This Week In Techdirt History: September 26th - October 2nd

from the those-were-the-days dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2016, we looked at how the internet of things was fueling an unprecedented rise in DDoS attacks, while the DHS was offering its unsolicitied (and likely unhelpful) assistance in securing it, and we also learned more about the likely reason for the NSA's trove of hacking tools being discovered and published. The CFAA emerged at the center of a political dispute, the California Supreme Court agreed to hear an important Section 230 case, and the DOJ decided that copyright infringement could be grounds for deportation, while the RIAA was going around acting as though SOPA had passed, even though it didn't. Also, in an extremely silly move, four state AGs filed a lawsuit to block the IANA transition, which was quickly tossed out by a judge.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2011, the Senate let the copyright lobby set up shop in the Senate building during the PROTECT IP debate, while the House version of the bill added in a provision covering cyberlockers, an "analyst" from Disney was cheerleading for the bill. Canadian politicians were pushing for their own terrible copyright reform law, while we looked at how the EU's copyright extension was harming classical music. Multiple countries were getting ready to sign ACTA on the weekend, until it turned out that some weren't actually going to do it, even though the US planned to use its signing statement to defend the unconstitutional aspects of the agreement. Meanwhile, Righthaven suffered another huge loss, and continued trying to avoid paying legal fees, though it only succeeded in getting a brief reprieve.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2006, the fight between Google and European newspapers continued with the papers trying to reinvent robots.txt, new companies were trying to find a way to charge money for social media, and we wondered if it was possible to see the actual FCC data on broadband penetration. Microsoft was going after the anonymous person who cracked their copy protection system, the MPAA was touting its bizarre use of DVD-sniffing dogs, and Hollywood was raising the stakes in its claims of the damages from piracy. Meanwhile, a judge sadly agreed with the RIAA that Morpheus had induced infringement, while Limewire was hitting back hard against the RIAA with a lawsuit alleging antitrust and consumer fraud.

Filed Under: history, look back

PS4 Battery Time-Keeping Time-Bomb Silently Patched By Sony; PS3 Consoles Still Waiting

from the tick-tock dept

Over the past several months, there have been a couple of stories that certainly had owners of Sony PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 consoles completely wigging out. First came Sony's announcement that it was going to shut down support for the PlayStation Store and PlayStation Network on those two consoles. This briefly freaked everyone out, the thinking being that digitally purchased games would be disappeared. Sony confirmed that wouldn't be the case, but there was still the question of game and art preservation, given that no new purchases would be allowed and that in-game purchases and DLC wouldn't be spared for those who bought them. As a result of the outcry, Sony reversed course for both consoles specifically for access to the PlayStation Store, nullifying the debate. Except that immediately afterward came word of an issue with the PS3 and PS4 console batteries and the way they check in with the PlayStation Network (PSN) to allow users to play digital or physical game media. With the PSN still sunsetting on those consoles, the batteries wouldn't be able to check in, and would essentially render the console and all the games users had worthless and unplayable.

But now that too has been corrected by Sony, albeit in a completely unannounced fashion.

PlayStation owners wanting to preserve their PS4 libraries well into the future can breathe a sigh of relief, as the system's latest firmware update reportedly fixes a time bomb found inside every console.

While Sony's official patch notes for the 9.00 update strangely make no mention of the CMOS fix, that lack of mention may point to a change in its attitude about PlayStation's legacy platforms. With PS5's backward-compatibility limited (so far) to PS4 titles and in the absence of a major overhaul to its PS Now streaming library of games, taking the step to push an update that nixes the CMOS issue on PS3 as well would be a welcome shift.

So now PS4 owners are off the hook, though whether they know it or not appears to be a matter of whether they read the news about this on sites like this. PS3 owners, meanwhile, don't currently have a fix in place. And that really does highlight a continuing messaging and transparency problem when it comes to Sony and how it treats its PlayStation customers.

Sony has, far too often, had to either reverse course on its plans when its own fans go apeshit, such as when it finally enabled cross-console play for PlayStation games, or instead has had to weather tough public relations and legal storms when it kept to its plans, such as when it removed useful features from the PS3 via firmware update after the public had already bought the console.

It's great that the company fixed this problem for the PS4 owners, but what about everyone else? Why not let people know the fix has been made? Why can't this company communicate?

Filed Under: battery, battery bug, dlc, patching, ps3, ps4
Companies: sony

Top Publishers Aim To Own The Entire Academic Research Publishing Stack; Here's How To Stop That Happening

from the protocols-not-platforms dept

Techdirt's coverage of open access -- the idea that the fruits of publicly-funded scholarship should be freely available to all -- shows that the results so far have been mixed. On the one hand, many journals have moved to an open access model. On the other, the overall subscription costs for academic institutions have not gone down, and neither have the excessive profit margins of academic publishers. Despite that success in fending off this attempt to re-invent the way academic work is disseminated, publishers want more. In particular, they want more money and more power. In an important new paper, a group of researchers warn that companies now aim to own the entire academic publishing stack:

Over the last decade, the four leading publishing houses have all acquired or developed a range of services aiming to develop vertical integration over the entire scientific process from literature search to data acquisition, analysis, writing, publishing and outreach. User profiles inform the corporations in real time on who is currently working on which problems and where. This information allows them to offer bespoke packaged workflow solutions to institutions. For any institution buying such a workflow package, the risk of vendor lock-in is very real: without any standards, it becomes technically and financially nearly impossible to substitute a chosen service provider with another one. In the best case, this non-substitutability will lead to a practically irreversible fragmentation of research objects and processes as long as a plurality of service providers would be maintained. In the worst case, it will lead to complete dependence of a single, dominant commercial provider.

Commenting on this paper, a post on the MeaseyLab blog calls this "academic capture":

For those of us who have lived through state capture, we felt powerless and could only watch as institutions were plundered. Right now, we are willing participants in the capture of our own academic freedom.

Academic capture: when the institutions' policies are significantly influenced by publishing companies for their profit.

Fortunately, there is a way to counter this growing threat, as the authors of the paper explain: adopt open standards.

To prevent commercial monopolization, to ensure cybersecurity, user/patient privacy, and future development, these standards need to be open, under the governance of the scholarly community. Open standards enable switching from one provider to another, allowing public institutions to develop tender or bidding processes, in which service providers can compete with each other with their services for the scientific workflow.

Techdirt readers will recognize this as exactly the idea that lies at the heart of Mike's influential essay "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech". Activist and writer Cory Doctorow has also been pushing for the same thing -- what he calls "adversarial interoperability". It seems like an idea whose time has come, not just for academic publishing, but every aspect of today's digital world.

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

Filed Under: academic capture, copyright, open access, protocols, publishing, research

Tampa Bay PD's 'Crime-Free Housing' Program Disproportionately Targeted Black Residents, Did Nothing To Reduce Crime

from the 'as-much-crime-as-elsewhere-housing'-just-not-nearly-as-catchy dept

It looks like landlords in Florida want to get back to things that made this country great: bigotry, segregation, and oppression. And look who's willing to pitch in! Why, it's that old friend of racists, local law enforcement. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

Since 2013, the Tampa Police Department has taken a hands-on role at more than 100 apartment communities, sending notices to landlords when their tenants are arrested or stopped by officers and encouraging their eviction.

The program, known as Crime-Free Multi Housing, was marketed to landlords as a way to keep violent crime and drug and gang activity off their properties.

Police pledged to create a database of “documented violent offenders, gang members or career criminals involved in your community.” It alerted landlords to tenants arrested for armed robbery and drug dealing.

Sounds like the sort of things cops should be doing. Sounds like a valuable contribution to public safety. Sounds like law enforcement is keeping dangerous crime out of shared housing, improving the living situations of tenants.

That's what it sounds like when the cops talk about it. That's what the surface gloss reflects back to those unwilling to dig deeper. Fortunately, the Tampa Bay Times (which has done amazing work detailing 'pre-crime' harassment programs operated by the Pasco County Sheriff's Office) has dug deeper. What seems like a net gain for public safety is apparently just another way for cops and landlords to target minorities.

[R]oughly 90 percent of the 1,100 people flagged by the program were Black, police records show. That’s despite Black residents making up only 54 percent of all arrests in Tampa over the past eight year.

Believe it or not, the program is less shitty and racist than it was four years ago, when the Tampa Bay Times first started asking questions about it. Once it became apparent there were outside eyes watching, the PD dialed it back a bit, sending out fewer letters and being less insistent about evictions.

But that's not an endorsement of the program's current iteration. Like any other law enforcement organization, the Tampa PD talks a good game about fighting violent crime and keeping drugs off the street. But like most law enforcement agencies, it likes to throw resources at the pettiest of crimes while claiming it's all about ensuring the public's safety.

[T]he program also swept up more than 100 people who were arrested for misdemeanors — and dozens more whose charges were later dropped, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

Despite the damning reporting, the program is unlikely to be altered further or abandoned. The initiative was put in place while Jane Castor was the Tampa Bay PD's police chief. She's now the mayor of Tampa. It's also supported unquestioningly by the Tampa Housing Authority, which handles nearly a quarter or the notices issued by police. Here's the Housing Authority's director of public safety, Bill Jackson, letting Tampa residents know he doesn't think much of the Constitution or due process.

“We don’t need a conviction,” Jackson said. “We just need reasonable suspicion.”

Swell. And here's former police chief, current mayor Jane Castor with a statement that is directly contradicted by the Housing Authority's statement:

“I don’t think that the landlords are evicting somebody based on a notice of arrest,” Castor said.

Well, it looks like that's exactly what they're doing. And the contradictions don't end there:

Police spokesperson Jamel Lanee said in April that police don’t send notices to landlords about “misdemeanor traffic offenses, a misdemeanor arrest of a juvenile or an offense involving domestic violence.”

But the Times review found that 44 tenants had been flagged to their landlord for domestic violence incidents since the program began, along with 13 for small-time drug busts and two for driving with a suspended license.

Despite the unwavering support of officials offering contradictory statements, the program doesn't appear to have any noticeable effect on crime rates and public safety. Reports of serious crimes at participating properties have decreased 28% since 2013. But reports of serious crime have dropped 25% across the city over the same time period.

The entire report by the Tampa Bay Times is worth reading. It shows how the Tampa PD has pursued this program aggressively, making entire families homeless over things like misdemeanor charges (and just charges, not convictions) and criminal acts that took place miles away from the targeted residence or by people who were on the lease but no longer lived at those addresses.

And while the Times notes there have been improvements over the years, it also correctly points out no one felt like reining any of this apparent racism in until reporters started asking questions the PD had no easy answers for. Its current form may be an improvement over its debut model, but it's still little more than a targeted harassment program that makes it easier for landlords to expel black tenants.

Filed Under: crime, florida, police, tampa bay

Ken Popehat White (Again) Shows How To Respond To A Completely Thuggish Legal Threat Letter

from the rhetorically-speaking dept

It's been a while since we've seen a really good response letter to a -- as Ken White likes to call them -- "bumptious" legal threat letter. But here we've got one, courtesy of Ken himself, representing Chad Loder. Loder is a writer who has been calling out propagandist Andy Ngo and The Post Millennial, a propagandist rag that Ngo sometimes writes for. The Post Millennial was apparently sad about that and sent Loder a very silly legal threat:

Here's the text of the letter:

From: Sam Coppola Sent: September 29, 2021 2:29 PM

Subject: The Post Millennial v Loder et al.

UNDER RESERVE

We are special counsel to The Post Millennial ("TPM") who have advised us of various recent posts and allegations you have made publicly and on your Twitter account.

Our client advises us that the posts and allegations are false and misleading (eg: TPM is NOT Ngo's "disinfo site" or a "disinformation website vilifying the Anti-Defamation League", it is an independent news organization; TPM is NOT "run by Andy Ngo", it is a site owned an operated by Matthew Azrieli as is publicly stated on TPM's website. As specifically denied by Andy Ngo, he does NOT provide "kill lists of journalists..."; Our client and TPM are NOT "neo-nazis" and do NOT "publicly incite violence" or "target journalists with death threats", in California State legal proceedings case No 21TRR000739 Chad Loder vs Sarah Mason you falsely believe "...that this account is popular with members of the far-right, including violent extremists" and Exhibit L where you indirectly and purposely falsely publish that "Andy Ngo knowingly defended pedophile Amos Yee", et...) and were done only with malice and intent to harm our client and interfere with its commercial dealings.

Such posts are also a direct violation of Twitter Rules in respect of "Abuse/harassment" since they harassed and targeted our client and Andy Ngo and incited other people to do so including your directed @(TPMadvertiser) tags. Your posts also published private information (a private chat transcript with Sheri Freed) again contrary to law and the Twitter Rules. As you are aware, Twitter has taken these violations very seriously and even suspended the accounts of well known Canadian politicians for abuses such as those made by you.

You are on formal notice to:

1. Cease and Desist publishing any false, misleading, abusive, and harassing posts;
2. Remove all of the unlawful posts;
3. Publish a retraction and apology satisfactory to our client and sent to the public and the clients and customers which you tortiously interfered with.

If you fail to do so within 3 days, our client will be obliged to exercise all other rights and recourse it may have, including without limitation, commence legal proceedings against you without further notice or delay and hold you liable for any and all damages thereto.

PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.

The main block of the 2nd paragraph is almost entirely inscrutable. It throws in some legal jargon but not in any manner that makes sense. The letter mixes up a bunch of things and suggests that TPM might take legal action, but also that Twitter might act? All in all it's nonsensical, but Ken White is the master in responding to these kinds of letters, so I'll let him take it from here:

On whose behalf do you write? You claim to be “special counsel” to The Post Millennial (“TPM”). Congratulations, I’m sure.¹ Yet most of your threat is a gripe about things Mr. Loder said about Andy Ngo, who is apparently an “editor at large” for TPM. (Again – congratulations, I’m sure.) Moreover, after asserting that you represent TPM, you lose track and refer to “our client and TPM.” Do you represent Mr. Ngo as well? You seem intent on distancing Mr. Ngo from TPM, pointing out that he does not “run” TPM. I’m sure everyone understands why you’d want to clarify that. But you also seem to be arguing that criticisms of Mr. Ngo are false and that Mr. Ngo is perfectly respectable. How, then, is it defamatory to associate TPM with him? That was a rhetorical question. Since your legal theories are nonsense, it doesn’t matter.

For what it's worth, the footnote links to this article calling bullshit on a nonsense story spread by The Post Millennial and a few other sites that are focused on driving whatever silly culture war the Trumpist world delights in this week.

It gets better. Ken breaks out his French (thoughtful for the Canadians):

You may believe that you can intimidate Mr. Loder with frivolous legal threats because Canada, despite being quite delightful in many other ways, indulges such vexatious litigation calculated to silence critics on behalf of the thin-skinned, the vengeful, and the cynically partisan. Au contraire, mon ami. The United States, conscious of the dangers of libel tourism and pro-censorship legal systems, has enacted the SPEECH Act, 28 United States Code § 4102. The SPEECH Act prohibits American courts from recognizing foreign defamation judgments obtained under regimes that do not provide defendants with free speech protections as robust as those available under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the laws of the relevant states. American courts have found that there is “no meaningful dispute that the law applied by [Canadian courts] provides less protection of speech and press than First Amendment and [state] law. Canadian defamation law is derivative of the defamation law of the United Kingdom, which has long been substantially less protective of free speech.” (Trout Point Lodge, Ltd. v. Handshoe, 729 F.3d 481, 488 (5th Cir. 2013) (upholding refusal to recognize Canadian libel judgment under SPEECH Act). Any Canadian judgment you obtain against Mr. Loder will be worthless – both because Canadian courts lack personal jurisdiction over him (as also required by the SPEECH Act) and because his speech is clearly protected by American law.

Then, he highlights why it would be equally stupid to file a lawsuit in the US:

Perhaps you plan to sue Mr. Loder in America. It would be my pleasure, M. Coppola, to introduce you and your client or clients to one of our anti-SLAPP statutes. Any suit you file in the United States will fail for multiple reasons, and result in you paying Mr. Loder’s legal fees under an anti-SLAPP statute.

He then goes through all the many reasons, including:

Astoundingly, your threat is based largely on things Mr. Loder or his attorney said in court filings. Such statements are absolutely privileged from defamation claims under relevant law. Cal. Civ. Code § 47(b), Pollock v. University of Southern California, 112 Cal.App.4th 1416, 1430-1431 (2003) (declaration filed in court absolutely protected by litigation privilege); Holland v. Jones, 210 Cal.App.4th 378, 382 (2012) (litigation privilege barred defamation action because it was based on statements “whether true or false or made with malice or without it, in her declaration in [court] proceedings [that] fall squarely within the litigation privilege. They are communications made in a judicial proceeding by a litigant to achieve the objects of the litigation with some connection to the action.”).

Reading this, you get the feeling that Ken was pretty excited to search out any Canadian reference he could think of:

Your threat is also a jumbled, oily poutine of complaints about opinions, insults, and heated rhetoric. But under American law, statements can only be defamatory if they’re provably false statements of fact. “Thus, rhetorical hyperbole, vigorous epithets, lusty and imaginative expressions of contempt, and language used in a loose, figurative sense have all been accorded constitutional protection.”

There are a few more reasons included as to why any such lawsuit will fail (you can go read the whole letter if you'd like) but the final one is also worth highlighting here:

Finally, I am informed that in Canada a defamation defendant carries the burden of proving that a challenged statement is true. This hardly seems polite. In the United States, which values free speech and scorns the censor and the litigious bully, the burden is on the defamation plaintiff to prove that a challenged statement is false. You will fail to carry that burden. Take, for example, your gripe that Mr. Loder described TPM as a “disinformation website vilifying the Anti-Defamation League.” Even assuming this statement were a provable statement of fact – a laughable proposition – your clients’ own words will thwart any effort to disprove it

But, truly, the cherry on top is the closing. As we've seen over and over again, letters that close "please govern yourself accordingly" are hallmarks of lawyerly bullying, so it's nice to see how Ken turns it all around on Mr. Coppola:

Direct all further patently frivolous threats and other communications to me. Kindly govern yourself.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, andy ngo, canada, chad loder, defamation, free speech, ken white, threats
Companies: the post millennial

Daily Deal: Meshforce M3 Mesh Wi-Fi System

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

Replace your old wireless router with the new Meshforce M3 Mesh Wi-Fi System. This flexible dual-band M3 system supports up to 60 devices. Its Wi-Fi coverage provides seamless connection for up to 4,500 sq.ft. - from your living room to your garage. Easy to expand the coverage by plugging more dots to enjoy a better Wi-Fi experience everywhere. This system supports up to 6 dots to build a Wi-Fi system for any home size. Use My mesh app and complete the setup of your mesh Wi-Fi System in less than 15 minutes. Manage your connections and guest network right on your iOS or Android mobile devices, at home or remotely, anytime and anyplace. Get one M3 hub and two M3 dots for $146. Use the coupon code VIP40 to get an additional 40% off.

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

Blumenthal's Finsta Debacle: It Remains Unacceptable That Our Politicians Are So Clueless About The Internet

from the this-is-just-embarrassing dept

Fifteen years ago, the best example of how out of touch elected officials were regarding the internet was Senator Ted Stevens' infamous "it's a series of tubes" speech (which started out "I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday.") Over the years, this unwillingness of those who put themselves in the position to regulate the internet to actually bother to understand it has become something of an unfortunate running joke. A decade ago, in the midst of the fight over SOPA/PIPA, we pointed out that it's no longer okay for Congress to not know how the internet works. And yet, a decade has passed and things have not gotten much better. Senator Ron Johnson tried to compare the internet to a bridge into a small creek. Senator Orrin Hatch has no clue how Facebook makes money.

And now there's a new addition to the list of examples of totally clueless Senators seeking to regulate something they clearly don't understand. This time it's Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has been grandstanding about how he wants to take on the internet since long before he was elected to the Senate. He created the most cringe-worthy media clip of a politician in a while while trying to press Facebook's head of safety Antigone Davis during a Senate hearing on "grandstanding about how we all hate Facebook" (not the actual subject matter, but close enough).

I heard about the exchange before I saw it, but watching the whole thing is even worse than just hearing that Blumenthal seemed to think "finsta" is a Facebook "product or service." If you're somehow as ignorant as Blumenthal, "finsta" is just a slang term for a "fake" Instagram account, where someone doesn't want to be posting under their real name. This can be used to have a more focused conversation, to discuss things you don't want to discuss under your real name, to hide from some people, or for plenty of other reasons. But Blumenthal seemed to think this "product or service" was bad and Facebook should stop it.

Blumenthal (giving his stern politician face): Will you commit to ending Finsta.

Davis (long pause and a very confused look): Senator, let me again explain... we don't actually "do" finsta. What "finsta" refers to is young people setting up accounts where they want to have more privacy. You refer to it as having privacy from their parents, but in my interaction with teens, what I found is they sometimes they like to have an account where they can interact just with a smaller group of friends...

This is a nice diplomatic response to a monumentally confused question. Some people might take that answer and realize that maybe they didn't quite understand what they were asking. But not Senator Blumenthal. Senator Blumenthal doubled down, interrupting Davis:

Blumenthal: Finsta is one of your products or services! [smug face] We're not talking about Google or Apple. It's Facebook! Correct?

Davis (another long pause and another very confused look): F-F-Finsta is slang for a type of account. It's not...

Blumenthal (interrupting again): Okay, will you end that type of account?

I mean, what? How the hell does Blumenthal think that Facebook can magically make people's alias accounts go away? Hell, earlier in the very same hearing... Blumenthal more or less admitted that he had created a finsta account for himself to examine Instagram's friend recommendation engine. And, obviously, there are plenty of good questions to be asked about the recommendation engine and how it works and what it promotes. But the "will you end alias accounts" line of questioning is just bizarrely disconnected from reality.

Even if we were to give Blumenthal the benefit of the doubt, and believe he is honestly concerned that people are able to sign up for accounts under non-real names, that also suggests a serious misunderstanding of a bunch of things about the internet. Facebook actually has long had a "real names" policy, and academic research going back a decade has shown just how damaging that is, especially for marginalized groups and those at risk for various reasons. Forcing everyone to use their real names damages privacy, can lead to stalking, can harm those who wish to explore more controversial topics, and a variety of other things. Automatically assuming that forcing everyone to have a profile under their real name is the best solution is its own kind of ignorance regarding the internet and internet culture. EFF's Jillian York rightly refers to this demand as "the White Man's Gambit," in that it is most often suggested as a solution by white men who don't realize how their privileged position blinds to them to the many, many reasons why people might want to use a "finsta" account for their own privacy and safety.

And this is obviously not the first time Blumenthal has made it clear that he has no interest in understanding the ins-and-outs or details of the internet he so desperately wants to regulate. He was the lead Democratic sponsor of FOSTA and took glee in the idea that the law might cause small internet companies to go out of business. He's also behind the EARN IT Act, which would be a disaster for the internet and encryption, but has hilariously also gotten mad that Zoom's encryption wasn't fully end-to-end even though his own bill would undermine the ability of anyone to offer end-to-end encryption.

So, no, Senator Blumenthal does not get the benefit of the doubt regarding his knowledge of the internet. He has a long history of being confused about how it all works and the impacts of his policy proposals. And maybe, just maybe, before rushing in to sternly judge these internet companies, he could take the time to learn what a "finsta" is.

Filed Under: antigone davis, congress, finsta, ignorance, internet policy, real names, richard blumenthal
Companies: facebook, instagram

The 'Digital Divide' Didn't Just Show Up One Day. It's The Direct Result Of Telecom Monopolization

from the can't-fix-what-you-don't-acknowledge dept

We've noted for a while that the entirety of DC has a blind spot when it comes to discussing the U.S. broadband problem. As in, U.S. broadband is plagued by regional monopolies that literally pay Congress to pretend the problem isn't happening. That's not an opinion. U.S. broadband is slow, expensive, patchy, with terrible customer service due to two clear things: regional monopolization (aka market failure), and state and federal regulatory capture (aka corruption). That the telecom industry employs an entire cottage industry of think tankers, consultants, and policy wonks to pretend this isn't true doesn't change reality.

But notice when regulators, politicians, and many news outlets discuss the problem, it's usually framed in this nebulous, causation free way. About 90% of the time, the problem is dubbed the "digital divide." But the cause of this broadband divide is always left utterly nebulous and causation free. It's almost pathological. Seriously, look at any news story about the "digital divide" in the last three months and try to find one that clearly points out that the direct cause of the problem is regional telecom monopolies and the corruption that protects them. You won't find it.

This phenomenon again showed up this week in a CNET interview with Jessica Rosenworcel, who appears to be the top candidate in the Biden Administration's glacial pursuit of a permanent FCC boss. In the article, CNET talks repeatedly about the U.S. broadband problem without once mentioning that telecom monopolies exist, and are the primary reason U.S. broadband is painfully mediocre:

"According to a study last year by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the US has the highest average monthly internet prices when compared to other countries in North America, Europe and Asia. On average, the monthly bill in the US is $84.37, which includes $68.38 for internet service and $15.99 for equipment rental fees.

"What's become clear is that affordability is a really big issue in the digital divide," she said. "And we're going to need programs like the EBB to help solve it."

Again, please notice how expensive, shitty broadband is just this thing that exists for some nebulous reason. That Comcast, Charter, Verizon, and AT&T have lobbied for thirty years to create a favorable policy environment that harms competition and prioritizes their bloated revenues doesn't even get a sentence. It's just this bizarre act of omission driven by, you'd have to imagine, a fear of upsetting sources and advertisers. Or in the case of politicians and regulators, powerful telecom lobbyists that can make or break your career.

Please notice the word "competition" isn't even used once in an interview with a top U.S. telecom regulator about the state of U.S. broadband, where the primary issue remains a lack of competition. The article almost acknowledges the U.S. telecom monopoly problem when it discusses "digital redlining," or the documented tendency of regional telecom monopolies like AT&T to refuse to upgrade low income or minority neighborhoods (while simultaneously lobbying for laws preventing them from building their own broadband networks). But even here the problem is addressed in this causation-free, nebulous way:

I think the fact that we're having a conversation about digital redlining is a good thing. We've got communities in this country that for too long have been overserved or underserved and overlooked. We've got to figure out how to address that.

Clearly and accurately calling out regional telecom monopolies is just viewed as...impolite in DC and much of the "he said, she said," access-motivated U.S. press. But you can't fix a problem you refuse to even acknowledge. And when it comes to regional telecom monopolization and the corruption that protects it, we're not even beginning to ask the right questions, much less acknowledge the real origins of the problem.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, digital divide, regional monopolization

Facebook: Amplifying The Good Or The Bad? It's Getting Ugly

from the the-mirror dept

When the New York Times reported Facebook’s plan to improve its reputation, the fact that the initiative was called “Project Amplify” wasn’t a surprise. “Amplification” is at the core of the Facebook brand, and “amplify the good” is a central concept in its PR playbook.

Amplify the good

Mark Zuckerberg initiated this talking point in 2018. “I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad,” he said after the Russian election meddling and the killings in Myanmar.

Then, other Facebook executives adopted this notion regardless of the issue at hand. The best example is Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram.

In July 2019, addressing online bullying, Mosseri said: “Technology isn’t inherently good or bad in the first place …. And social media, as a type of technology, is often an amplifier. It’s on us to make sure we’re amplifying the good and not amplifying the bad.”

In January 2021, After January 6 Capitol attack, Mosseri said: “Social media isn’t good or bad, like any technology, it just is. But social media is specifically a great amplifier. It can amplify good and bad. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we amplify more good and less bad.”

In September 2021, after a week of exposés about Facebook by the WSJ, The Facebook Files, Mosseri was assigned to defend the company once again. “When you connect people, whether it’s online or offline, good things can happen and bad things can happen,” he said in his opening statement. “I think that what is important is that the industry as a whole tries to understand both those positive and negative outcomes, and do all they can to magnify the positive and to identify and address the negative outcomes.”

Mosseri clearly uses the same messaging document, but Facebook’s PR template contains more talking points. Facebook also asserts that there have always been bad people or behaviors, and the current connectivity simply makes them more visible.

A mirror for the ugly

According to the “visibility” narrative, tech platforms simply reflect the beauty and ugliness in the world. Thus, social media is sometimes a cesspool because humanity is sometimes a cesspool.

Mark Zuckerberg addresses this issue several times, with the main message that it is just human nature. Nick Clegg, VP of Global Affairs and Communications, repeatedly shared the same mindset. “When society is divided and tensions run high, those divisions play out on social media. Platforms like Facebook hold up a mirror to society,” he wrote in 2020. “With more than 3 billion people using Facebook’s apps every month, everything that is good, bad misogynist and ugly in our societies will find expression on our platform.”

“Social media broadly, and messaging apps and technology, are a reflection of humanity,” Adam Mosseri repeated. “We communicated offline, and all of a sudden, now we’re also communicating online. Because we’re communicating online, we can see some of the ugly things we missed before. Some of the great and wonderful things, too.”

This “mirror of society” statement is being criticized for being intentionally uncomplicated. Because the ability to shape, not merely reflect, people’s preferences and behavior is also how Facebook makes money. Therefore, despite Facebook’s recurring statements, it is accused of not reflecting but increasing the bad and ugly.

Amplify the bad

“These platforms aren’t simply pointing out the existence of these dark corners of humanity,” John Paczkowski from BuzzFeed News, told me. “They are amplifying them and broadcasting them. That is different.”

After an accumulation of deadly events, such as the Christchurch shooting, Kara Swisher wrote about amplified hate and “murderous intent that leaps off the screen and into real life.” She argued that “While this kind of hate has indeed littered the annals of human history since its beginnings, technology has amplified it in a way that has been truly destructive.”

It is believed that bad behavior (e.g., disinformation) is induced by the way that tech platforms are designed to maximize engagement. Thus, Facebook’s victim-centric approach refuses to acknowledge that perhaps bad actors don’t misuse its platform but rather use it as intended (“machine for virality”).

Ev Williams, the co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, said he now believes that he had failed to appreciate the risks of putting such powerful tools in users’ hands with minimal oversight. “One of the things we’ve seen in the past few years is that technology doesn’t just accelerate and amplify human behavior,” he wrote. “It creates feedback loops that can fundamentally change the nature of how people interact and societies move (in ways that probably none of us predicted).”

So, things had turned toxic in ways that tech founders didn’t predict. Should they have foreseen them? According to Mark Zuckerberg, an era of tech optimism led to unintended consequences. “For the first decade, we really focused on all the good that connecting people brings … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough,” he said After the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He admitted they didn’t think through “how people could use these tools to do harm as well.” Several years after the Techlash coverage began, there’s a consensus that they needed to “do more” to purposefully deny the ability to abuse them.

One of the reasons it was (and still is) a challenging task is their scale. According to this theme, the growth-at-all-cost “blinded” them, and they turned so big to be successfully managed at all. Due to their bigness, they are always in a game of cat-and-mouse with bad actors. “When you have hundreds of millions of users, it is impossible to keep track of all the ways they are using and abusing your systems,” Casey Newton, from the Platformer newsletter, explained in an interview. “They are always playing catch-up with their own messes.”

Due to the unprecedented scale at which Facebook operates, it is dependent on algorithms. Then, it claims that any perceived errors result from “algorithms that need tweaking” or “artificial intelligence that needs more training data.” But is it just an automation issue? It depends on who you ask.

The algorithms’ fault vs. the people who build them or use them

Critics say that machines are only as good as the rules built into them. “Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all regularly shifted the blame to algorithms, but companies write the algorithms, making them responsible for what they churn out.”

But platforms tend to avoid this responsibility. When ProPublica revealed that Facebook’s algorithms allowed advertisers to target users interested in “How to burn Jews” or “History of why Jews ruin the world,” Facebook’s response was: The anti-Semitic categories were created by an algorithm rather than by people.

At the same time, Facebook‘s Nick Clegg argued that human agency should not be removed from the equation. In a post titled “You and the Algorithm: It takes two to Tango,” he criticized the dystopian depictions of their algorithms, in which “people are portrayed as powerless victims, robbed of their free will.” As if “Humans have become the playthings of manipulative algorithmic systems.”

“Consider, for example, the presence of bad and polarizing content on private messaging apps - iMessage, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp - used by billions of people around the world. None of those apps deploy content or ranking algorithms. It’s just humans talking to humans without any machine getting in the way,” Clegg wrote. “In many respects, it would be easier to blame everything on algorithms, but there are deeper and more complex societal forces at play. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror and not wrap ourselves in the false comfort that we have simply been manipulated by machines all along.”

Fixing the machine vs. the underlying societal problems

Nonetheless, there are various attempts to fix the “broken machine,” and some potential fixes are discussed more often. One of the loudest calls is for tougher regulation – legislation should be passed to implement reforms. Yet, many remain pessimistic about the prospects for policy rules and oversight because regulators tend not to keep pace with tech developments. Also, there’s no silver-bullet solution, and most of the recent proposals are overly simplistic.

“Fixing Silicon Valley’s problems requires a scalpel, not an axe,” said Dylan Byers. However, tech platforms are faced with a new ecosystem of opposition, including Democrats and Republicans, antitrust theorists, privacy advocates, and European regulators. They all carry axes.

For instance, there are many new proposals to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But, as Casey Newton noted, “it won’t fix our politics, or our broken media, or our online discourse, and it’s disingenuous for politicians to suggest that it would.”

When self-regulation is proposed, there is an inherent commercial conflict since platforms are in the business of making money for their shareholders. Facebook only acted after problems escalated and caused real damage. For example, only after the mob violence in India (another problem that existed before WhatsApp, and may have been amplified by the app) the company instituted rules to limit WhatsApp’s ‘virality.’” Other algorithms have been altered in order to eliminate conspiracy theories and their groups from being highly recommended.

Restoring more human control requires different remedies: from decentralization projects, which seek to shift the ownership of personal data away from Big Tech and back toward users, to media literacy, which seek to formally educate people of all ages about the way tech systems function, as well as encourage appropriate, healthy uses.

The proposed solutions could certainly be helpful, and they all should be pursued. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be adequate. We will probably have an easier time fixing algorithms, or the design of our technology than we will have fixing society, and humanity has to deal with humanity’s problems.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick recently addressed the underlying societal problems that need fixing. “What we see - what Facebook and other social media have exposed – is often the consequences of huge societal failings.” He mentioned various problems with education, social safety nets, healthcare (especially mental healthcare), income inequality and corruption. Masnick concluded we should be trying to come up with better solutions for those issues rather than “insisting that Facebook can make it all go away if only they had a better algorithm or better employees.”

We saw that with COVID-19 disinformation. After President Joe Biden blamed Facebook for “killing people,” and Facebook responded by saying they are “helping save lives,” I argued that this dichotomous debate sucks. Charlie Warzel called it (on his Galaxy Brian newsletter) “an unproductive, false binary of a conversation,” and he is absolutely right. Complex issues deserve far more nuance.

I can’t think of a more complex issue than tech platforms’ impact on society, in general, and Facebook’s impact in particular. However, we seem to be stuck between the storylines discussed above, of “amplifying the good vs. the bad.” It is as if you can only think favorably or negatively about “the machine,” and you must pick a side and adhere to its intensified narrative.

Keeping to a single narrative can escalate rhetoric and create an insufficient discussion, as evidenced by a recent Mother Jones article. The “Why Facebook won’t stop pushing propaganda” piece describes how a woman tried to become Montevallo’s first black mayor and lost. Montevallo is a very small town in Alabama (7,000 people), whose population is two-thirds white. Her race loss was blamed on Facebook: The rampart of misinformation and rumors about her affected the voting.

While we can’t know what got people to vote one way or another, we should consider that racism was prevalent in places like Alabama for a long time. Facebook was the candidate's primary tool for her campaign, highlighting the good things about her historic nomination. Then, racism was amplified in Facebook’s local groups. In the article, the fault was centered on the algorithm amplification, on Facebook's “amplification of the bad.” Facebook’s argument that it only “reflects the ugly” does not hold true here if it makes it more robust. Yet, the root cause in this case remains the same, racism. Facebook “doing better” and amending its algorithms will not be enough unless we also address the source of the problem. WE can and should “do better,” as well.

Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt is the author of The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication

Filed Under: algorithms, amplification, mark zuckerberg, society
Companies: facebook