Netflix Files Anti-Slapp Motion To Dismiss Lawsuit Claiming One Of Its Series Caused A Teen To Commit Suicide

from the even-an-algorithm-is-protected-speech dept

Because Netflix is big, it draws lawsuits. It has been sued for defamation, copyright infringement, and, oddly, defamation via use of a private prison's logo in a fictional TV show. It has also been sued for supposedly contributing to a teen's suicide with its series "13 Reasons Why," which contained a lot of disturbing subject matter that teens deal with daily, like bullying, sexual assault, and -- most relevant here -- suicide. The final episode of the first season contained a suicide scene, one that was removed by Netflix two years after the show debuted.

While undeniably a tragedy, the attempt to blame Netflix for this teen's suicide is severely misguided. The lawsuit filed by the teen's survivors alleges Netflix had a duty to warn viewers of the content (content warnings were added to the show a year after its release) and it failed to do so, making it indirectly liable for this death.

Netflix is now trying to get this lawsuit dismissed using California's anti-SLAPP law because, as it argues persuasively, this is all about protected speech, no matter how the plaintiffs try to portray it as a consumer protection issue. (h/t Reason)

Netflix's anti-SLAPP motion [PDF] points out this isn't the first time teen suicide has been depicted in pop culture, nor is it the first time people have tried to sue creators over the content of their creations. None of those lawsuits have been successful.

13 Reasons Why is not the first work to tell a story about teen suicide. The subject has been explored in countless literary works, motion pictures, songs, and TV shows—everything from Romeo and Juliet to Dead Poets Society. And this is not the first lawsuit that has claimed that the media’s depiction of suicide and violence is to blame, and should be held legally liable, for real-life suicides and other tragic events. Courts, however, have repeatedly rejected such suits.

Since this lawsuit directly implicates creative expression, Netflix says California's anti-SLAPP law applies.

Without question, 13 Reasons Why is protected expression under the First Amendment. And the FAC itself, which is replete with citations to articles about 13 Reasons Why and its subject matter, makes plain that 13 Reasons Why’s speech is in “connection with a public issue.” Plaintiffs try to sidestep the anti-SLAPP statute and the First Amendment by insisting that their claims are not based on the content of 13 Reasons Why, but on an alleged “failure to warn” or breach of a purported duty to protect “vulnerable populations” from the content. But without the allegations that the show’s content is “dangerous,” Plaintiffs’ theories fall apart. Not only do those theories strike at the free expression embodied in the show, they target Netflix’s conduct “in furtherance” of the distribution of the show, and therefore bring this lawsuit squarely within the ambit of the anti-SLAPP statute.

Not only is the content of the series protected expression, but so is the algorithm that possibly recommended the show to the teen. The plaintiffs' "failure to protect" theory argues that Netflix's algorithm is itself reckless and dangerous, given that it prompts users to select titles that may contain disturbing subject matter. But whether or not a human is performing the recommendation makes no difference. It's a form of editorial control which is protected under the First Amendment.

The recommendations system, and the display of suggested titles, is speech. It evinces “[a]n intent to convey a particularized message,” Spence v. Washington, 418 U.S. 405, 410–11 (1974)—namely, a message about what shows and movies a viewer might choose from to watch. The recommendations fall within the well-recognized right to exercise “editorial control and judgment.” Miami Herald Pub. Co. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241, 258 (1974). Plaintiffs allege that the recommendations here are different because they are dictated by an algorithm. But the fact that the recommendations “may be produced algorithmically” makes no difference to the analysis.

[...]

The suggestion that a viewer watch a particular show falls within the broad scope of conduct in furtherance of the right to free speech. The subject of the recommendation—13 Reasons Why—is itself protected speech, and the recommendations facilitate Netflix’s protected distribution and dissemination of that speech.

The plaintiffs' claims can't be separated from the undeniable fact that the allegations are all about creative expression, which is exactly why the state's anti-SLAPP law should apply.

Finally, like Plaintiffs’ failure-to-warn theory, Plaintiffs’ recommendation theory cannot be disentangled from Plaintiffs’ allegation that the underlying content is “dangerous”: the entire premise of the claim is that Netflix had a duty to identify which viewers are “vulnerable,” and ensure that the algorithm does not recommend 13 Reasons Why (or other content Plaintiffs deem unsuitable) to such viewers.

If, as the plaintiffs argue, creators and producers of disturbing content can be held directly liable for the actions of viewers, the end result would be self-censorship and a dearth of options for creators to distribute their creations. Suicide has been the subject matter of countless creative efforts for hundreds of years. A lack of content warnings ahead of viewing doesn't make a viewer's death Netflix's fault. Viewers have control over what they watch and, given the vast amounts of information contained on the internet about movies and TV series, there's little reason to believe viewers have to go into any show "blind."

As tragic as this situation is, the blame (if there even is any) doesn't lie with Netflix. Netflix is no more responsible for this death as the creators of the series or the writer of the novel that inspired it.

Filed Under: 13 reasons why, 1st amendment, anti-slapp, blame, california, liability, protected speech, suicide
Companies: netflix

The Internet Is Not Facebook; Regulating It As If It Were Will Fuck Things Up

from the fixed-that-for-you dept

I've mocked the NY Times for its repeated failures to understand basic facts about internet regulations such as Section 230 -- but the organization also deserves credit when it gets things (mostly) right. Last week, Farhad Manjoo wrote up a great opinion piece noting that, even if you agree that Facebook is bad, most regulatory proposals would make things much, much worse.

He focuses on the blatantly unconstitutional "Health Misinformation Act" from Senators Klobuchar and Lujan, which would appoint a government official to declare what counts as health misinformation, and then remove Section 230 protections from any website that has such content. As Manjoo rightly notes, it's as if everyone has forgotten who was President from 2017 to early 2021 and hasn't considered what he or someone like him would do with such powers:

There’s only one problem: What is health misinformation? I know of no oracular source of truth about Covid-19. Scientific consensus has shifted dramatically during the pandemic, and even now experts are divided over important issues, such as whether everyone should get a vaccine booster shot. Klobuchar and Luján’s bill elides these complications. Instead they designate an all-knowing authority: Health misinformation, the bill says, is whatever the secretary of health and human services decides is health misinformation.

I’m sorry — what? Have the senators forgotten that just last year we had a president who ridiculed face masks and peddled ultraviolet light as a miracle cure for the virus? Why would we choose to empower such a president’s cabinet appointee as the arbiter of what’s true and false during a pandemic? And not just a pandemic — since the law defines a public health emergency so broadly, I wouldn’t put it past a science-averse future secretary from attempting to declare discussions about abortion, birth control, transgender health or whatever else as “misinformation.”

As he notes, so many of the proposals out there fill him "with deep dread" and they should. They're "this is bad, we must do something, this is something" proposals with little regard to (1) whether or not they are constitutional, and (2) whether or not they'd do anything to help with whatever the "bad" thing is. And, a key point, many of them would help Facebook at a moment when Facebook is losing users to competitors:

Rather than curbing the influence of Big Tech, altering Section 230 might only further cement Facebook and other tech giants’ hold over public discourse — because the giants might be the only companies with enough resources to operate under rules in which sites can be inundated with lawsuits over what their users post. Smaller sites with fewer resources, meanwhile, would effectively be encouraged to police users’ content with a heavy hand. It is no accident that Facebook has been telling lawmakers that it welcomes reforms to Section 230 — while smaller sites like Etsy and Tripadvisor are nervous about the possibility.

What's clear (though Manjoo doesn't say it in the piece) is that so many of these regulations are really targeted at Facebook, and don't realize how much they'd impact the wider ecosystem. They're regulating the internet as if Facebook was the internet. And the end result might be that... it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If only Facebook can survive under these regulations, then Facebook becomes the internet.

There is one point in the article that I think is questionable, though. Manjoo spoke to NY Times suer (though he eventually dropped the suit) Larry Lessig, who told him:

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who has been working with Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, told me that some content-neutral rules for online speech might survive constitutional scrutiny — for example, a rule that set an upper limit on the number of times a Facebook post could be reshared.

And... I may not be a Harvard law professor, but that's just wrong. Limiting how often something can be shared is clearly a 1st Amendment issue, because it is the literal suppression of speech. It may be "content neutral" but that's not the only part of the strict scrutiny test used to judge whether or not something can get around the 1st Amendment. They also need to be narrowly tailored, be the least restrictive means to achieve their result and leave open ways for speech to be spread -- and I can't see how restricting how often something can be shared can possibly meet that bar.

Either way, kudos to Manjoo and the NY Times for highlighting that even if you think Facebook is awful, most regulatory proposals would probably make the internet, and Facebook, way worse.

Filed Under: internet regulations, section 230
Companies: facebook

Publishers Want To Make Ebooks More Expensive And Harder To Lend For Libraries; Ron Wyden And Anna Eshoo Have Questions

from the end-of-ownership dept

Techdirt has noted in the past that if public libraries didn't exist, the copyright industry would never allow them to be created. Publishers can't go back in time to change history (fortunately). But the COVID pandemic, which largely stopped people borrowing physical books, presented publishers with a huge opportunity to make the lending of newly-popular ebooks by libraries as hard as possible.

A UK campaign to fight that development in the world of academic publishing, called #ebookSOS, spells out the problems. Ebooks are frequently unavailable to institutions to license as ebooks. When they are on offer, they can be ten or more times the cost of the same paper book. The #ebookSOS campaign has put together a spreadsheet listing dozens of named examples. One title cost £29.99 as a physical book, and £1,306.32 for a single-user ebook license. As if those prices weren't high enough, it's common for publishers to raise the cost with no warning, and to withdraw ebook licenses already purchased. One of the worst aspects is the following:

Publishers are increasingly offering titles via an etextbook model, via third party companies, licensing content for use by specific, very restricted, cohorts of students on an annual basis. Quotes for these are usually hundreds, or sometimes thousands, times more than a print title, and this must be paid each year for new cohorts of students to gain access. This is exclusionary, restricts interdisciplinary research, and is unsustainable.

Although #ebookSOS is a UK campaign, the problem is global, as publishers try to change the nature of ebook lending everywhere. Ron Wyden and Anna Eshoo have noticed that it's happening in the US, and seem unimpressed by the publishing industry's moves, as a letter to the CEO of Penguin Random House (pdf) makes clear:

Many libraries face financial and practical challenges in making e-books available to their patrons, which jeopardizes their ability to fulfill their mission. It is our understanding that these difficulties arise because e-books are typically offered under more expensive and limited licensing agreements, unlike print books that libraries can typically purchase, own, and lend on their own terms. These licensing agreements, with terms set by individual publishers, often include restrictions on lending, transfer, and reproduction, which may conflict with libraries' ability to loan books, as well as with copyright exceptions and limitations. Under these arrangements, libraries are forced to rent books through very restrictive agreements that look like leases.

The letter asks for answers to nine detailed questions about any restrictions imposed on ebook use, the pricing of both physical and digital books, as well as information about any legal actions that have been taken in response to things like multiple checkouts of digital texts, interlibrary loans, controlled digital lending, and institutions making digital copies of physical books they own.

This is a hugely important battle, since it's clear the publishing world sees it as a unique chance to redefine what libraries can do with ebooks. It's part of the much larger, very troubling trend to turn everyone into renters, and to bring about the end of ownership.

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

Filed Under: anna eshoo, ebooks, libraries, publishers, ron wyden

Lessons From The First Internet Ages

from the interesting-discussions dept

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I'm excited to be participating in an event that the Knight Foundation is putting on, curated by law professors Eric Goldman and Mary Anne Franks, entitled Lessons From the First Internet Ages. The event kicks off with the release of reflections on "the first internet age" from various internet luminaries who were there -- but also, most importantly talking about what they might have done differently. I'm going to have a writeup at some future date on my response to the pieces, but I highly recommend checking them all out. In particular, I'll recommend the pieces by Senator Ron Wyden, Nicole Wong, Brewster Kahle, Vint Cerf, Reid Hoffman, and Tim Berners-Lee. I also think that the interviews Eric Goldman conducted with Matthew Prince and Nirav Tolia were both fascinating.

Just to give you a snippet, Wyden's article really is excellent:

I firmly reject the notion that improving our national discourse requires changing Section 230 or the First Amendment to give the government more power over speech. Instead, I wish I had been equally successful at protecting the other essential elements of the open internet: access, competition and personal privacy.

One of the internet’s strengths is its ability to give a megaphone to new voices that don’t own a television station or printing press. Digital activism has made grassroots, progressive politics a stronger force than we’ve seen in more than half a century. It has put a spotlight on police violence against Black Americans and allowed LGBTQ+ communities to organize in ways that weren’t possible before. It has allowed journalists of color to call out their own organizations’ coverage of race. But unless all Americans have the underlying infrastructure they need to access these communications tools, their promise falls short. And right now, far too many Americans still lack reliable, affordable high-speed internet access.

Anyway, for the next two days, there will be some really fascinating panel discussions on these reflections with a bunch of other great and thoughtful folks, including Julia Angwin, Esther Dyson, Daphne Keller, Chris Lewis, Evelen Douek, Jonathan Zittrain, Cory Doctorow, Alex MacGillivray, and many more. It should be a really fascinating for anyone interested both in the history of the internet, as well as its future.

Filed Under: internet, lessons, lessons from the first internet ages, section 230

Hawaii School, Police Department On The Verge Of Being Sued For Arresting A Ten-Year-Old Girl Over A Drawing

from the getting-the-most-oppression-bang-for-your-tax-buck dept

Putting cops in schools is never a good idea. It only encourages school administrators to hand over discipline problems to the "proper authorities," which is what administrators used to be until the addition of law enforcement on campus.

Having cops on tap also appears to encourage parents to demand a law enforcement response to disciplinary problems. That's what happened at a school in Hawaii, where a 10-year-old student was arrested over a drawing another student's parent didn't like. The school -- and the police department that performed the arrest -- are on the verge of being sued by the student and the ACLU.

Here's a brief summary of the incident from the ACLU:

On the morning of January 10, 2020, a parent complained to school officials about a sketch N.B. and other students had drawn in response to another student bullying N.B. The parent unreasonably insisted that school officials call the police.

After arriving on school grounds, police interrogated 10-year-old N.B., handcuffed her with excessive force, arrested her without probable cause, and transported her to the police station—all without letting N.B. see or speak with her mother. The police and school officials took these traumatizing actions despite the fact that N.B. was cooperative and did not pose any danger to any person or herself—and without accommodating N.B.’s disability, which was documented with the school.

The demand letter [PDF] from the ACLU goes into greater detail about the incident, including police officers keeping N.B.'s mother, Tamara Taylor, from speaking to her daughter until after the 10-year-old had been cuffed and transported to the police station. The school did not notify Ms. Taylor that her daughter was being questioned by police and made no effort to ensure the student had any counsel (legal or otherwise) advocating for her or ensuring her rights weren't violated.

Everyone involved in this acted like it was out of their hands, an inevitable series of events stemming from one parent's complaint.

On January 10, 2020, Ms. Taylor received a phone call from Honowai Elementary Vice Principal, Ms. Terri Runge, at 8:42 am about N.B. being in a dispute with another student. N.B. had allegedly participated in drawing an offensive sketch of a student in response to that student bullying her. Ms. Runge asked Ms. Taylor to come to the school, because “they are thinking about calling the police.” Ms. Taylor implored Ms. Runge to not do so and told her she would be shortly on her way.

A Honowai staff member and Honolulu Police Officer Ford greeted Ms. Taylor when she arrived at Honowai Elementary and took her to the school office. Officer Ford then began explaining his presence at school by saying that “some parents take things out of proportion and make things bigger than what they are,” apparently referring to the parent who had insisted that the police be called that day.

Here's an inadvertent demonstration of how terrible law enforcement officers are at de-escalation. Rather than seek a resolution that didn't involve use of force, the officers acted like it was beyond their power to placate an angry parent without arresting a pre-teen over a drawing.

And we are still talking about a drawing -- one that targeted a student who had been bullying N.B. The drawing was apparently a collaborative effort with other students. N.B. did not want the drawing shown to the alleged bully, but another student decided to bring it to their attention. The "target" of the drawing was apparently unmoved by it. Neither were their parents. It was the parent of another child that had seen the drawing that had contacted the school and "asked the school to call 911 on N.B."

Meanwhile, as N.B. continued to be separated from her mother by police officers, everyone with the power to shut this down shrugged around the place bemoaning the apparent impossibility of the situation.

A female officer then entered the room and stated that the parent was going to press charges. Ms. Taylor then asked what the charges were for, explained that she would also stand behind her daughter, and that she did not understand what was going on. Instead of answering these questions, Officer Ford stated that he is a father to an 11-year-old and he did not understand why the parent was acting the way she was acting about the situation. The female officer stated that she has a 7- year-old and did not understand either. Vice Principal Runge appeared and described the complainant parent as being “difficult” and that she had never seen a parent act in such way.

No one could understand why a parent could act this way. Well, maybe the parent acted this way because they knew school administrators and police officers could be weaponized this way. So, instead of anyone stepping up to shut this down, N.B. and her mother found themselves surrounded by a bunch of people with a lot of power claiming they were powerless to do anything but what one parent demanded.

When Ms. Taylor asked why they had called the police when she had specifically asked that they not do so, Ms. Runge responded: “Well, it’s the parent’s right if she wants us to call the police for her.” When Ms. Taylor pushed back, arguing that the school had the discretion not to call the police, Ms. Runge simply reiterated that it was the parent’s right to ask the school to do so.

Yes, the parents have that right. And Ms. Taylor is right, the school has the discretion to reject their requests. No one felt like exercising their discretion that day. So, Taylor's daughter was cuffed, put in a police car, and taken to the PD for processing.

Then there's the racial element. Statements were made by administrators and officers that suggest they would have handled this differently if N.B. wasn't black.

Officer Ford confided to Ms. Taylor that they thought it was best for her not to see N.B. because they did not want Ms. Taylor to “beat [N.B.] at the school.”

[...]

Ms. Taylor also expressed dismay about being forced to stay in the room, to which Ms. Runge explained that they had to stop Ms. Taylor because they saw “fire in her eyes.”

[...]

Ms. Runge also explained that she had prevented Ms. Taylor from leaving the room that day because she was concerned that Ms. Taylor would get arrested for intervening and attacking the other parent or the police.

A bunch of powerful people violated rights because they were too powerless to deny a parent's demand for police involvement and too afraid of what an Angry Black Woman might do if allowed to see her child or confront another parent, despite both Ms. Taylor and her child being fully cooperative during this string of rights violations.

The end result was this:

Even assuming the complaining parent wanted to press charges—and assuming there were valid charges that could be brought against N.B.—N.B. could have easily been surrendered to her mother who was at the school. No one else involved in the drawing incident was arrested or interrogated. No charges were ever brought against N.B., who as a ten year old did not intend to commit a crime with a drawing she did not draw alone and did not even want to deliver. N.B.’s detention and false arrest without probable cause violated her rights to be free from unreasonable seizures under the Hawaiʻi and U.S. Constitutions.

[...]

Ms. Taylor and N.B. were singled out because of their race, both perceived and treated as “more dangerous,” less rational, and less worthy of respect for their rights than the non-Black students and parents involved.

Right now, the ACLU and Taylor are only demanding a raft of changes to school and PD policy when it comes to detaining, questioning, and arresting minors. They're also demanding $500,000 in damages. That demand will presumably increase if the city and PD decide they'd rather defend themselves in court rather than make some common sense changes to policy and put another $500k on the taxpayers' tab.

This all could have been avoided if any one of these very powerful people had actually used their power wisely and deployed the discretion they so often claim is necessary to prevent outcomes like this. If this parent really felt police should be involved, they should have made that call themselves. Instead, they chose to weaponize two bureaucracies to achieve their ends: the punishment of a 10-year-old for offending them with a drawing.

Filed Under: arrests, bullying, hawaii, honolulu, honowai elementary, police, school resource officer, students, tamara taylor
Companies: aclu

Because Of Course: Trump's SPAC Deal May Have Broken The Law

from the on-brand dept

If you thought that Trump's new Truth Social website's potential legal problems with its apparent failure to abide by the license on the open source code it seems to be using would be the worst legal problems facing the site, well, you underestimated The Donald. There's been plenty of talk about the SPAC deal that valued the company at billions of dollars through one of those reverse merger IPOs. But, now the NY Times is reporting that the way the deal was done may have violated securities laws. So on brand.

To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former “Apprentice” contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando.

Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times. That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando’s SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said.

SPACs sell their shares to investors through an initial public offering and then find a private company with which to merge. Because SPACs are empty vessels, stock exchanges allow them to list their shares without disclosing much financial information. But that creates opportunities for SPACs to serve as backdoor vehicles for companies to go public without receiving the kind of investor scrutiny they would in a traditional listing. To prevent that, SPACs aren’t supposed to have a merger planned at the time of their I.P.O.

Ooops.

And it gets worse:

Another issue is that Digital World’s securities filings repeatedly stated that the company and its executives had not engaged in any “substantive discussions, directly or indirectly,” with a target company — even though Mr. Orlando had been in discussions with Mr. Trump.

Given the politically fraught nature of a deal with Mr. Trump, securities lawyers said that Digital World’s lack of disclosure about those conversations could be considered an omission of “material information.”

You don't say.

Of course, given all this, how much do you want to bet that it would be Orlando on the hook for this, rather than Trump? Either way, the NY Times has more details suggesting that, despite Digital World insisting that it didn't have any acquisition deals in place, everyone in Trump world was blabbering on about the SPAC deal they had set to go.

In early July, Phillip Juhan, a former financial analyst who had also been an executive at a bankrupt fitness company, was introducing himself to people as Trump Media’s chief financial officer. He said the company was in an “exclusive agreement” with a SPAC, according to one of the people.

So now the question is, which is going to be more of a problem for Trump's new operation? The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) or the SEC?

Filed Under: donald trump, patrick orlando, sec, spac
Companies: digital world acquisition, tmtg, truth social

California Prosecutors Are Still Trying To Get Signal To Hand Over User Info It Simply Doesn't Possess

from the keep-burning-that-toner,-g-men dept

Encrypted messaging app Signal is slowly educating federal prosecutors on the meaning of the idiom "blood from a stone." Usually this refers to someone who is judgment-proof (or extortion-proof or whatever), since you can't take money a person doesn't have.

This would be the digital equivalent. Prosecutors in California have tried three times this year to obtain data on Signal users that Signal never collects or retains. Issue all the subpoenas you want, Signal says, but don't expect anything to change. We can't give you what we don't have. (h/t Slashdot)

Here we are in the second half of 2021, Signal still knows nothing about you, but the government keeps asking.

Because everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, the broad set of personal information that is typically easy to retrieve in other apps simply doesn’t exist on Signal’s servers. Once again, this request sought a wide variety of information we don’t have, including the users’s name, address, correspondence, contacts, groups, call records.

As usual, we couldn’t provide any of that. It’s impossible to turn over data that we never had access to in the first place. Signal doesn’t have access to your messages; your chat list; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; or even the GIFs you search for. As a result, our response to the subpoena will look familiar. It’s the same set of “Account and Subscriber Information” that we can provide: Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service.

That’s it.

That handles one request from prosecutors in Santa Clara County, California. Another one was greeted with the same response a few days later -- this time from the Central District of California. Apparently the lesson wasn't learned back in April, when the same district made the same request for data and got the same answer from Signal. Two grand jury subpoenas and one search warrant later and the answer remains the same.

The search warrant had a few more wrinkles of the government variety, even if the end result was Unix timestamps. According to the Signal post, the government attached a gag order to this warrant and renewed it four times while being told by Signal that the company had nothing more to turn over in response. There was nothing remotely adversarial about this process. The government made four secrecy requests, got all four granted -- all without acknowledging Signal's motion to unseal. The court also refused to schedule a hearing or even return phone calls from Signal's legal reps.

It seems like the government will keep trying, though. Signal doesn't get hit with many requests for user info, but prosecutors spending the public's money seem willing to define insanity through their ineffective actions. And for companies providing encrypted communications, the best way to protect users is to gather as little info about them as possible. When the government comes knocking, it's sometimes best to have nothing to give it.

Filed Under: california, encryption, privacy, prosecutors, subpoenas
Companies: signal

Daily Deal: The 2021 Complete Video Production Super Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The 2021 Complete Video Production Super Bundle has 10 courses to help you learn all about video production. Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about this in-depth video production bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and here you'll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics, to screenwrighting to the advanced shooting and lighting techniques of the pros, you'll be ready to start making high quality video content. You'll learn how to make amazing videos, whether you use a smartphone, webcam, DSLR, mirrorless, or professional camera. It's on sale for $35.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Forget 'The Kids These Days'; It's The Adults And Their Moral Panics To Worry About

from the truly-devious-licks dept

A recent episode of the Reply All podcast, Absolutely Devious Lick, touched on a bunch of interesting points regarding the never-ending debates about social media, content moderation, and how it's supposedly damaging the kids these days. It's worth listening to the entire episode, but it begins by talking about a very slightly viral TikTok "challenge" which became known as Devious Licks -- lick being slang for something you stole. It started with a kid putting up a TikTok video of him holding a box of disposable masks, suggesting that he had stolen it from the school. Because school kids sometimes do stupid things to copy their stupid friends, a few others posted similar videos, including one early one of a kid taking a soap dispenser. And then there were some stories of it spreading and people going more extreme, because, you know, kids. But it didn't seem to spread that far initially.

But, of course, the thing became a lot more viral after mainstream media jumped on it with their typical "OMG, the kids these days" kind of coverage, starting with the New York Times, CNN, USA Today and then like every random local news jumping on the trend to tsk tsk about the kids these days.

Prominent grandstanding Senator, Richard Blumenthal called on TikTok execs to testify over all of this, which turned into another ridiculous Senate hearing in which old men yell at social media execs about how they're harming kids.

But, scratch the surface a little, and beyond a few dumb kids, this seems a lot more like adults over-reacting and freaking out, and making the story go much, much, much more viral than it did in reality. Indeed, the only news organization I've seen that recognized that most of this was a moral panic by adults was Curbed, which noted that, yes, there was some actual vandalism done by kids, but a lot of it seemed to be kids mocking the trend as well:

For all the real-life vandalism, what is also very real is that some of these teen punks might be punking us all too. One student, Gavino, a 17-year-old high schooler in Minnesota, uploaded a video showing a classroom sink gushing water, describing it as a “Devious Lick” gone wrong. When I contacted him over Snapchat, however, he told me he wasn’t actually trying to poach the faucet. It was broken, so he made a video about it. When I reached out to another student, a 14-year-old, who posted a TikTok stuffing Chromebooks into his backpack, he told me he didn’t even take them out of the building.

“Seeing people do it, others think they can ‘one-up’ the last person and get something better without getting caught,” Gavino said, adding, “It’s just being funny, trying to get five seconds of fame on a big platform.” Said a 17-year-old girl in L.A., who posted a video “stealing” a microscope from her science lab (she actually owned it, and she filmed the TikTok at home), “I made the video because obviously it was trending. Mostly, it’s for internet clout. And to be funny. It’s not a ‘fitting in’ type of thing. It’s literally just for clout, to show off or … whatever.”

Meanwhile, pretty damn early in all of this, TikTok banned the "Devious Lick" tag and told people searching for it to knock it off:

Also, as far as I can tell, none of the media orgs that covered the whole moral panic freak-out noted that a bunch of kids started to counterprogram whatever vandalism occurred in the opposite direction, posting the opposite of "devious licks": angelic yields, where they would show themselves adding new items to schools (often school bathrooms, since so many of the devious licks stories were about soap and toilet paper being taken from bathrooms).

And that brings us back around to the Reply All episode, which followed a secondary freak-out, after the Devious Licks challenge, in which a document was being passed around claiming to have pre-planned a bunch of other "challenges" for kids in school throughout the rest of the school year. Each month, the posting suggested, kids were planning to do crazy stupid shit (I mean, more crazy and more stupid than any normal teenager) in schools... for TikTok. But, as Reply All's Anna Foley noted, everything about the story just seemed weird -- including (1) teenagers actually planning shit out for an entire school year, and (2) the language on the document didn't sound at all like kids ("slap a teacher on the backside"?!?!?).

Foley started investigating and... basically tracked it down to adults freaking out. She found a School Resource Officer (SRO) who had been early posting the list to Facebook, who didn't seem particularly concerned at all whether or not it was accurate or not -- taking the typical "better safe than sorry" kind of approach. And from there, she traced it back to a school superintendent who claimed she had gotten it from students, though wouldn't say who. But what becomes pretty clear is that almost no kids were passing it around or seriously considering it.

Indeed, there's a hilarious moment in the podcast in which Foley quotes posts from kids laughing and mocking all the adults falling for this nonsense.

It's hard not to look at this like any other moral panic by adults who somehow have forgotten what it's like to be a teenager. Are there teenagers doing stupid stuff -- including some theft and vandalism? Yes, of course. Because that's something teenagers do. I mean, I did stupid shit as a teenager too. But, the idea that this is something new, or is caused by social media doesn't really get much support in reality. It does seem like the real "disinformation" came from the adults, not the kids, and the people who bought into it were the adults, not the kids -- and the leading vector of it being sent around was the mainstream media, not social media.

But I don't see Senator Blumenthal calling the head of CNN, the NY Times, and USA Today to come testify about their role in spreading "devious lick" news to gullible adults. Because then he'd have to admit that he, too, is a silly gullible adult.

Filed Under: adults, devious licks, kids, moral panic, pranks, social media
Companies: facebook, tiktok

It's Ridiculous The 'Developing World' Wasn't Given Access To The Facebook Files

from the do-this-the-right-way dept

By now it's fairly clear the Facebook leaks showcase a company that prioritized near-mindless international growth over the warnings of their own experts. They also show a company that continues to painfully struggle to be even marginally competent at scale, whether we're talking about content moderation or rudimentary customer service. While this has become an all-encompassing media spectacle, the real underlying story isn't particularly unique. It's just a "growth for growth's sake" mindset, where profit and expansion trumped all reason. It just happens to be online, and at unprecedented international scale.

One thing I haven't seen talked a lot about is the fact that if you look back a few years, an awful lot of of folks in developing nations saw these problems coming a mile away, long before their Western counterparts. For a decade, international activists warned repeatedly about the perils of Facebook's total failure to understand the culture/regulations/language/norms of the countries they rapidly flooded into. Yet bizarrely, Frances Haugen's PR team somehow excluded most of these countries when it came time to recently release access to the Facebook files:

The "consortium" handling release of the files is basically a loose collaboration between 17 U.S. news orgs and a handful of European outlets. They're all being given access to redacted versions of documents Haugen provided the Securities and Exchange Commission, showing Facebook repeatedly prioritized growth and profit over, well, everything else. The whole thing was handled by Haugen's PR team via an ordinary embargo, which some oddly saw as itself somehow nefarious (it's not, embargoes, though often kind of stupid, are commonly used to maximize impact).

The real problem was who was included in that consortium. And a bigger problem, oddly not talked about until a month into the Facebook leak news cycle, was that much of the developed world was just... excluded... from the coalition by her PR reps. The exclusion of academics and researchers that could make the most sense of the data was a problem. But restricting analysis to most white, western newsrooms, (despite Haugen's very clear understanding that most of Facebook's impact problems disproportionately harmed developing nations) is particularly odd and tasteless.

For all the problems Facebook (sorry, Meta) has had in the United States in regards to managing the company's platform at scale, those problems have been dramatically worse internationally. Facebook was so excited to flood into dozens of international locations to wow investors, they didn't dedicate the time, resources, or attention needed to actually understand what they were doing. Even if they had (and the whistleblowers keep showing they absolutely didn't), the sheer scale of the expansion made it impossible to do well. That Facebook did so anyway despite being warned about it is an act of greed and hubris.

It was actually a net neutrality debate that keyed many overseas activists into Facebook's problems more than a decade ago. Activists in India were particularly sensitive to Facebook's attempts to conflate "the internet" with Facebook in developing nations. If you recall, activists in India successfully derailed Facebook's Free Basics program, which was Facebook's attempt to corner developing nation ad markets under the banner of altruism.

Basically, it involved Facebook striking deals with local wireless companies to offer discounted access to Facebook, under claims that aggressively curated version of "online" was better than no online access at all. It was a highly curated walled garden bastardized variation of AOL or CompuServe, in which Facebook decided what information, services, and resources mattered (they initially even banned encrypted services). But activists and international experts were quick to see the problem with giving Facebook this kind of power, especially in countries they didn't take the time to understand.

We've seen repeatedly how conflating "Facebook" with "the internet" (or Whatsapp with "the internet") has created a laundry list of problems that are especially pronounced in developing nations. The centralized approach of programs like Free Basics defeated the purpose of the open internet, reduced transparency, was a big boon for authoritarian governments, and helped create an even more potent funnel for propaganda. One recurring theme in whistleblower accounts is that Facebook's own researchers generally warned about all of this, repeatedly, but were ignored for profit and growth's sake.

As early as 2015 organizations like Mozilla were busy arguing that if Facebook genuinely cared about information access in developing nations, they should simply fund access to the internet itself. Facebook was ultimately forced to back off its plan in some countries like India and Egypt, but if you were a reporter or activist in these countries who pointed out the problems with Facebook's ambition, you were accused of being an enemy of the poor. When the Free Basics brand became toxic, Facebook just named Free Basics something else (sound familiar?).

There has been some valid and not so valid criticism of the way Haugen handled these latest revelations. Some have tried to argue that because she was smart enough to hire lawyers and a PR team to maximize impact she can't possibly be technically seen as a "whistleblower." There was also some brief hyperventilation over a Politico report, with some trying to claim that because she had received some money from investor Pierre Omidyar, she shouldn't be taken seriously. But a shrewd, organized whistleblower is still a whistleblower, and Omidyar proxy groups actually just funded whistleblower orgs Haugen was part of after she went public. It's actually a good thing to see a whistleblower do the right thing and not be economically and reputationally devastated for once.

But it's both weird and telling that people freaked out about these perceived injustices, but didn't notice that the whistleblower's PR coalition apparently just forgot the developing world existed:

Nobody I've talked to so far at news organizations seems clear why this seems to have happened (a strange decision for an effort geared toward greater transparency). It's not like it would be particularly difficult to coordinate the release via the same organizations in places like India that warned about Facebook's consolidated power almost a decade ago (see: IFEX). Some outlets, like Gizmodo, have been trying to expand access to the source documents to everyone. That's apparently to the chagrin of Haugen's PR team, who seems to think they can put the genie back in the bottle.

There was a certain hubris in Facebook stumbling its way across the developing world in a quest for growth without bothering to understand the impact their platform would have on foreign cultures. But there's a fairly substantial amount of hubris in excluding these developing nations from accessing raw data on a problem they've disproportionally been harmed by.

Filed Under: bias, developing nations, facebook files, facebook papers, frances haugen, india, journalists
Companies: facebook, meta