Facebook Promises To Distinguish Takedowns From Governments; Whether They're For Illegal Content, Or Merely Site Rules Violations

from the that's-a-start dept

There's an interesting discussion that happens in content moderation circles with regards to government requests for takedowns: are those requests about content that violates local laws or about the content violating website policies? Many people lump these two things together, but they're actually pretty different in practice. Obviously, if a government comes across content that violates the law, it seems reasonable for them to alert the platform to it and expect that the content will be removed (though, there may be some questions about jurisdiction and such). However, when it's just content that may violate site policy, there are some pretty big questions raised. This actually gets to the "jawboning" question we've been discussing a lot lately, and exploring where the line is between a politician persuading a website to take something down and compelling them to do so.

There is one argument that suggests that a government pointing out content that might violate site policies is simply helping out. The website doesn't want content that violates its standards, and the government reporting it is just like any other user reporting it (though, backed up by whatever credibility the government may or may not have). But, the flip side of that is, if the content is perfectly legal, this often starts to feel like a loophole through which government actors can engage in wink-wink-nudge-nudge censorship -- just send a notification to the site that this particular content may not break the law, but hey, doesn't it violate your policies?

A recent decision by the Oversight Board, and a corresponding statement from Facebook, suggests that Facebook is going to be clearer about when this situation happens. The case the Oversight Board reviewed was an interesting one. Here's how it summarized the situation:

In January 2021, an Instagram user in the United States posted a picture of Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founding members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The picture included the words “y’all ready for this conversation.” Underneath the picture the user wrote that it was time to talk about ending Öcalan’s isolation in prison on Imrali Island. They encouraged readers to engage in conversation about his imprisonment and the inhumane nature of solitary confinement.

Facebook removed the content for violating Instagram’s Community Guidelines after the post was automatically flagged for review (at this stage, the Board does not know if the content was removed by an automated system or through human review). These Guidelines under the heading “follow the law,” set out that “Instagram is not a place to support or praise terrorism, organized crime, or hate groups.” The Guidelines link to Facebook’s Community Standard on Dangerous Individuals and Organizations. These rules clarify that Facebook also prohibits any support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in terrorist activity or other serious crimes committed by these groups. The PKK has been designated a terrorist organization by multiple countries, including Turkey, the United States, and the EU.

The user states in their appeal that Öcalan has been a political prisoner for decades and that banning any reference to him prevents discussions that could advance the position of the Kurdish people. They argue that Öcalan’s philosophy is peaceful and that his writings are widely available in bookshops and online. The user compares Öcalan’s imprisonment to that of former South African President Nelson Mandela, noting that discussion of Öcalan’s imprisonment should be allowed and encouraged.

In July, the Oversight Board overturned Facebook's initial decision (even though once the case was taken Facebook admitted it had taken down the content in error before the Oversight Board even ruled). A key part of the discussion was that Facebook claimed it had "misplaced" an "internal policy exception" for the "Dangerous Individuals and Organizations" policy, as that misplaced policy included an exception for the discussion of human rights issues, even among those designated as "dangerous." As with many other Oversight Board rulings, there were a bunch of other recommendations as well.

In early August, Facebook responded to the recommendations, and, as Evelyn Douek noted, buried deep within them (recommendation 11) was an admission that Facebook would start revealing information and data on requests from governments based on "Community Standards" violations, rather than legal violations. Here's what the Oversight Board asked for:

Include information on the number of requests Facebook receives for content removals from governments that are based on Community Standards violations (as opposed to violations of national law), and the outcome of those requests.

While this may have been a minor part of this particular situation, it's important information that has previously not be available. And, as Douek also notes, human rights activists have been begging Facebook for this data for ages, with no luck. But the Oversight Board seems to have made it happen. Here's what Facebook had to say about it:

Our commitment: We are actively working to provide additional transparency when we remove content under our Community Standards following a formal report by a government, including the total number of requests we receive.

Considerations: As noted in our response to Recommendation 9 above, when we receive a formal government report about content that may violate local law, we first review it against our global Community Standards, just as we would review a report from any other source. If the content violates our Community Standards, we will remove it and count it in our Community Standards Enforcement Report. These reports are reviewed under a standardized process in the same way and against the same policies as reports from any other source. As a result, we are not currently able to report when we remove content based on a report by a government or from a Facebook user. In addition, we may receive reports of a piece of content that may violate our policies from multiple sources at the same time—for example, from a government and from user reports on Facebook. Such situations create additional challenges in determining whether content should be considered as removed in response to a government report.

We have been exploring ways to increase the level of transparency we provide to users and the public about requests we receive from governments, in line with best practices laid out by civil society efforts like the Santa Clara Principles and the Ranking Digital Rights project. We are prioritizing that work in response to this recommendation.

Next steps: We are planning work that will enable us to include information on content removed for violating our Community Standards following a formal report by a government, including the number of requests we receive, as a distinct category in our Transparency Center.

Again, as Douek points out, there is some wiggle room here in that Facebook committed to counting "formal" requests from government, which means that totally informal requests and suggestions -- pure "jawboning" situations -- might not be counted. But, still, this is a step forward in getting more transparency about how often governments push Facebook and Instagram to take down content that is legal, even if it may violate site policies.

Filed Under: community standards, content moderation, government requests, illegal content, jawboning, lawful but awful
Companies: facebook, oversight board

As EU Starts To Draft Its Most Important New Online Law, The Digital Services Act, MEPs Want Basic Rights High On The Agenda

from the but-massive-lobbying-and-dirty-tricks-will-soon-fix-that dept

The EU is now starting to work in earnest on what is likely to be its most important new law for the online world, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Techdirt wrote about this last year, when the European Commission started sketching out (bad) ideas for the new law. The basic impetus for the DSA is to replace the EU's e-Commerce Directive, which was passed 20 years ago, and is clearly in need of an update. As the European Commission's page on the DSA explains, there are two core elements:

First, the Commission would propose clear rules framing the responsibilities of digital services to address the risks faced by their users and to protect their rights. The legal obligations would ensure a modern system of cooperation for the supervision of platforms and guarantee effective enforcement.

Second, the Digital Services Act package would propose ex ante rules covering large online platforms acting as gatekeepers, which now set the rules of the game for their users and their competitors. The initiative should ensure that those platforms behave fairly and can be challenged by new entrants and existing competitors, so that consumers have the widest choice and the Single Market remains competitive and open to innovations.

Those aims mean that the DSA touches on several of the most contentious issues in the online world, such as the introduction of mandatory pan-European rules for tackling online hate speech and disinformation, and efforts to control platforms that are "gatekeepers" -- basically US companies like Google and Facebook. In other words, the DSA is going to be important, and not just for the EU. One of the key players in the drafting of the DSA is the European Parliament. The good news is that in a series of votes MEPs have made clear that they want protection for key human rights to be an integral part of the new law.

The votes concerned reports from three of the Parliament's specialist committees: those for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, Legal Affairs, and Civil Liberties (pdf). The three reports are couched in a rather impenetrable EU-speak; fortunately, the European Parliament has put out a press release on the votes that provides a more comprehensible summary of the three reports. The European Parliament is quite open about what the EU hopes to achieve with the DSA: "With the upcoming package, the European Union aims to shape the digital economy at EU level as well as setting the standards for the rest of the world, as it did with data protection." One of the priorities of the DSA is tackling illegal content online. On this, MEPs say:

A binding "notice-and-action" mechanism must be set up so that users can notify online intermediaries about potentially illegal online content or activities. This would help online intermediaries to react quickly and be more transparent regarding the actions they have taken on potentially illegal content. Users should be able to seek redress through a national dispute settlement body.

The European Parliament wants a distinction made between illegal content and harmful content, with a legal liability only for the former. MEPs say that there should be no general monitoring of users, and that platforms should not use upload filters for controlling harmful or illegal content: "The final decision on whether content is legal or not should instead be taken by an independent judiciary and not by private undertakings". It's hard to square that with the awful Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive, which inevitably requires precisely this kind of upload filter to block allegedly infringing content. MEPs say that harmful content should be dealt with through "enhanced transparency obligations and by helping citizens to acquire media and digital literacy regarding the dissemination of such content." According to the European Parliament, another priority of the DSA should be enhancing consumer protection and user safety:

Platforms and online intermediation services will need to get better at detecting and taking down false claims and tackling rogue traders, e.g. those selling false medical equipment or dangerous products online, as happened during the COVID-19 outbreak.

MEPs also call for a new "Know Your Business Customer" principle to be introduced, requiring platforms to check and stop fraudulent companies using their services to sell their illegal and unsafe products and content.

More controversial is a call for rules to prevent -- not merely remedy -- what MEPs called "market failures by big platforms". The stated aim is to open up markets to new entrants. Some of the most striking ideas to emerge from the reports are: to allow online users to opt out of content curation, to be informed if a service is enabled by AI, and to ban microtargeted advertising:

Targeted advertising must be regulated more strictly in favour of less intrusive, contextualised forms of advertising that require less data and do not depend on previous user interaction with content. MEPs also call on the Commission to further assess options for regulating targeted advertising, including a phase-out leading to a ban.

As Techdirt has noted, such targeted advertising doesn't really seem to bring much in the way of benefit to advertisers, but certainly causes people to be tracked relentlessly, and huge amounts of personal information to be gathered. Getting rid of it in the EU could encourage companies to re-think their advertising strategies globally, just as the GDPR has had a big knock-on effect on data protection everywhere. That would be welcome, as would a move to enshrine in the DSA a right to use digital services anonymously "whenever possible". Adding a right to strong encryption without backdoors would be even better: at the moment, one report simply "Stresses the importance to apply effective end-to-end encryption to data".

Two of the reports approved by the European Parliament are what are known as "legislative initiatives" (PDF). Although not binding on the European Commission, such initiatives require a much fuller response if any of the proposed ideas are rejected. This gives the European Parliament's ideas more chance of making it into the final text of the DSA. Against that, some of the most powerful companies in the world will be deeply affected by the EU's new law, which guarantees years of fierce lobbying and dirty tricks, as the dispiriting experience of the Copyright Directive demonstrated.

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

Filed Under: digital services act, dsa, e-commerce directive, eu, eu parliament, harmful content, illegal content, intermediary liability, online harms, tracking

EU Commission Asks Public To Weigh In On Survey About Just How Much They Want The Internet To Be Censored

from the try-again? dept

A few years ago, when the EU Commission was first considering some really bad copyright policies designed to attack fundamental principles of how the internet worked, we pointed out the many, many problems with the EU Commission's online survey (including the fact that their survey tool was literally broken, which eventually resulted in them expanding the time that the survey could be answered). It appears that one thing the EU Commission is good at doing is pushing silly one-sided online surveys that seem uniquely designed to get people to answer in a manner that blesses whatever awful policy the EU Commission has already decided to adopt.

The latest is, once again, an attempt to massively censor the internet. As we've discussed over the past few months, after burying the evidence that said piracy is a much smaller issue than people claim, and ignoring multiple people explaining the fundamental issues of mandatory content filters (i.e., automated censorship machines), the EU Commission appears to be hellbent on putting in place such filters. And it's now pushing a survey to get you to support their plan.

Everything about the survey is designed to get you to be worried about the scourge of "illegal content" online (without any evidence that it's a serious problem) and to demand that the EU force platforms to wave a magic wand and make it go away. Here's the survey's introduction:

The availability and proliferation of illegal content online remains an important public policy and security concern in the EU, notably with regards to the dissemination of terrorist content, as well as of illegal hate speech, child sexual abuse material, or illegal commercial practices and infringements of intellectual property rights, selling of illicit drugs, counterfeits or other illicit goods.

First off, see what they did there? They mixed in copyright infringement with... things that don't belong in the same camp: "child sex abuse," "illicit drugs" and "hate speech." And that's not even touching on how problematic the whole area of "banning hate speech" has become.

The Commission is collecting evidence on the effectiveness of measures and the scale of the problem, and will explore, by the end of 2018, further measures to improve the effectiveness of combating illegal content online.

In particular, through the present public consultation the Commission seeks to gather views from all relevant stakeholders. The questionnaire is targeted to the general public, hosting service providers such as online platforms, organisations reporting the presence of illegal content online, competent authorities and law enforcement bodies, and academia, civil societies and other organisations.

Collecting evidence? It appears what the Commission wants is a bunch of people to say "ooh, bad content," and the Commission will use that to demand internet platforms wave their magic wands and make it go away. However, as we've noted over and over again, this backfires every single time. When you put the liability on platforms, they will massively over censor, stifling both free speech and innovation -- while doing very, very little to stop "bad stuff" from happening online. Sex trafficking and drug dealing is already mostly underground, so demanding that platforms do more won't have much of an impact either way. Hate speech is an amorphous ball of trouble that frequently just leads to censorship of people critical of government. And, honestly, haven't we learned by now that merely censoring people doesn't make them stop thinking whatever it is they're thinking -- it just makes them feel more persecuted.

Anyway, the survey starts out by asking you to designate who you are (and you can only pick one, even if more might apply):

It's a... weird sort of list. It seems to imply that someone representing "victims" can't also be representing "civil rights interests." Really? It also seems to suggest that organizations who "identify and report allegedly illegal content online" are somehow automatically opposed to organizations that host content online.... which is odd.

Once you start filling out the survey, new questions pop up that seem designed to just hand the EU Commission a bunch of anecdotes about you running into "bad" stuff online, so that they can use those stories to insist that we need more censorship:

If you check off any of these a new box pops up, in which you can almost feel the Commission salivating, asking you to share "in what way this has affected you." Basically "please give us scary anecdotes to push through our horrible idea."

Next up: please tell us how scary the internet is so we can, again, justify censoring it:

See all that? It's just "give us scary stories so we can scare people into allowing us to censor the internet." Incredibly, even if you check off that you "never" came across any of these things, the survey still asks you to explain "how were you affected by the illegal activities."

Then it asks who "has an important role to play in tackling illegal content online."

Um. Notice something missing here? For each party, the choices are "Main role," "important role," "marginal role," "I don't know" and "No answer." What's missing? How about "no role"? Why do we expect most of these parties to have any role in trying to censor content? Again, shouldn't the focus be on finding the person who did something illegal and bringing them to justice? Instead, this entire survey is 100% focused on just getting people to say platforms must "do more." Indeed, this survey doesn't let you say anything else.

Also: what strange framing. What does "tackling illegal content online" even mean? Hell, it's still not even clear what "illegal content" really consists of or how serious any "problem" is, but already we need to know who needs to "tackle" it? But, really, this question is absurd for a different reason: it cleverly skips all the nuance behind this question. That is, in order to actually understand how one would "tackle illegal content" (whatever that means) you'd first need to understand quite a lot about what methods already work for dealing with content -- and how that changes depending on the type of content. Or the type of platform. Or the type of user. It also would seem to require some knowledge of all the many, many, many, many ways that attempts to "tackle illegal content" (whatever that means) has failed miserably and tragically in the past -- often in ways that expand the "bad" content or make it more difficult to track down the actual perpetrators.

And this is a larger point that the survey makers don't seem to have considered at all: perhaps instead of focusing on the bad or illegal content... we should be focusing on those who created the illegal content. The underlying theme here is that we need to stop illegal content after it exists, rather than finding and stopping those creating this "illegal" content. It's a strange approach that focuses on burying the "crime" by blaming the tools, rather than targeting the criminal. What a silly approach.

But if you're just asking people who don't follow this issue, of course they're going to point their fingers at whoever hosts the content, because that's always the easiest to point fingers at, without ever recognizing that doing so is asking for widespread censorship with little recourse. At this point it's simply unconscionable that the EU Commission working on this effort doesn't recognize the massive dangerous consequences of mandatory filters. Yet this question is clearly designed to get people to request filters, without ever giving anyone a chance to point out that filters don't tend to work and often have massive speech-suppressing consequences.

There are then a few more questions, which all seem entirely focused on giving the EU Commission the cover they need to say that "the public has spoken" and "the public wants us to force platforms to censor speech." The whole thing is a travesty -- but at the very least, here's a chance for you to explain (politely) why this effort is not just nonsense, but actively dangerous to free speech and innovation.

Oh, and just to make things even more ridiculous: in the process of writing this post, I took the time to fill out the whole survey. As I finished up I hit submit and this is what I got:

Apparently, if you don't fill out the survey quick enough (and I did it pretty quickly), they'll just dump all your results in the garbage. Nice work, guys. I'm so glad you're the ones deciding how the internet will be regulated. I'm sure that'll go over just great.

Filed Under: censorship, censorship machines, eu, eu commission, filters, free speech, illegal content, mandatory filters