Why Is The EU Parliament Pushing Fake Propaganda From Hollywood?

from the a-hollywood-story dept

What the hell is going on in the EU these days? The EU Commission put out a Medium post that literally mocked the public as an "angry mob" for raising legitimate concerns about the EU's proposed Copyright Directive. And that followed a bizarrely incoherent "Q & A" page put out by the EU Parliament's Legislative Affairs Committee (JURI), spewing pure nonsense about the Copyright Directive. In both cases, those involved were publicly mocked for this (to the point that the Commission even took down its post, but blaming others for misunderstanding it as the reason).

But now the EU Parliament is doubling down on this absurdity. Its official Twitter feed posted this bit of pure propaganda:

If, for some reason, you can't read that, it says:

Your memes are safe 🙌 Freedom of expression is not affected 👌 It's all about fair payment to content creators 💶

And then urges people to watch a short video that is simply bullshit propaganda put forth by an industry association, called "Europe for Creators." Think about this for a second. Here is the official feed of the entire European Parliament -- which has not yet voted on the EU Copyright Directive -- posting corporate propaganda from a trade group, pushing misleading to outright false messages, in support of a bill that is designed to financially benefit that industry.

In what world is that okay?

MEP Julia Reda has gone through and highlighted many of the problems with the video in a detailed Twitter thread. To make it easier to read, I'm turning that thread into plaintext here:

This video by @Europarl_EN on the draft #copyright directive has sparked a lot of outrage, and rightfully so! First, the Commission called critics of the reform as a mob, now the Parliament chimes in.... The Parliament should maintain neutrality in its communication until the final version of the #copyright directive is adopted. The video not only creates the impression that the directive has already been agreed, there are several factual mistakes and problematic aspects:

In the beginning of the video a balloon is shown, carrying the “Europe for Creators” logo. It belongs to a controversial lobby campaign by a group of collecting societies, music publishers and record producers. The logo of Europe for Creators tries to rip off the logo of @EFF, possibly to create the impression that this is a civil society campaign. Advertisements for commercial interest groups have no place in a video of a political institution.

The video claims that the reform is directed at “large platforms”: In fact, the size of the platform does not matter for the application of #article13, merely whether it hosts “large amounts” of protected content. This can also be the case for a platform run by a single person. The video says a lighter regime applies to platfoms that have an turnover below 10 Million *or* less than 5 million unique visitors. This is just wrong. Actually, the lighter regime only applies if both criteria are met, and platforms are also younger than 3 years old.

Another false statement is that “there is no requirement for platforms to put filters in place”: Yes there is, as soon as a rightholder does not wish to offer a license, para 4 (b) and (c) require platforms to use an #uploadfilter in order to escape liability.

The video says “your memes are safe”: This is misleading. #Article13 says that member states should allow parodies, but the criticism is not that memes will be illegal, but that filters will block them automatically, because they can’t distinguish a parody from ©️ infringement.

At the end, @AxelVossMdEP says that any change to a copyrighted work is allowed under #Article13. It’s not. There’s a list of exceptions in Article 13 (5) that should apply: quotation, criticism, review, caricature, parody & pastiche. Other transformative uses remain forbidden.

Reda then notes that, as a member of Parliament, she has submitted a request to inspect the internal documents that resulted in this video being made and published on the official EU Parliament Twitter feed. I actually think Reda could have gone even further. Beyond the flat out lies by Axel Voss in the video (saying 10 million Euros "or" less than 5 million uniques, and leaving out that those only apply to companies less than 3 years old), Voss also makes this odd statement, saying that if a company qualifies they are "a little bit exempted." How is one "a little bit exempted"? He's actually choosing his words carefully, because he knows that even if you qualify for all three conditions (which will only cover a very small number of platforms) you're not really exempted at all. You just have slightly less onerous conditions thrust upon you.

Of course, with elections coming up in just a few months, it does seem like the EU Parliament may regret this decision. Just skimming through most of the responses to this tweet, it doesn't seem to be convincing anyone of anything... other than that they want to vote the bums out in May.

And there are a lot more like that. Indeed, I don't seem to see anyone actually praising the EU Parliament's decision to post this nonsense, which makes you wonder why they even bothered.

Filed Under: article 13, axel voss, bias, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, eu parliament, julia reda, lies, propaganda

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

from the springtime-for-jack-dorsey dept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appeals Court Judge Tears Into ATF's Life-Wrecking, Discriminatory Stash House Stings

from the more-of-this-please dept

The ATF's stash house stings are one of the worst things about federal law enforcement. And it's a crowded field! Sure, the FBI routinely engages in something approaching entrapment when it turns people with self-esteem problems and/or serious mental health issues into terrorists. But the FBI can't tell a judge how much terrorism to charge defendants with. The ATF stings -- involving imaginary drugs hidden in fictitious stash houses -- give the government the ability to trigger mandatory minimum sentences simply by claiming the fake stash of drugs was more than five kilos -- automatically setting up defendants for 20-year prison terms.

Another victim of the ATF's stash house stings is fighting his conviction in court. Daryle Lamont Sellers hopes to prove the ATF's stash house stings are racially-biased. There's some evidence this is the case. Researchers found sting operations in Chicago netted a disproportionate number of minority suspects. A review of hundreds of court cases by the USA Today showed the ATF targeted minorities 91% of the time.

Sellers says the ATF is engaging in selective enforcement. To do that, he needs information the ATF has on hand, but is refusing to hand over. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has declared Sellers should have access to this information because the claim he's making isn't the same as selective prosecution, which requires Sellers to show more than he has in this case. From the decision [PDF]:

To succeed on his selective enforcement claim, Sellers must show that the enforcement had a discriminatory effect and was motivated by a discriminatory purpose. He is unlikely to meet this demanding standard without information that only the government has. Sellers can obtain this information through discovery if he makes a threshold showing. We must decide what that showing is. We hold that in these stash house reverse-sting cases, claims of selective enforcement are governed by a less rigorous standard than that applied to claims of selective prosecution under United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996).

This is good news for Sellers. And it's potentially good news for others roped in by ATF stings. If he obtains information showing discriminatory motivation, minority suspects are going to have another way to fight these charges in court.

But the entire opinion is worth reading past the opening declaration in favor of Sellers. Judge Jacqueline Nguyen tees off on the ATF in her concurring opinion, pointing out biased enforcement is only a small part of stash house sting operations' problems.

While these operations do “not . . . reduc[e] the actual flow of drugs,”2 the government touts them as an important tool “to catch people inclined to commit home invasions.” United States v. Hudson, 3 F. Supp. 3d 772, 786 (C.D. Cal. 2014), rev’d sub nom. United States v. Dunlap, 593 F. App’x 619 (9th Cir. 2014). But when the government fails to target known criminal enterprises or people suspected of engaging in serious crimes, the practice is highly questionable and raises troubling questions about race-based targeting.

There is no legitimate dispute that these stings primarily affect people of color, but the government has steadfastly resisted any defense attempt to determine whether enforcement is racially biased.

She goes on to point out the government outsources the target selection to informants -- ones who have their own interests to serve and protect. This makes it clear the ATF is searching for dangerous criminals to talk into fake stash house robberies. It's more than willing to take whoever -- which more often than not is a minority with no history of violent crime or armed robbery. From there, the government gets to decide how many years of a suspect's life it's willing to try to take away. Invariably, every fake drug stash is large enough to demand 20-year minimum sentences.

Then she gets right to the heart of the matter: of course the ATF's sting operations are racially-biased. They're based on a bunch of lies, which gives the ATF the opportunity to pick anyone as its fall guy. But the agency always seems to end up arresting the same sort of people.

Law enforcement agents, on the other hand, do not deal with a closed universe of criminal suspects. When conducting a reverse sting, literally anyone could be a target. See Black, 733 F.3d at 315 (Noonan, J., dissenting) (“In the population of this country, there is an indefinite number of persons who dream of clever and unlawful schemes to make money. Does their dreamy amorality cast them all as fit candidates for a sting by their government?”). There is no reason to suspect that persons of a particular race are more likely to agree to commit a stash house robbery unless one believes that persons of that race are inherently more prone to committing violent crime for profit—a dangerously racist view that has no place in the law. If law enforcement agents target potential stash house robbers in a race-neutral way, then the racial breakdown of targeted individuals would presumably closely mirror that in the community. If it doesn’t, then that’s potentially indicative that the agents or their informants are using discriminatory procedures.

This is what the ATF does dozens of times a year. It takes fake drugs and fake stash houses and turns them into real prison sentences. And, so far, it's been getting away with it. But it sounds like courts are beginning to tire of locking people up for unwittingly engaging in the ATF's charades. At some point, this will all come crashing down on the feds, but until then dangerous criminals will continue to walk the streets while down-on-their-luck nobodies serve their prison terms for them.

Filed Under: atf, bias, daryle lamont sellers, entrapment, jacqueline nguyen, stash house, stings

Louisiana's Attorney General Wants To Break Up Google Over 'Bias'

from the fairness-doctrine-gone-mad dept

The latest in this ridiculous political fight over the claimed, but not proven, "political bias" found in search results and social media is that Louisiana's Attorney General says we should break up the big internet companies because of it. He's not even hiding his unconstitutional anti-First Amendment reasons for doing so:

Landry says the internet giants are suppressing conservative agendas, stifling competition, and infringing on antitrust laws.

“This can’t be fixed legislatively,” Landry told The Advocate Tuesday. “We need to go to court with an antitrust suit.”

Again, it's not at all proven that the internet giants are "suppressing conservative agendas." If they were, that would be quite remarkable, given that apparent "conservatives" control the White House, both houses of Congress, the judiciary and the vast majority of state houses. It would certainly then suggest that these internet companies aren't very good at suppressing such an agenda if they really were attempting to do so (and, spoiler alert: they're not).

But, of course, the larger point still stands: this is clearly a government official, looking to use not just executive power, but law enforcement powers, to intimidate companies regarding speech on their platforms. That is 100% unconstitutional. I already detailed a variety of cases that make this point, but it appears that law enforcement officials are going to ignore that, so long as they can politically grandstand on this issue.

But, just to flip this around: would Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry agree that Fox News or Breitbart should be hit with legal action for "suppressing liberal agendas?" Of course not.

Some will say that this is just politicians being politicians, and they'd have a point. But what's absolutely astounding is that some on the other end of the political spectrum are jumping on this just because they so hate Google. Matt Stoller, from the Open Market Institute, has spent the past few years misrepresenting all sorts of arguments concerning the internet companies, and pushing for them to be broken up. He sits very far away from Landry politically, but apparently as long as a politician wants to break up the internet companies (even in violation of the First Amendment) that seems to be cool with him:

After people pointed out to him that Landry was just playing partisan politics, Stoller responded by suggesting that maybe it's for the wrong reasons, but at least someone is trying to break up these companies (despite there being no evidence to support such a move):

Lots of people have key issues that they think are important. For some that may be breaking up the big internet companies. But a general rule of thumb: if you have to spit on the First Amendment to get your wish, you're doing it wrong.

Filed Under: antitrust, bias, jeff landry, monopoly, political bias
Companies: google

There's A Reason That Misleading Claims Of Bias In Search And Social Media Enjoy Such Traction

from the but-it's-not-a-good-reason dept

President Trump's tweets charging that Google search results are biased, against him and against conservatives, are the loudest and latest version of a growing attack on search engines and social media platforms. It is potent, and it's almost certainly wrong. But it comes at an unfortunate time, just as a more thoughtful and substantive challenge to the impact of Silicon Valley tech companies has finally begun to emerge. If someone were truly concerned about free speech, news, and how platforms subtly reshape public participation, they would be engaging these deeper questions. But these simplistic and ill-informed claims of deliberate political bias are the wrong questions, and they risk undermining and crowding out the right ones. Trump's charges against Google, Twitter, and Facebook reveal a basic misunderstanding of how search and social media work, and they continue to confuse "fake news" with bad news, all in the service of scoring political points. However, even if these companies are not responsible for silencing conservative speech, they may be partly responsible for allowing this charge to gain purchase, by being so secretive for so long about how their algorithms and moderation policies work.

So what do search engines actually do when users access them for information or news? Search engines deliver relevant results, nothing more. That judgment of relevance is based on hundreds of factors: including popularity, topic relevance, and timeliness. Results are fluid and personalized. There's plenty of room in this complex process for overemphasis and oversight, and these are important questions to examine. But serious researchers who actually already study this are careful to take into account the effects of personalization, changes over time, and the powerful feedback effects of users. This is a far cry from looking at your own search results and being troubled by what you see. (Even the author of the report Trump was likely reacting to acknowledges that it was unscientific and disagrees with the suggestion that regulation of search should follow.)

To understand, for instance, the results for "Trump" in Google News, or "Trump news" in Google -- different things, by the way -- we would need to consider some much more likely explanations than deliberate political manipulation: major outlets like CNN may publish a lot more content a lot more often; more users may click on, read, and forward links from these sources; outspoken right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit may have much less trust outside of their devoted base than they imagine; CNN may be much more congruent with centrist political leanings than Trump and conservative critics admit; well-established news sources may already circulate more widely and successfully on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, boosting their rankings on search engines; users may simply be more convinced by these news sources, "voting" for them with their clicks and links in ways that Google picks up on.

In truth, there are important questions to be asked about search engines, social media platforms, and the circulation of news online. There are profound concerns about the economic sustainability of journalism itself when it has to compete on social media platforms. There a profound concerns about the subtle effects of how algorithms work. But the noise that right-wing critics are stirring up is not subtle, it is not helpful, it is not well informed -- and more than that, it is clearly about scoring political points. Those claiming political bias seem wholly uninterested in acknowledging the inquiries already underway.

Charges of left-leaning bias are not new, of course. They come from a very old playbook conservatives have used against newspapers and broadcasters for decades. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley is partly to blame for why it is working so well today. Search engines and social media platforms have been too secretive about how their algorithms work, and too secretive about how content moderation works. In the absence of substantive explanations, users have been left to wonder why search results look the way they do, or why some posts get removed and others don't. This uncertainty breeds suspicion, and that suspicion goes looking for other explanations. This leaves room for trolls, conspiracy mongers, and demagogues to suggest that the platforms are silencing them for their political speech -- conveniently overlooking the fact that they been suspended for making hateful threats, or can't reach the first page of search results because readers trust other sources. And Silicon Valley has bruised their users' trust for so long, that even their genuine explanations sound suspect.

Some of the press coverage, when it's not careful, can inadvertently make the very same easy assumptions that these critics do. Search results, trending lists, and content moderation are not the same thing, they are not managed by the same people, and they are not handled in the same way. Too often, a critic will thread together ill-informed charges against search, one outdated incident regarding trending, and continued uncertainty about moderation practices, and lace them together into a blanket charge of bias. But they are simply different things.

It is unnerving to feel like an apologist for these tech companies. There are real and concerning questions about how search and social media work. I ask some of these questions in my own research, and my field has been thinking about them for years. The ways these companies have addressed, or often failed to address, the public ramifications of search algorithms and moderation policies has been deeply problematic. But these questions of bias distract us from the deeper problems.

It is also disconcerting, just as the public is finally grasping the subtle ways in which search and social media platforms matter, that we are ready to fall back on so simplistic a charge as deliberate political bias. I feel a bit like critics of mainstream news media, who for years have tried to highlight the way contemporary US news organizations are subtly centrist, structurally cautious, founded by commercial imperatives, and under attentive to marginalize voices -- who now have to bracket those critiques and come to the defense of CNN when the President dismisses them as "fake news." Those of us who ask hard questions about search and social media should do so, but we must also steadfastly refused to lump these real concerns in with facile, politically motivated charges of bias that miss the deeper point.

Tarleton Gillespie is the author of Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. He is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliated associate professor at Cornell University.

Filed Under: bias, hype, politics, search engines, social media, transparency
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Conservatives: Stop Crying Wolf On Tech Bias Or No One Will Ever Take You Seriously

from the this-is-not-the-bias-you-are-looking-for dept

In an article picked up by Drudge Report and then tweeted by President Donald Trump himself, PJ Media editor Paula Bolyard makes the shocking claim that Google deliberately manipulates its search results to favor left-wing views and undermine the President.

In supporting this allegation, she goes to Google and looks through the first hundred listings on the search engine results page. Therein, she finds that 96 percent of results for "Trump" are from liberal media outlets. Bolyard remarks:

I was not prepared for the blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets. Looking at the first page of search results, I discovered that CNN was the big winner, scoring two of the first ten results. Other left-leaning sites that appeared on the first page were CBS, The Atlantic, CNBC, The New Yorker, Politico, Reuters, and USA Today

She adds that other than Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, traditional right-leaning outlets didn't make the cut:

PJ Media did not appear in the first 100 results, nor did National Review, The Weekly Standard, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, Hot Air, Townhall, Red State, or any other conservative-leaning sites except the two listed above.

Aha! A big tech company caught red handed pushing its progressive agenda. Well...not so fast. Rather than uncovering compelling evidence of bias, this article's author and its promoters merely reveal their ignorance of how search engines work.

First, the author seems to conflate Google Search and Google News, two products which use different algorithms and serve different functions. Google News is a searchable news aggregator and app (with some overt editorial functions), whereas Google Search tries to give users the most useful and relevant information in response to a query.

In order to determine what constitutes a relevant and useful result, search engines use complex algorithms to rank the quality of different pages based on a variety of signals such as keywords, authoritativeness, freshness or site architecture. A big part of this quality determination is based on outside links to a site – an idea going back to Larry Page and Sergey Brin's work at Stanford in the late 1990s that culminated in the creation of the PageRank algorithm.

Page and Brin realized that incoming links to a site served as a proxy for quality markers like authoritativeness, trustworthiness and popularity. Today, Google Search is much more complex, utilizing complex machine-learning functions like RankBrain and an evolving set of algorithms with names like Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin and Pigeon. However, incoming links are still a key factor. Additionally, while Google uses manual quality raters to test new algorithm changes, they do not use them on live search results.

Google News' approach to ranking results is also driven by algorithms that use a number of the same signals (you can get an idea from their patent), with a couple exceptions where manual input is used for editorial features, major events, and cross-over results from Google Search for particular topics.

With this in mind, it should be no great surprise that outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and Washington Post trounce outlets like PJ Media, National Review, and the Weekly Standard in organic search. The sites in the latter group don't have metrics that support them rising to the top of the search algorithm. Of course, PJ Media found Fox and WSJ weren't affected by this "bias" because their numbers are actually comparable to the former group of "left-wing" outlets (see below).

This approach to ranking quality isn't just a Google thing. If you look at competitors like DuckDuckGo or Bing (which PJ Media didn't seem to bother doing), you're going to see pretty similar results. Maybe this says something about the media landscape. But it's not a good reason to storm Mountain View with pitchforks.

PJ Media's conspiracy-mongering is based on an avoidable misunderstanding that could throw gasoline on the techlash and lead to policies that chill American innovation (although at least for now, conservatives still think a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet is a dumb idea).

It's worth saying that libertarians and conservatives aren't totally unreasonable in wanting to investigate whether they're getting fair treatment by tech companies. After all, Silicon Valley is a very liberal place that doesn't always reflect their norms or values (I also say this as someone with generally right-leaning views who has worked for organizations like the Cato Institute and R Street). That being said, if you're going to make an allegation that there's a big conspiracy, you should do your due diligence. This means taking time to understand the underlying technology before jumping to conclusions.

On Google's part, given all of the tensions around bias lately, they would probably be wise to be more transparent about how their news algorithm works and do more proactive outreach to avoid future misunderstandings.

Zach Graves is Head of Policy for Lincoln Network

Filed Under: algorithms, bias, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, google news, journalism, news, search
Companies: google

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

from the stop-this-dumb-narrative dept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rep. Kevin McCarthy Continues The Parade Of Stupid Anti-Internet Grandstanding

from the playing-to-a-dumb-base-is-dumb dept

In the last few months, we've seen a fairly astounding amount of idiotic grandstanding from both parties in Congress, basically trying to out stupid themselves in attacking internet companies. On the Democratic side, they've been peddling incomprehensible nonsense about how internet companies have to stop bad information from spreading (and also some misleading claims about antitrust). On the Republican side, they keep dragging internet companies up to Capitol Hill and making ridiculous and blatantly misleading claims about how they're "censoring" conservatives, which is a bunch of utter nonsense.

And here's the thing: most of the politicians spewing this stuff know it's pure nonsense. But, they also know that it's an effective money raising tactic. When Democrats and Republicans clash over an issue, all too frequently, it's really about riling up people for donations, rather than any actual policy agenda. And it appears it's not going away any time soon. Despite multiple hearings that have only served to make Congress look incredibly hypocritical and/or ignorant, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is now joining the fray, saying he wants Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify about Twitter's made up censoring of conservative voices.

And while I'm not sure whether or not some other members of Congress grandstanding on this issue actually understand what's going on, McCarthy of all people should know better. He actually has at least some history of understanding tech issues better than many of his colleagues. But, apparently, these days, the way to raise money is to make blatantly false or misleading statements against tech companies, and thus, McCarthy feels the need to join in on this silly dog and pony show. I'm sure we'll get another stupid hearing out of it that demonstrates to anyone just how clueless Congress is, but I guess if it gets a bunch of ignorant people to kick in to his re-election campaign, that's all good, right?

Filed Under: bias, censorship, content moderation, grandstanding, jack dorsey, kevin mccarthy, politicians
Companies: twitter