Twitter Is Just The Beginning Of Jack Dorsey's Speech Revolution

from the decentralization-ftw dept

Jack Dorsey has left Twitter, which he co-founded and ran for more than a decade. Many on the American political right frequently accused Dorsey and other prominent social media CEOs of censoring conservative content. Yet Dorsey doesn't easily fit within partisan molds. Although Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube, its founder's approach to free speech and interest in decentralized initiatives such as BlueSky make Dorsey one of the more interesting online speech leaders of recent years. If you want to know what the future of social media might be, keep an eye on Dorsey.

Twitter has much in common with other prominent "Big Tech" social media firms such as Facebook and Google-owned YouTube. Like these firms, Twitter is centralized, with one set of rules and policies. Twitter is nonetheless different from other social media sites in important ways. Although often discussed in the context of "Big Tech" debates, Twitter is much smaller than Facebook and YouTube. Only about a fifth of Americans use Twitter and most are not active on the platform, with 10 percent of users being responsible for 80 percent of tweets. Despite its relatively small size, Twitter is often discussed by lawmakers because of its outsized influence among cultural and political elites.

Republican lawmakers' focus on Twitter arose out of concerns over its content moderation policies. Over the last few years it has become common for members of Congress to decry the content moderation decisions of "Big Tech" companies. Twitter is often lumped together with Facebook and YouTube in such conversations, which is a shame given Dorsey's views on free speech.

Dorsey has been more supportive of free speech than many on the American political right might think. Did Twitter, under Dorsey's leadership, adhere to a policy of allowing all legal speech? Of course not. Did Twitter sometimes inconsistently apply its policies? Yes.

But no social media site could allow all legal speech. The wide range of awful but lawful speech aside, spam and other intrusive legal speech would ruin the online experience. Any social media site with millions or billions of users will experience false positives and false negatives while implementing a content moderation policy.

Yet Dorsey defended keeping former President Trump's Twitter account live, and expressed concern about suspending Trump's Twitter account in the wake of the January 6th coup attempt.

It became clear in the last few years that Dorsey is open to new ideas that may end up being considered mainstream eventually. We are still in the early years of the Internet and social media and users are used to centralized platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But, increasingly, there are decentralized alternatives, and a few years ago Dorsey announced the decentralized social media project BlueSky, with the goal of moving Twitter over to such a system eventually.

Dorsey has not been shy about his passion for decentralization, citing the cryptocurrency bitcoin as a particular influence, "largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be."

I predict that in the coming years decentralized social media will gradually become more popular than current centralized platforms. As I wrote earlier this year:

"Americans across the political spectrum may look to decentralized social media and cryptocurrencies if their political allies continue to criticize household name firms. Those involved in protest movements as varied as Black Lives Matter and #StopTheSteal are especially likely to embrace such alternatives given their experiences with surveillance.

But Americans fed up with what they perceive to be politically‐motivated content moderation and Big Tech's irresponsible approach to harassment and misinformation may also join an exit from popular platforms and use decentralized alternatives. If they do, members of Congress upset over the spread of specific political content, COVID 19 misinformation, and election conspiracy theories will have to reach beyond Big Tech and grapple with decentralized systems where there is no CEO to subpoena or financial institution to investigate."

Such platforms can embrace a Twitter-like aesthetic. Mastodon, a decentralized and open source social media service, looks very similar to Twitter, allowing users to send "toots." Gab, a right wing social media network, which also mimics Twitter, became a Mastodon fork in 2019 after adopting Mastodon software. As policy fights over "Big Tech" and online speech continue, we should not be surprised if more people across the political spectrum adopt decentralized social media.

Dorsey clearly believes in a future where decentralized social media replaces centralized online speech platforms. If he is vindicated in that prediction it is likely that Dorsey's legacy will be more bound to his work in decentralization more than his career at Twitter.

Matthew Feeney is the director of Cato’s Project on Emerging Technologies, where he works on issues concerning the intersection of new technologies and civil liberties.

Filed Under: bluesky, decentralization, free speech, jack dorsey
Companies: twitter

Filecoin Foundation Ensuring That SecureDrop Can Continue To Help Whistleblowers And Journalists

from the some-good-news dept

Earlier this year we were excited to see the Filecoin Foundation give the Internet Archive its largest donation ever, to help make sure that the Internet Archive is both more sustainable as an organization, and that the works it makes available will be more permanently available on a more distributed, decentralized system. The Internet Archive is a perfect example of the type of organization that can benefit from a more distributed internet.

Another such organization is the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which, among its many, many projects, maintains and develops SecureDrop, the incredibly important tool for journalists and whistleblowers, which was initially developed in part by Aaron Swartz (as DeadDrop). So it's great to see that the Freedom of the Press Foundation has now announced the largest donation it has ever received, coming from the Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web (the sister organization of the Filecoin Foundation):

Today, for the first time, that calculus has changed. We’re thrilled to announce the largest grant in the history of Freedom of the Press Foundation that will ensure SecureDrop survives — and thrives — for years to come. The Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web — a new grantmaking organization whose mission is to permanently preserve humanity’s most important information — is funding FPF at over $1.7 million for each of the next three years, for a total of $5.8 million.

The funding will largely go towards sustaining and expanding our SecureDrop team, funding the development of the next-generation of the system, including exploring a new zero-trust architecture for the decentralized servers. This grant will ensure that SecureDrop will not only be sustainable over the long term, but will be easier to use and hopefully safer than ever. In short, it will have a game-changing impact on how we can build and improve SecureDrop for journalists around the world. You can read about some of our technical plans for the future here.

This is great to see as SecureDrop is another one of those tools that is so key, but as an open source project is often in a precarious position without the financial support to make sure that there is active development.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, decentralization, filecoin, free speech, journalism, securedrop, whistleblowers
Companies: filecoin foundation, freedom of the press foundation

Facebook's Downtime And Why Protocols Are More Resilient Than Centralized Platforms

from the did-you-miss-stuff dept

As you know by now, much of the tech news cycle yesterday was dominated by the fact that Facebook appeared to erase itself from the internet via a botched BGP configuration. Hilarity ensued -- including my favorite bit about how Facebook's office badges weren't working because they relied on connecting to a Facebook server that could no longer be found (also, how in borking their own BGP, Facebook basically knocked out their own ability to fix it until they could get the right people who knew what to do to have physical access to the routers).

But in talking to people who were upset about being cut off from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, it was a good point to remind people that another benefit of a protocols, not platforms approach to these things is that it's way more resilient. If you're using Messenger and it's down, but can easily swap in a different tool and continue to communicate that's a much better, more resilient solution than relying on Facebook not to mess up. And that's on top of all the other benefits I laid out in my paper.

In fact, a protocols approach also creates more incentives for better uptime from services, since continually screwing up for extended periods of times doesn't just mean losing ad revenue for a few hours, but it is much more likely to lead people to permanently switch to an alternative provider.

Indeed, a key part of the value of the internet, originally, was in its resiliency of being highly distributed, rather than centralized, and how it could continue to work well if one part fell off the network. The increasing centralization/silo-ization of the internet has taken away much of that benefit. So, if anything, yesterday's mess should be seen as another reason to look more closely at a protocols-based approach to building new internet services.

Filed Under: bgp, decentralization, downtime, platforms, protocols
Companies: facebook

Jack Dorsey Explains The Difficult Decision To Ban Donald Trump; Reiterates Support For Turning Twitter Into A Decentralized Protocol

from the good-to-see dept

Last Friday, Twitter made the decision to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform, which I wrote about at the time, explaining that it's not an easy decision, but neither is it an unreasonable one. On Wednesday, Jack Dorsey put out an interesting Twitter thread in which he discusses some of the difficulty in making such a decision. This is good to see. So much of the content moderation debate often is told in black and white terms, in which many people act as if one answer is "obvious" and any other thing is crazy. And part of the reason for that is many of these decisions are made behind close doors, and no one outside gets to see the debates, or how much the people within the company explore the trade-offs and nuances inherent in one of these decisions.

Jack doesn't go into that much detail, but enough to explain that the company felt that, given the wider context of everything that happened last week, it absolutely made sense to put in place the ban now, even as the company's general stance and philosophy has always pushed back on such an approach. In short, context matters:

Here's his thread in plaintext:

I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?

I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.

That said, having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications. While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us. Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.

The check and accountability on this power has always been the fact that a service like Twitter is one small part of the larger public conversation happening across the internet. If folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another internet service. This concept was challenged last week when a number of foundational internet tool providers also decided not to host what they found dangerous. I do not believe this was coordinated. More likely: companies came to their own conclusions or were emboldened by the actions of others. This moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet. A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.

Yes, we all need to look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement. Yes, we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm. Yes, we need more transparency in our moderation operations. All this can’t erode a free and open global internet.

I fear that many will miss the important nuances that Jack is explaining here, but there are a few overlapping important points. The context and the situation dictated that this was the right move for Twitter -- and I think there's clear support for that argument. However, it does raise some questions about how the open internet itself functions. If anything, this tweet-thread reminds me of when Cloudlflare removed the Daily Stormer from its service, and the company's CEO, Matthew Prince highlighted that, while the move was justified for a wide variety of reasons, he felt uncomfortable that he had that kind of power.

At the time, Prince called for a wider discussion on these kinds of issues -- and unfortunately those discussions didn't really happen. And so, we're back in a spot where we need to have them again.

The second part of Jack's thread highlights how Twitter is actually working to remove that power from its own hands. As he announced at the end of 2019, he is exploring a protocol-based approach that would make the Twitter system an open protocol standard, with Twitter itself just one implementation. This was based, in part, on my paper on this topic. Here's what Jack is saying now:

The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be. We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky.

This will take time to build. We are in the process of interviewing and hiring folks, looking at both starting a standard from scratch or contributing to something that already exists. No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency. I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.

There had been some concern recently that, since nothing was said about the Bluesky project in 2020, Twitter had abandoned it. That is not at all true. There have been discussions (disclaimer: I've been involved in some of those discussions) about how best to approach it and who would work on it. In the fall, a variety of different proposals were submitted for Twitter to review and choose a direction to head in. I've seen the proposals -- and a few have been mentioned publicly. I've been waiting for Twitter to release all of the proposals publicly to talk about them, which I hope will happen soon.

Still, it's interesting to see how the latest debates may lead to finally having this larger discussion about how the internet works, and how it should be managed. While I'm sure Jack will be getting some criticism (because that's the nature of the internet), I appreciate that his approach to this, like Matthew's at Cloudflare, is to recognize his own discomfort with his own power, and to explore better ways of going about things. I wish I could say the same for all internet CEOs.

Filed Under: content moderation, decentralization, donald trump, jack dorsey, platforms, power, protocols
Companies: twitter

Why Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency Is Both More Interesting Than Expected And Less Interesting Than I Hoped

from the well,-it's-something dept

After lots and lots of speculation, Facebook finally officially announced its cryptocurrency project last week, with a big event and a white paper that loosely describes the plans for the cryptocurrency called Libra. There was a lot to discuss, so in the spirit of slow news, I wanted to take some time to actually digest the plans before opining on it more thoroughly. Nearly all of the immediate reaction to the plan that I saw was not just negative, but mockingly so. Lots of jokes about "ZuckBucks" and the most common line of all: "who would actually trust Facebook with your money."

Having spent time actually reading the white paper, as well as much of the commentary around it, as well as talking to a bunch of different people -- some who are supportive of the program, some who are not at all supportive, and one very knowledgeable friend who basically rated the whole program as a big "meh" -- my initial take is that the effort is in many ways a lot more interesting than I expected, but a lot less interesting than I hoped, and I don't think anyone can really have much of a sense of what will become of it until we learn more.

More Interesting Than Expected

So, let's start with why it's a lot more interesting than I expected. And I'll note that, in addition to reading the white paper, I also highly recommend John Constine's writeup about Libra at TechCrunch, which is by far the most thorough and detailed analysis of the program. So what made Libra more interesting than I expected is that you can tell that a massive amount of effort and thought went into dealing with a single giant question: no one's going to trust this, because no one trusts Facebook. The people designing this clearly knew that their biggest challenge was the fact that there's massive global distrust of Facebook, and really bent over backwards to respond to that. I had kind of expected -- like many big companies -- that the koolaid inside would lead them to pretend that the distrust and hatred directed towards the company wasn't that big of a deal. But, no, it's clear that from the start, this was designed to answer many of the questions raised by "the... but why would anyone trust Facebook" question.

Indeed, in a big Wired "behind the scenes" profile of the Libra project, Libra creator Dave Marcus more or less says exactly that:

Marcus, then head of Facebook Messenger, thought he had an answer. He texted his boss and told him it was time to talk about Facebook creating a cryptocurrency, saying that he had a clear view of how to do it, in a way that would earn trust even from those skeptical of Facebook. Marcus spent the next few days writing a memo that laid out his ideas.

Later, the article notes:

Libra’s greatest hurdle may well be overcoming the tarnished reputation of its creator. Marcus knows this, and thinks that the key is making sure that Libra is not synonymous with Facebook.

And you can see that in many, many elements of the design. Over and over again you see decisions that effectively take Facebook's vision out of the equation. It's set up an outside non-profit, the Libra Association, which will oversee the project. It's recruiting "founding members" who will (mostly) pay $10 million to become a validator node, and Facebook itself will just be a single member with a single vote. In effect, while Facebook is building the initial scaffolding, it's setting the project free from its own direct control. The code is open sourced and can be audited. While Facebook has also set up a separate subsidiary, Calibra, that has built a wallet product that will integrate with various Facebook messaging products, it has isolated Libra information from the rest of the data it collects on you, so this isn't going into the big data bank of info that you already don't trust Facebook to keep private.

If you're actually concerned about trusting Facebook, Facebook has made a rather Herculean effort to make it clear that to use Libra you don't actually have to trust Facebook. But, that's only true with two big caveats. First, you have to concern yourself enough to read the details. Not many people are going to do that. Second, you do still need to trust all the other validator node operators, which right now make up a rather motley mix of big organizations.

Because unlike most cryptocurrencies where anyone can effectively become a node in the open ledger, Libra made the choice to, at least initially, limit that to a bunch of founding members who will act as nodes. The reasoning behind this design choice is pretty obvious. For one, you can set it up in a way that doesn't have the scaling/energy concerns of a Bitcoin. Also, doing it this way can be seen as less chaotic and subject to questionable behavior as a fully distributed/trustless setup of Bitcoin or Ethereum, but you still have a bunch of large, mostly "respected" organizations acting as validator nodes, meaning that for something to go horribly wrong, a bunch of those big organizations would have to all agree to do something really, really bad. And that seems... unlikely. Not impossible. But unlikely.

The initial members are an interesting, and slightly eclectic, mix:

Payments: Mastercard, PayPal, PayU (Naspers’ fintech arm), Stripe, Visa

Technology and marketplaces: Booking Holdings, eBay, Facebook/Calibra, Farfetch, Lyft, Mercado Pago, Spotify AB, Uber Technologies, Inc.

Telecommunications: Iliad, Vodafone Group

Blockchain: Anchorage, Bison Trails, Coinbase, Inc., Xapo Holdings Limited

Venture Capital: Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Union Square Ventures

Nonprofit and multilateral organizations, and academic institutions: Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking

The non-profits don't have to pay the $10 million entry fee. The others do, if they decide to buy in, though the Wired piece notes in passing that this initial list has not actually committed to buying in yet:

Actually, all of those are provisional partners. At this point, their participation in the association doesn’t mean they’ve committed to paying $10 million to become a Libra node. The partners seem motivated by curiosity, FOMO, and a shared dream with Facebook that the effort could be both a boon to their ambitions in underserved economies and a milestone in the evolution of digital currency. But they have varying degrees of enthusiasm.

As Joshua Gans of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, one of the launch partners, puts it, the members have thus far been invited to a kind of constitutional convention. “It’s entirely possible not everyone stays part of the union after that,” he says.

Wired also notes that many of these organizations agreed to this in just the last few weeks. And, Facebook has made it clear that its goal is to have 100 members by the actual launch in 2020. In short, the partner list could change a lot. And, as many people have pointed out, that even if they recognize that you don't need to trust Facebook to make use of Libra, they don't trust a lot of those participants. There also aren't any banks. Or any of the other really big tech companies (most of the tech partners are a tier down). How this all shakes out in the long run is going to be very, very important.

The other interesting tidbit is that it's clear that the Libra team wanted to deal with the other big issue with many cryptocurrencies: that the volatility makes it mostly useless as a currency, since everyone is using it as a speculative vehicle. Libra is set up so that the currency will be fully backed by a reserve of real assets to make it stable. There are a few other "stablecoins" out there, but they're not all that popular and, in some cases, such as with Tether, it's long been accused of being a scam and not actually backed by dollars as promised (accusations that gained more credibility recently). However, given the players backing Libra, and the setup of the program, many of those kinds of concerns can be dealt with.

I've seen multiple reports saying that rather than thinking of Libra as another cryptocurrency, it's probably best thought of as another Paypal or Venmo. Indeed, you could say that the only time the cryptocurrency/blockchain part matters is for getting the currency out of Facebook's ecosystem. That is, if you use Calibra inside of a Facebook service, it's really little more than an internal currency. What's partly interesting, is that if you want to then move it out of Facebook's control, then the blockchain aspect takes over and you get to extract yourself. That's good.

But, to me, the better comparison, rather than Paypal or Venmo, is really WeChat in China. The whole Libra setup (as well as Calibra) seems like a fairly obvious attempt to recreate what WeChat has done. If you're not familiar with it, WeChat is not just like the Facebook of China, it's the everything China. People pay for nearly everything directly within WeChat. Without WeChat in China you basically can't do anything. It seems pretty clear that Libra is an attempt to try to build that kind of functionality into Facebook, and to do it in a way that the currency aspect flows smoothly, without too much friction. That's interesting in a lot of ways, because there's been a lot of innovation coming out of WeChat, and showing what can be done when you integrate connectivity with currency.

Less Interesting Than Hoped

However, that last point is also why this whole thing is a lot less interesting than I hoped. Recreating what WeChat has done in China, and doing so in a way that is more open, and with less control by Facebook is interesting -- and if it's actually adopted could lead to some new innovations. But it's not nearly as far as I had hoped Facebook might go. I've been talking about this protocols instead of platforms concept for a while now -- and one element that could make that work is a better cryptocurrency or tokenization system that would open up new business models that don't rely on advertising. And I had hoped that Facebook's foray into cryptocurrency might include that element. But it clearly does not.

While part of Libra is the new Move programming language that will let people develop on top of the Libra blockchain, this does not seem designed for a world of protocols instead of platforms. It's very much about integrating money into existing platforms. That's understandable, but disappointing.

That's not to say Libra isn't ambitious and couldn't lead to more interesting things down the road, but on the Clayton Christensen spectrum of sustaining to disruptive innovations, this looks like it hues much more towards a sustaining innovation. It's a platform to add new features into existing systems, rather than a new way of organizing the world. It could still have a big impact. But it could have done a lot more.

And, frankly, as I'll discuss in the next section, I think the failure to go this far has the greatest chance of holding Libra back in the long run. Since so much of Libra is about layering on payments to what's out there already that just opens up Facebook to lots of criticism and potential regulatory hurdles. If Facebook had, instead, tried to restart its own setup as a cryptocurrency-based protocol, focused much more on the protocol service building, rather than the currency, the regulatory response likely would have been quite different. Indeed, turning its platform into a protocol would have been, in effect, Facebook breaking itself up. While Facebook took a bold approach with Libra in effectively taking its own power out of the equation to empower all the Libra Association Members, it's only doing that for this payments layer -- not for its underlying structure.

Lots of reasons to be skeptical:

In the end, while this is an interesting and ambitious project, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. While Facebook did bend over backwards to try to pre-answer the "but who would ever trust Facebook with money" question, how many people are actually going to take the time to understand that? At least based on the initial reactions I saw online, the answer is: not many.

And, of course the bigger threat are regulators. New York Magazine noted that, in the end, this seems to be Facebook trying to compete with the US dollar to become the global reserve currency. And governments sure aren't going to like that. And they're already pissed off about Facebook in general. So the idea that grandstanding politicians are going to take the time to understand that Facebook has mostly taken its own trust issues out of the equation is likely a non-starter. European regulators are already flipping out and the US Congress is already setting up hearings. The whole effort may be crushed by regulators before it even really begins.

And then, of course, there's the distinct possibility that even if this does get off the ground, no one might actually use it. Yes, Facebook has a massive base to start with. Yes, there's lots of publicity and I'm sure Calibra can pull lots of tricks to incentivize usage. But, getting people to buy into new payments is something of a crapshoot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And the biggest platform doesn't always win. People may not remember, but PayPal's initial success was facilitating payments on eBay. eBay then came up with its own competitor to PayPal, and you might think that, given its own dominance and platform that it would take over -- but that didn't happen. eBay ended up having to buy PayPal because its own competitor flopped.

The other big challenge is actually getting however many members of the Libra Association actually on the same page. It's not hard to see how different visions and in-fighting could mess up the entire project as well.

So while there are plenty of interesting things here, there's plenty that could go wrong. And, frankly, I'm disappointed that the project's ambition wasn't nearly as disruptive as it could have been.

Of course, you never know what the future might hold. And, at least one person is already trying to setup their own version of the Libra blockchain that doesn't involve the Libra Association, but is actually fully distributed and "privacy oriented." Wouldn't it be fascinating if Libra actually took off by a forked version that does an end-run around all those giant companies?

Filed Under: cryptocurrency, decentralization, libre, payments, trust
Companies: calibra, facebook

Tim Berners-Lee Moves Forward With His Big Plan To Fix The Web By Bringing Back Its Original Decentralized Promise

from the good-to-see dept

Here we go. For years I've been talking about how we really need to move the web to a world of protocols instead of platforms. The key concept is that so much of the web has been taken over by internet giants who have built data silos. There are all sorts of problems with this. For one, when those platforms are where the majority of people get their information, it makes them into the arbiters of truth when that should make us quite uncomfortable. Second, it creates a privacy nightmare where hugely valuable data stores are single points of failure for all your data (even when those platforms have strong security, just having so much data held by one source is dangerous). Finally, it really takes us far, far away from the true promise of cloud computing, which was supposed to be a situation where we separated out the data and the application layers and could point multiple applications at the same data. Instead, we got silos where you're relying on a single provider to host both the data and the application (which also raises privacy concerns).

Despite some people raising these issues for quite some time, there hasn't been much public discussion of them until just recently (in large part, I believe, driven by the growing worries about how the big platforms have become so powerful). A few companies here or there have been trying to move us towards a world of protocols instead of platforms, and one key project to watch is coming from the inventor of the web himself, Tim Berners-Lee. He had announced his project Solid a while back: an attempt to separate out the data layer, allowing end users to control that data and have much more control over what applications could access it. I've been excited about the project, but just last week I commented to someone that it wasn't clear how much progress had actually been made.

Then, last Friday, Berners-Lee announced that he's doubling down on the project, to the point that he's taken a sabbatical from MIT and reduced his involvement with the W3C to focus on a new company to be built around Solid called inrupt. inrupt's new CEO also has a blog post about this, which admittedly comes off as a bit odd. It seems to suggest that the reason to form inrupt was not necessarily that Solid has made a lot of forward progress, but rather than it needs money, and the only way to get some is to set up a company:

Solid as an open-source project had been facing the normal challenges: vying for attention and lacking the necessary resources to realize its true potential. The solution was to establish a company that could bring resources, process and appropriate skills to make the promise of Solid a reality. There are plenty of examples of a commercial entity serving as the catalyst for an open-source project, to bolster the community with the energy and infrastructure of a commercial venture.

And so we started planning inrupt - a company to do just that. Inrupt’s mission is to ensure that Solid becomes widely adopted by developers, businesses, and eventually … everyone; that it becomes part of the fabric of the web. Tim, as our CTO, has committed his time and talent to the company, and I am delighted to be its chief executive. We also have an exceptional investor as part of the team.

I'm certainly hopeful that something significant comes of this, as it truly is an opportunity to move the internet into that kind of more distributed, less centralized/silo'd world that shows off the true power of the web. I have heard some grousing among some people that this is just Tim Berners-Lee just rebranding the concept of the Semantic Web that he started pushing nearly two decades ago, without any real traction. And, of course, there have been plenty of other attempts over the decades to build these kinds of systems. As it stands right now, there are a few other projects that are getting some traction, including the more distributed social platform Mastodon or some of the ideas that have come out of IndieWeb.

That said, we may finally be entering an era where both users and companies alike are recognizing the benefits of a more distributed web and the downsides of a more centralized one. So it really does feel like there's an opportunity to embrace these concepts, and it's good to see the founder of the world wide web ramping up his efforts on this. If it produces real, workable solutions, that would obviously be fantastic, but at the very least if it gets more people just thinking about these concepts, that would also be useful. So, this should be seen as big news for anyone concerned about the powers of the largest internet companies (especially if you're skeptical about government trying to step in to deal with those companies when they don't know what they're doing). While the details and implementation will matter quite a bit, it's exciting to see more movement towards a world in which the data layer is not just separated out, but where end users will be able to fully control that layer themselves, and potentially choose which apps can access what (and for how long). It certainly opens up a real opportunity to bring back the early promise of a truly decentralized web... and that would be a web built on protocols rather than centralized, silo'd platforms.

Filed Under: applications, control, data, decentralization, distributed web, protocols, silos, solid, tim berners-lee
Companies: inrupt

Everything Wrong In One Story: Data Silos, Privacy, And Algorithmic Blocking

from the nerding-harder-won't-solve-complex-problems dept

Facebook is probably not having a very good week concerning its privacy practices. Just days after it came out that -- contrary to previous statements -- the company was using phone numbers that were submitted to Facebook for two-factor-authentication as keys for advertising, earlier this morning the company admitted a pretty massive data breach in which its "view as" tool was allowing users to grab tokens of other users and effectively take over their accounts (even if those users had two factor authentication enabled).

This is, as they say, "really, really bad." It turned the "view as" feature -- which lets you see how your own page looks to other users -- into a "take over someone else's account" feature. That's a pretty big mistake to make for a product used by approximately half of the entire population of the planet. I'm sure there will be much more on this, but a few hours after the announcement, Facebook had another headache to deal with: numerous reports said that people trying to post articles about this new security mess from either the Guardian or the AP, were getting that action blocked, with Facebook's systems saying that the action looked like spam:

If you can't read that, it says:

Action Blocked

Our security systems have detected that a lot of people are posting the same content, which could mean that it's spam. Please try a different post.

If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let us know.

It's not hard to see how this happened of course. Many times, when a ton of people all start linking to the exact same story, there's a decent chance that it might just be a spam attack. I think even our own spam filter for the Techdirt comments takes something similar into account. Thus, with so many people all posting that link to Facebook, it tripped an algorithmic alarm, leading it to block the posting as possible spam. It appears this practice only lasted for a little while, as currently both articles can be posted to Facebook again.

Obviously, given that the content was about a big Facebook security breach, this looks fishy, even if there's a perfectly "logical" explanation for how it happened. But this also gives us yet another opportunity to highlight how ridiculous it is for people to argue that algorithmic content moderation is a reasonable solution. It's always going to mess up, especially when used at scale, and sometimes will do so in incredibly embarrassing ways, such as here.

And, of course, it provides yet another opportunity to highlight the problems of having just a few giant silos collecting and keeping so much data about people. Even if they are very good at security -- and despite arguments to the contrary, Facebook has a strong security team -- there are always going to be vulnerabilities like this, and companies like Facebook are always going to represent huge targets. This seems like yet another reminder that we need to be looking for more solutions to decentralize the web, and move away from giant silos holding onto all of our data.

Tragically, the powers that be are often looking at this the other way: trying to magically "force" big companies to "lock down" data, which actually only increases the value and demands on the silo, while expecting magic algorithms to protect the data. If we're serious about protecting privacy, we need to start looking at very different solutions that don't mean letting the giant internet companies control all this data all the time. Move it out to the ends of the network, let individuals control their own data stores (or partner with smaller third parties who can help with security) and then let those users choose when, how and where to allow the large platforms access to that data (if at all). There are better solutions, but there seems to be little interest in actually making them work.

Filed Under: algorithms, blocking, centralization, content moderation, data breach, decentralization, privacy, silos, spam, tokens
Companies: facebook

We Shouldn't Want Internet Giants Deciding Who To Silence; But They Should Let Users Decide Who To Hear

from the rethinking-moderation dept

A few weeks back I wrote a big piece on internet platforms and their controversial content moderation efforts. As I've pointed out more recently, part of the reason why what they do is so bad is it is literally impossible to do this well at the scale they do things at. That is, even if they can reach 99% accuracy, given the amount of content on these sites, it's still going to take down a ton of legitimate stuff, while leaving up an awful lot of awful stuff. This doesn't mean they shouldn't do anything -- but my own proposal is for them to shift the way they think about this issue entirely, and move the moderation out from the center to the ends. Let third parties create their own filters/rules and allow anyone else to not just use them, but to adjust and modify and reshare them as well. Then allow the users to not just "opt-in" to the kind of experience they want, but allow them to further tweak it to their own liking as well.

I've seen some pushback on this idea, but it seems much more viable than the alternatives of "do nothing at all" (which just leads to platforms overwhelmed with spam, trolls and hatred), and continue to focus on a centralized moderation system. There have been a number of articles recently that have done a nice job highlighting the problems of having Silicon Valley companies decide who shall speak and who shall not. EFF's Jilian York highlights the problems that occur when there's no accountability, even if platforms have every legal right to kick people off their platforms.

This is one major reason why, historically, so many have fought for freedom of expression: The idea that a given authority could ever be neutral or fair in creating or applying rules about speech is one that gives many pause. In Europe’s democracies, we nevertheless accept that there will be some restrictions – acceptable within the framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and intended to prevent real harm. And, most importantly, decided upon by democratically-elected representatives.

When it comes to private censorship, of course, that isn’t the case. Policies are created by executives, sometimes with additional consultations with external experts, but are nonetheless top-down and authoritarian in nature. And so, when Twitter makes a decision about what constitutes ‘healthy public conversation’ or a ‘bad-faith actor,’ we should question those definitions and how those decisions are made, even when we agree with them.

We should push them to be transparent about how their policies are created, how they moderate content using machines or human labor, and we should ensure that users have a path for recourse when decisions are made that contradict a given set of rules (a problem which happens all too often).

Jillian's colleague at EFF, David Greene, also had an excellent piece in the Washington Post about how having just a few giant companies decide these things should worry us:

We should be extremely careful before rushing to embrace an Internet that is moderated by a few private companies by default, one where the platforms that control so much public discourse routinely remove posts and deactivate accounts because of objections to the content. Once systems like content moderation become the norm, those in power inevitably exploit them. Time and time again, platforms have capitulated to censorship demands from authoritarian regimes, and powerful actors have manipulated flagging procedures to effectively censor their political opponents. Given this practical reality, and the sad history of political censorship in the United States, let's not cheer one decision that we might agree with.

Even beyond content moderation's vulnerability to censorship, the moderating process itself, whether undertaken by humans or, increasingly, by software using machine-learning algorithms, is extremely difficult. Awful mistakes are commonplace, and rules are applied unevenly. Company executives regularly reshape their rules in response to governmental and other pressure, and they do so without significant input from the public. Ambiguous "community standards" result in the removal of some content deemed to have violated the rules, while content that seems equally offensive is okay.

Vera Eidelman, of the ACLU similarly warns of the pressures that are increasingly put on tech companies that will inevitably lead to the silencing of marginalized voices:

Given the enormous amount of speech uploaded every day to Facebook’s platform, attempting to filter out “bad” speech is a nearly impossible task. The use of algorithms and other artificial intelligence to try to deal with the volume is only likely to exacerbate the problem.

If Facebook gives itself broader censorship powers, it will inevitably take down important speech and silence already marginalized voices. We’ve seen this before. Last year, when activists of ...anchor markup--p-anchor" rel="nofollow noopener noopener" target="_blank">experiences of police violence, Facebook chose to shut down their livestreams. The ACLU’s own Facebook post about censorship of a public statue was also inappropriately censored by Facebook.

Facebook has shown us that it does a bad job of moderating “hateful” or “offensive” posts, even when its intentions are good. Facebook will do no better at serving as the arbiter of truth versus misinformation, and we should remain wary of its power to deprioritize certain posts or to moderate content in other ways that fall short of censorship.

Finally, over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi makes a similar point. What starts out as kicking out people we generally all agree are awful people, leads to places we probably won't like in the end:

Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies.

In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his removal. That will be followed by calls from furious conservatives to wipe out the Torch Network or Anti-Fascist News, with Jacobin on the way.

We’ve already seen Facebook overcompensate when faced with complaints of anti-conservative bias. Assuming this continues, “community standards” will turn into a ceaseless parody of Cold War spy trades: one of ours for one of yours.

This is the nuance people are missing. It’s not that people like Jones shouldn’t be punished; it’s the means of punishment that has changed radically.

This is why I think it's so important that the framework be shifted. People have long pointed out that "just because you have free speech doesn't mean I need to listen," but the way social media networks are constructed, it's not always so easy not to listen. The very limited "block / mute" toolset that Twitter provides is not nearly enough. The more platforms can push the moderation decision making out to the ends of the network, including by allowing third parties to create different "views" into those networks, the better off we are. It's no longer the internet giants making these decisions. In fact, it increases "competition" on the moderation side itself, while also increasing the transparency with which such systems operate.

So, really, it's time we stopped focusing on who the platforms should silence, and give more power to help the end users decide who they wish to hear.

Filed Under: censorship, centralizataion, decentralization, filters, free speech, human rights, intermediary liability, platforms, silence, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Big News: Big Internet Platforms Making It Easy To Move Your Data Somewhere Else

from the it's-a-start dept

So, just last week we had a post by Kevin Bankston from the Open Technology Institute arguing for some basic steps towards much greater data portability on social media. The idea was that the internet platforms had to make it much easier to not just download your data (which most of them already do), but to make it useful elsewhere. Bankston's specific proposal included setting clear technical standards and solving the graph portability project. In talking about standards, Bankston referenced Google's data transfer project, but that project has taken a big step forward today announcing a plan to let users transfer data automatically between platforms.

The "headline" that most folks are focusing on is that Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter are all involved in the project (along with a few smaller companies), meaning that it should lead to a situation where you could easily transfer data between them. As it stands right now, the various services let you download your data, but getting it into another platform is still a hassle, making the whole "download your data" thing not all that useful beyond "oh, look at everything this company has about me." Making a system where you can easily transfer all that data to another platform without having to manage the transition yourself or being left with a bunch of useless data is a big step forward -- and a huge step towards giving users much more significant control over their data.

But the really important thing that this may lead to is not so much about transferring your data between one of the giant platforms, but hopefully in opening up new businesses which would allow you to retain much greater control over your data, while limiting how much the platforms themselves keep. This is something we've talked about in the past concerning the true power of data portability. Rather than having it tied up in silos connected to the services you use, wouldn't it be much better if I could keep a "data bank" of my data in a place that is secure -- and where if and when I want to I can allow various services to access that data in order to provide the services I want?

In other words, for many years I've complained about how we've lost the promise of cloud computing in just building up giant silos of data connected to the various online services. If we can separate out the data layer from the service layer, then we can get tremendous benefits, including (1) more end-user control over their own data (2) more competitive services and (3) less power to dominate everything by the biggest platforms. Indeed, we could even start to move towards a world of protocols instead of platforms.

Of course, this is only one step in that direction, but it's a big one. And, yes, it's notable that the big platforms are all working on this together, since it has the potential to undermine their own powerful position. But it's absolutely the right thing for them to do, and hopefully we'll start to see much more interesting services pop up out of this. If it only ends up allowing people to shift between Google and Facebook that will be a failure. If it enables new services and more end user control over data -- forcing various services to compete and provide better value in exchange for accessing our data -- that would be a huge step forward in how the internet functions.

Filed Under: competition, control, data portability, decentralization, innovation, lock in, privacy, silos
Companies: facebook, google, microsoft, twitter