does pre-empt the possibility for tougher federal or state protections. Knowing ISPs well, they'll also try to sneak in language that harms their newfound "allies" at the last second.

Giving how corrupt this current Congress is, there's a universe of ways this well-intentioned effort for new meaningful privacy guidelines could go south with genuine consumer privacy being a distant afterthought. There's certainly a case to be made for tough new privacy protections in the wake of IOT dysfunction and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But it should probably go without saying that we don't want Comcast lawyers (or Facebook and Google lobbyists) writing them.

Filed Under: broadband, mark zuckerberg
Companies: cambridge analytica, facebook

Hey Mark Zuckerberg: Don't Lock Down Everyone's Data, Open It Up To Services That Give Your Users More Control Over Their Data

from the there-are-other-solutions dept

As we've been discussing all week, a lot of people are reacting to the wrong thing in the whole Facebook / Cambridge Analytica mess. The problem was not that Facebook had an open API -- but that its users were unaware of what was happening with their own data. Unfortunately, many, many people (including the press and politicians) are running with the narrative that Facebook failed to "protect" data. And, just as we warned, the coming "solutions" won't help matters, but will actually make them worse.

Case in point: when Mark Zuckerberg finally made his big press tour on Wednesday evening, he repeatedly told people that, the public has spoken and Facebook will lock down your data now.

I do think early on on the platform we had this very idealistic vision around how data portability would allow all these different new experiences, and I think the feedback that we’ve gotten from our community and from the world is that privacy and having the data locked down is more important to people than maybe making it easier to bring more data and have different kinds of experiences.

This is the wrong solution for two reasons: (1) It makes Facebook that much more central and dominant to online activities, making it that much more difficult for upstarts and competitors to compete and (2) it takes away power from the end users to do more with their own data. For all the people whining about Facebook having too much of your data, this is not the solution you want. This is effectively giving Facebook even more power over your data, not less.

If people were to take the time to actually understand the issue, then they wouldn't be pressuring Facebook to react this way. And there are better solutions: give people more access to their own data. That means, as Cory Doctorow suggested, the better way out is for Facebook to open itself up in a different way: to open itself up to third party app developers not to suck up data for marketing databases, but to give end users more control over their own data and how it is used.

People are so focused on Facebook sucking up their data, that they're responding by demanding Facebook be a better steward of their data... rather than demanding that they get to manage their own data.

Nearly a decade ago, EFF suggested a social media bill of rights that it hoped sites like Facebook would adopt. It included giving users transparency into who wants their data and who gets it, giving users full control over their data, and finally enabling them to export their data in a useable format to bring to other sites on their own terms. If we lived in such a world, then we wouldn't have to worry about the Cambridge Analytica situation, because users would know that some creepy personality test app was requesting their info, and they could deny it (or they could set filters that would automatically block it).

So, if Mark Zuckerberg really wants to respond to this crisis in a way that's helpful, he should be opening up his platform... to a different set of app developers. It shouldn't go to the developers who are siphoning up everyone's data, but to those who can provide tools for end users to have full transparency and control over their data.

Unfortunately, the political and media reality is that if Zuckerberg actually went down this path, he'd probably be slammed for "opening up" user data, rather than locking it down.

Filed Under: apis, competition, control, data, data portability, mark zuckerberg, ownership, transparency
Companies: cambridge analytica, facebook

Wherein Facebook Loses Recess For Everyone

from the with-Facebook-friends-like-these dept

Hold on tight to those memories of all the good things the Internet has brought. SESTA has just passed the Senate, and at this point it's a clear legislative path to undermining Section 230, the law that has enabled all those good things the Internet has offered.

It is not entirely Facebook's fault: opportunists from Hollywood saw it as a chance to weaken the innovation that weakens their antiquated grip over people's creativity. Ill-informed celebrities, who understood absolutely nothing about the cause they professed to advocate for, pressed their bumper-sticker demands that something be done, even though that something is destructive to the very cause the bumper-stickers were for. Willfully ignorant members of Congress then bought into the bumper-sticker rhetoric, despite all the evidence they had about how destructive this law would be to those interests and online speech generally.

Even frequent innovation ally Senator Wyden joined the chorus mounting against the tech industry, lending credence to the idea that when it came to a law that would undermine the Internet, the Internet had it coming.

With all due respect, that criticism is not fair. Setting aside that many of these companies didn't even exist twenty years ago, we have never before lived in a world where we could all talk to each other. It makes no sense to punish the people who have enabled this gift simply because we haven't quite figured out how best to manage it. We are but toddlers in Internet time, and just as we would not crush a toddler's ability to learn to do better, it makes no sense to punish today's Internet service providers, or future innovators, or speakers, simply because figuring out how to handle the promise of this global interconnectivity is hard. We cannot let the reactionary antipathy against Facebook mask difficult issues that need to be carefully teased apart before applying regulatory "solutions."

But when we tally the score on whose fault today is, plenty can still be laid at Facebook's door. Again, not all of its current troubles are necessarily of its own making: in addition to being square in the eye of the worst growing pains that computer-mediated communication can offer, it has also been misused, and even potentially illegally manipulated, by bad actors keen to exploit the inherent vulnerabilities presented by this shift from a world of physical scarcity to a world of digital plenty. Meanwhile doctoral theses in organizational theory could be written about the challenges faced by large companies, especially those that have grown so quickly, in reacting to the challenges their success has invited. In other words, we need to separate which expectations of the company are reasonable from those that are not necessarily fair to expect from an enterprise pioneering a new business that could not have even existed just a few years ago.

Yet while much of what Facebook does should be viewed charitably, it is not beyond criticism. To say it is like a bull in a china shop would be unfair to bulls, who at least seem to have some awareness of the chaos they leave in their wake as they throw their weight around. Whereas Facebook seems to have little insight into just what it is that it does, where it lives in the Internet ecosystem, and who is in there with it. As it blunders about, stoking outrage that makes people too upset to see the need for nuance in regulatory response, it also interferes with those advocating for that nuanced regulatory response. It is becoming very hard to trust Facebook as a partner in addressing the complex issues its business choices raise when the company itself seems to lack any coherent understanding of what those choices are. After all, what exactly is the business of Facebook? Is it to aggregate data, or to connect people and intermediate their speech? Or something else? These competing agendas antagonize users and cloud the regulatory waters, leading to overreactions like SESTA that end up hurting everyone. The bitter irony of SESTA, of course, is that it only punishes the good things Facebook does—the being a global platform facilitating speech and interpersonal connections around the world—that benefit our lives, and not those that give us pause. But it also makes sure that no one else will be able to come along and perform any of these functions any better.

Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that, as a matter of politics, Facebook allowed this regulatory travesty to happen. Its shocking endorsement of these dysfunctional policies undermined the resistance that the speakers and innovators were trying to mount against these policies that so that threaten them. Facebook may be foolish enough to believe it can endure the regulatory shift SESTA will bring, but even if it were correct, no one else can. Not even Facebook's own users.

Today is a sad day for the future and all the speech, innovation, and interconnectivity we were counting on to help us confront the challenges of living together in this increasingly small world. There is plenty of blame to go around, but the oblivious insularity of one of the biggest actors in the policy space is a deserving recipient of much of it. Not only was it a lightning rod for regulatory outrage, not entirely undeservedly, but it then greased the skids for the worst of it, indifferent to the effects on others. It will surely suffer from its choices, but so will everyone else.

Filed Under: cda 230, free speech, innovation, intermediary liability, mark zuckerberg, ron wyden, sesta
Companies: facebook

Mark Zuckerberg Finally Speaks About Cambridge Analytica; It Won't Be Enough

from the more-to-be-done dept

It took way too long, but Mark Zuckerberg finally responded to the Cambridge Analytica mess on Wednesday afternoon. As we've discussed in a series of posts all week, this is a complex issue, where a lot of people are getting the details wrong, and thus most of the suggestions in response are likely to make the problem worse.

To be clear, Mark's statement on the issue is not bad. It's obviously been workshopped through a zillion high-priced PR people, and it avoids all the usual "I"m sorry if we upset you..." kind of tropes. Instead, it's direct, it takes responsibility, it admits error, does very little to try to "justify" what happened, and lists out concrete steps that the company is taking in response to the mess.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

It runs through the timeline, and appears to get it accurately based on everything we've seen (so no funny business with the dates). And, importantly, Zuckerberg notes that even if it was Cambridge Analytica that broke Facebook's terms of service on the API, that's not the larger issue -- the loss of trust on the platform is the issue.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

The proactive steps that Facebook is taking are all reasonable steps as well: investigating all old apps prior to the closing of the old API to see who else sucked up what data, further restricting access to data, and finally giving more transparency and control to end users:

First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days.

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

That's mostly good, though as I explained earlier, I do have some concerns about how the second issue -- locking down the data -- might also limit the ability of end users to export their data to other services.

Also, this does not tackle the better overall solution that we mentioned yesterday, originally pitched by Cory Doctorow to open up the platform not to third party apps that suck up data, but to third party apps that help users protect and control their own data. That part is missing and it's a big part.

If you already hated Zuckerberg and Facebook, this response isn't going to be enough for you (no response would be, short of shutting the whole thing down, as ridiculous as that idea is). If you already trusted him, then you'll probably find this to be okay. But a lot of people are going to fall in the middle and what Facebook actually does in the next few months is going to be watched closely and will be important. Unless and until the company also allows more end-user control of privacy, including by third party apps, it feels like this will fall short.

And, of course, it seems highly unlikely that these moves will satisfy the dozens of regulators around the world seeking their pound of flesh, nor the folks who are already filing lawsuits over this. Facebook has a lot of fixing to do. And Zuckerberg's statement is better than a bad statement, but that's probably not good enough.

Meanwhile, as soon as this response was posted, Zuckerberg went on a grand press tour, hitting (at least): CNN, Wired, the NY Times and Recode. It's entirely possible he did more interviews too, but that's enough for now.

There are some interesting tidbits in the various interviews, but most of what I said above stands. It's not going to be enough. And I'm not sure people will be happy with the results. In all of the interviews he does this sort of weird "Aw, shucks, I guess what people really want is to have us lock down their data, rather than being open" thing that is bothersome. Here's the Wired version:

I do think early on on the platform we had this very idealistic vision around how data portability would allow all these different new experiences, and I think the feedback that we’ve gotten from our community and from the world is that privacy and having the data locked down is more important to people than maybe making it easier to bring more data and have different kinds of experiences.

But, of course, as we pointed out yesterday (and above), all this really does is lock in Facebook, and make it that much harder for individuals to really control their own data. It also limits the ability of upstarts and competitors to challenge Facebook. In other words, the more Facebook locks down its data, the more Facebook locks itself in as the incumbent. Are we really sure that's a good idea? Indeed, when Wired pushes him on this, he basically shrugs and says "Well, the people have spoken, and they want us to control everything."

I think the feedback that we’ve gotten from people—not only in this episode but for years—is that people value having less access to their data above having the ability to more easily bring social experiences with their friends’ data to other places. And I don’t know, I mean, part of that might be philosophical, it may just be in practice what developers are able to build over the platform, and the practical value exchange, that’s certainly been a big one. And I agree. I think at the heart of a lot of these issues we face are tradeoffs between real values that people care about.

In the Recode interview, he repeats some of these lines, and even suggests (incorrectly) that there's a trade-off between data portability and privacy:

“I was maybe too idealistic on the side of data portability, that it would create more good experiences — and it created some — but I think what the clear feedback from our community was that people value privacy a lot more.”

But... that's only true in the situation where Facebook controls everything. If they actually gave users more control and transparency, then the user can decide how her data is shared, and you can have both portability and privacy.

One other interesting point he raises in that interview: we should not be letting Mark Zuckerberg make all the decisions about what is and what is not okay:

“What I would really like to do is find a way to get our policies set in a way that reflects the values of the community, so I am not the one making those decisions,” Zuckerberg said. “I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California in an office making content policy decisions for people around the world.”

“[The] thing is like, ‘Where’s the line on hate speech?’ I mean, who chose me to be the person that did that?,” Zuckerberg said. “I guess I have to, because of [where we are] now, but I’d rather not.”

But, again, that's a choice that Facebook is making in becoming the data silo. If the end users had more control and more tools to control, then it's no longer Mark's choice. Open up the platform not for "apps" that suck up users data, but for tools that allow users to control their own data, and you get a very different result. But that's not where we're moving. At all.

So... so far this is moving in exactly the direction I feared when I wrote about this yesterday. "Solving" the problem isn't going to be solving the problem for real -- and it's just going to end up giving Facebook greater power over our data. That's an unfortunate result.

Oh. And for all of the apologizing and regrets that Zuckerberg raises in these interviews, he has yet to explain why if this is such a big deal, Facebook threatened to sue one of the journalists who broke this story. It seems like that's an important one for him to weigh in on.

Filed Under: damage control, data portability, dominance, mark zuckerberg, privacy, silos
Companies: cambridge analytica, facebook

Zuckerberg Momentarily Curbs 'Hate Speech' Moderation Stupidity At Facebook To Reinstate Posts By Donald Trump

from the but-will-it-scale? dept

Another "free speech" controversy has blown up at Facebook. "Free speech" in quotes because Facebook is a private company that can make it own rules about speech it's willing to tolerate, much less protect. It's also one that can make up the rules as it goes along and apply them inconsistently. Welcome to the Internet. That's just how things are done.

So, it comes as no surprise that moderators at Facebook attempted to remove Donald Trump's posts as "hate speech." (via Slashdot)

Facebook employees pushed to remove some of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's Facebook posts — such as one proposing the ban of Muslims from entering the U.S. — from the service as hate speech that violated the giant social network's policies, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

To some readers, Facebook's attempts to remove posts by a Republican may seem like business as usual. The social media network has been criticized before for playing politics with its news feeds. But digging a little deeper into the details of the story reveals this mini-debacle starts as most censorship stories do: with the site's users, rather than its moderation team.

Issues around Mr. Trump’s posts emerged when he posted on Facebook a link to a Dec. 7 campaign statement “on preventing Muslim immigration.” The statement called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Users flagged the December content as hate speech, a move that triggered a review by Facebook’s community-operations team, with hundreds of employees in several offices world-wide.

Flagging a policy proposal as "hate speech" sounds very much like certain Facebook users' attempts to create their own echo chambers -- the normal efforts of those who have mistaken the "report" button for Facebook's still-nonexistent "dislike" button.

The problem could have ended there. Moderators could have easily decided this was relevant to the upcoming election and not something that should be declared "hate speech." But it didn't go that way.

Some Facebook employees said in internal chat rooms that the post broke Facebook’s rules on hate speech as detailed in its internal guidelines, according to people familiar with the matter.

Facebook's definition of "hate speech" is far too broad. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreed the post violated the company's "hate speech" policy, but overrode moderators and reinstated the posts. The rules will apparently continue to be rewritten on the fly.

On Friday, senior members of Facebook’s policy team posted more details on its policy. “In the weeks ahead, we’re going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards,” they wrote.

This is a better interpretation of the rules, but one that should be permanently implemented, rather than just half-assed into place to lower the risk of losing campaign advertising dollars. Facebook has earned a lot of the criticism thrown in its direction over its surprisingly terrible post moderation decisions. So, FB earns a golf clap for deciding to prevent user-generated echo chambers, at least up until the second Tuesday in November.

The other problem is that this decision just isn't good enough for some Facebook employees.

[O]thers, including some Muslim employees at Facebook, were upset that the platform would make an exception. In Dublin, where many of Facebook’s content reviewers work, more than a dozen Muslim employees met with their managers to discuss the policy, according to another person familiar with the matter. Some created internal Facebook groups protesting the decision, while others threatened to leave.

Those that threatened to leave should do so. They're only going to make Facebook an even worse place for the world to get its news. There's plenty of unpleasantness out there that is newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest. Very little of it rises to the level of hate speech -- even in Facebook's broad, constantly-changing definition of the term.

Lot of things Trump has said and advocated for are objectively repugnant and undoubtedly offensive to the races and religions targeted by them. But they are not "hate speech." They are bad ideas borne of worse thought processes. In any event, it's better to know what presidential candidates are supporting, rather than being unpleasantly surprised post-election.

The same goes for "normal" people. Why police "hate speech" in such a heavy-handed fashion? Wouldn't it be better to have those in your social circles out themselves publicly as repellant human beings, rather than discover this during a child's birthday party or other IRL social gathering?

Facebook isn't a free speech defender. It's a private company with a lot of advertising dollars and billions of users with competing interests on the line. It will play it safe and continue its long run of dubious moderation decisions. But what it shouldn't do is continue to expand its definition of hate speech so moderators become nothing more than a heckler's veto extensions.

Filed Under: donald trump, free speech, hate speech, mark zuckerberg, moderation, newsworthiness

DailyDirt: Dressing For Success...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

It's not an uncommon question to wonder if it's okay to wear the same clothes every day under varying circumstances. Many folks don't think it's a big deal to wear the same outfit (as long as it's clean) all the time because it's like a uniform. But just don't "steal" the black turtleneck and jeans look -- come up with your own signature outfit, please.

• More than a few famous people are known to wear the same outfit every day. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Dean Kamen... and the putative reason is that it saves time to make less decisions about what to wear. [url]
• Apparently, a lot of female meteorologists own the same $23 dress -- because it's a reasonably priced article of clothing that follows the on-air TV rules for standing in front of a green screen. Perhaps Liberte Chan should join the meteorologist Facebook group. [url]
• Australian TV host Karl Stefanovic wore the same suit for a year, and no one noticed. It looks like he did change his tie, so how is anyone really expected to notice a guy is wearing the same suit? [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: clothes, correlation, dean kamen, fashion, karl stefanovic, liberte chan, mark zuckerberg, meteorologists, outfits, steve jobs

No, Virtual Reality Won't Make Us Fat, Stupid Slaves Of Mark Zuckerberg

from the fear-is-the-mind-killer dept

With the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift prepping for launch over the next few months, the public has only just begun to be inundated with a sound wall of virtual reality media coverage. And while that's great if, like me, you've been waiting for functional, non-vomit-inducing VR since childhood, those unnerved by the idea of strapping a $600 plastic and metal headset to their face for hours will react poorly. The folks that believe games make us violent, Google makes us stupid, and cell phones make us antisocial are going to have an absolute field day demonizing VR. Usually, never having tried it.

Right on cue, the backlash began in earnest this week. Countless news outlets and Twitter users circulated this photo of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating Samsung Gear VR Headsets at the Mobile World Congress this week in Spain. It is, admittedly, very white, very male, and not particularly flattering: But the Washington Post was one of numerous outlets to somehow read entire universes of meaning into the photo, breathlessly insisting it was mystically precognitive in nature, offering a glimpse into our "creepy" and "dystopian tech future":

Zuckerberg has said that, in his vision for the future, these virtual experiences will be fundamentally social. But the photo suggests something quite different: Hundreds of people share a physical space, but no perception, no experience, no phenomenological anchor. The communality of a conference (literally from conferre, 'to bring together') is thrown over for a series of hyper-individualized bubbles. And you’re reminded, from Zuckerberg’s awkward semi-smile, that the man who owns the bubbles also owns what’s in them. That controlling virtual reality, in other words, is only a step from controlling reality itself.

Ooh, scary! I'm not necessarily a fan of Zuckerberg or his tone-deafness during the recent global net neutrality fracas, but the Post's "digital culture critic" seems more than a little confused by what VR is, and what was happening at the event. As folks like Ben Kuchera were quick to point out the event was mostly harmless, with audience members being greeted with a surprise cameo by Zuckerberg after they took off their headsets. Audience members actually reacted with "gasps of excitement" at glimpsing a t-shirt clad billionaire. Nerdy white dudes being nerdy white dudes, sure. But 1984 this wasn't.

When people unfamiliar with VR see someone in a headset, many immediately picture the fat hovering people in Pixar's Wall-E, happily guzzling sugar water while anesthetized to all greater meaning. But while many spent the week deriding VR as a Zuckerberg-controlled big brother enslavement tool, most of the people that have actually tried VR realize it has amazing potential as a tool for creation, expression and connectivity for artists, story tellers, journalists, and musicians. Again, once people actually try VR, it doesn't take long to see the potential.

Yet all week the photo had a bizarre, hypnotizing effect on the media that overshadowed this fact. Fusion, for example, became oddly transfixed by the heaviest man in the photo, magically equating his daily caloric surplus with the idea that VR will somehow make us all miserable:

If you were to choose an attendee in the crowd who most represents You, it would be probably be this man. Here you are, six years from today: Unsatisfied, dour, a VR headset crammed onto your face. Your belongings are at your feet, your computer balances on your lap, your identifying lanyard hangs from your neck. You are watching…something? It doesn’t matter. You hate it.

That's some rich analysis, yo. The existential fear of VR from the Luddite wing of the American electorate is palpably bizarre. The Atlantic, for example, published a piece of moody dystopian fiction based entirely on the heavyset man in the photo. The piece is set years in the future -- after we've all apparently become fatter, sadder and notably less productive thanks to Zuckerberg's villainy.

It apparently needs noting: putting on a VR headset doesn't magically prevent you from eating kale, doing yoga or going for a run. If you're chubby outside of VR, you're still chubby with a headset strapped to your head. That's not somehow VR's fault. At the same time, if you've actually watched some of the developer demos for games like Budget Cuts, you'd realize VR gaming can be a very physical and social experience. Still nerdy as hell, granted. But VR is not, contrary to this week's press narrative, somehow synonymous with servitude and muscle atrophy.

We've been over this before at Techdirt countless times. Each and every time a new technology emerges this same narrative bubbles forth: "this new technology is going to make us less social than ever and usher forth a terrifying future where nobody interacts!" XKCD highlighted quite well a few years ago how this idea is neither accurate nor new, and it's getting downright boring: Does VR have some major PR obstacles to broader adoption? Absolutely. The initial cost of entry is significant, given to do VR "right" you need a quality headset (the Oculus Rift is $600 at launch and the HTC Vive will be $800) and a higher end PC with a beefy graphics card (around $1000-$1500) capable of powering it. But what will begin as a high-end playpen for art, porn and video gaming will quickly evolve into adoption at schools, universities and homes everywhere -- especially as the technology matures, its uses expand, and prices drop.

Sure, until VR tech can be shrunk down and integrated into contacts or glasses we'll all look downright stupid wearing VR headsets. It's just a fact. But if you're dismissing an entire technological revolution for appearance's sake, the problem would be yours, not virtual reality's.

Filed Under: innovation, mark zuckerberg, moral panics, virtual reality, vr