How Attacks On Section 230 Could Put Addiction Recovery Efforts At Risk

from the so-many-issues dept

We keep trying to highlight the pitfalls and dangers of attacking the problems seen on social media as if Section 230 is the cause of them, rather than the mirror highlighting societal problems that other policies have failed to fix or have exacerbated. We already have one strong example of how attacking 230 only makes societal problems worse with FOSTA, which has put sex workers' lives at risk, made it much harder for law enforcement to track down sex traffickers, and has done absolutely none of the things the backers of the law promised in terms of solving societal problems.

Now, other people representing the interests of more marginalized groups are beginning to speak out and warn about similar pitfalls. Ryan Hampton, a recovery advocate, who has written extensively on opioid addiction and recovery, has a very thoughtful opinion piece over at The Hill noting how Section 230 reform will be a disaster for harm prevention and recovery efforts. While I disagree when he refers to Section 230 as "obscure," he's correct that chipping away at it will cause tremendous harm to his efforts to help those in recovery and those seeking to deal with drug addiction.

Just as advocates urged Congress to rewrite Section 230 to prevent sexual exploitation—a similar campaign is underway to prevent drug sales and curb America’s soaring overdose death rate. Horrific stories involving young adults buying drugs on Snapchat and TikTok abound. Some parents and advocates want Section 230 rewritten to increase liability of social media companies for drug sales on their platforms. But efforts to clamp down on online drug sales through Section 230 carve outs are somewhat misguided. Without careful considerations, these reforms would endanger the recovery community and harm reduction advocates—and threaten to stifle productive speech that is critical for progress to combat the overdose crisis. Current proposed 230 carve-outs could undermine access to lifesaving resources, mandating takedowns of broad categories of content, and forcing vulnerable populations, including those navigating supportive services, off-platform. For criminalized communities, the risk for exploitation and harm offline is significant, and support and resources can be limited.

As Hampton explains:

Harm reduction efforts—and conversations—are often nuanced and specific to the individual, aiming to minimize harms of substance use. Blanket content bans, prescribed without consideration of context and nuance, could punish those seeking help—hamstringing legitimate, proven approaches to combatting overdoses.

Instead of broadly crushing free speech and pushing social media companies to eliminate our ability to share resources, the U.S. government should focus its efforts on things that work. To save lives, policymakers must develop a realistic national strategy to combat the overdose crisis, including implementing evidence-based prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery support services on the community-based level. Don’t kill the conversation.

This is why we keep pointing out that so much of this debate really seems to be about politicians, who have failed to put in place policies to help solve underlying societal problems, now see attacking Section 230 as a convenient way to brush those problems (and their own failures to deal with them) under the rug. If no one can discuss these issues without fear of liability, maybe people will just forget what's actually happening?

It's good that people like Hampton are speaking up and calling out the very real human risks of attacking Section 230, and silencing speech, rather than dealing with the underlying problems. The question, though, is whether any policymaker will listen.

Filed Under: addiction, addiction recovery, fosta, health, information, section 230

Congress Tries To Ram The Ill-informed INFORM Bill Into The Must-pass NDAA

from the ill-considered-with-ill-effect dept

Congress is at it again, trying to legislate without bothering to understand the problems they are ostensibly trying to fix. This time it's with the INFORM Consumers Act, S.B. 936, which, instead of debating further, some of its sponsors are trying to ram through as an amendment to the must-pass NDAA. Which itself is a clue that there's something wrong with this bill, because if the only way to become law is to avoid further scrutiny, then that's exactly when such scrutiny is needed.

At least this time the proposed bill doesn't take direct aim at Section 230 or antitrust, and unlike some other bills this one is at least trying to target something resembling an actual policy problem. But as is so often the case with these "let's make Internet platforms responsible for everything wrong with the world" bills, it still doesn't actually fix the problem it's trying to solve.

The problem that this bill is supposedly tackling is that sometimes the products people buy online can be defective or dangerous, but then sometimes consumers can have difficulty finding the seller responsible to try to hold liable for any resulting harm. The apparent goal of the INFORM Consumers Act is to make such sellers more findable and thus more accountable, but (a) it won't really, and (b) it will create all sorts of other problems that ultimately will hurt consumers (and others) instead.

The bill is flawed both in its concept and its execution. At its core, the essential failing is that instead of directly targeting the wayward vendors concerning Congress, the bill instead aims to conscript online marketplaces into formally policing online sellers, which is itself of dubious effectiveness as a regulatory strategy, let alone of dubious doctrinal consistency regarding how tort law works or of dubious constitutionality regarding how state action works. In particular, the bill wants to obligate all online marketplaces, of every size and stripe (see the definition at Section (2)(e)(4)), to collect seller information (Section (2)(a)(1)), verify it (Section (2)(a)(2)), display it (Section (2)(b)(1)), and then terminate any seller's account if they are out of compliance (see Section (2)(b)(4)). To the drafters these requirements may seem like small asks, but in practice they are far from it, especially as wrapped up in this overall legislative language.

For one thing, even just asking for all this seller information creates all sorts of privacy problems, particularly for sellers who are individual people, who would have to supply all sorts of personal details, including tax IDs (Section (2)(a)(1)(A)(iii)), which may well be their social security numbers. And then the marketplaces would have to somehow safely store this government-demanded honeypot of deliciously sensitive of personal information that other regulation has actively been trying to deter them from collecting at all. (The House version of the bill, H.R. 5502, at least addresses this concern, albeit with a handwavy, "Nerd harder," sort of demand of the platforms (see Section (1)(a)(4)).)

Next, policing this information is not something that a marketplace would necessarily have either the resources or competency to do, especially not at the scale the law would demand. Being forced to terminate accounts for inadequate compliance also raises due process concerns for both the marketplace and any legitimate seller so affected. And such terminations are not without consequence, including for consumers who will now have to face higher prices, lack of supply for the products they seek as vendors are driven offline entirely, or even more risk as everyone is now forced to turn to offshore marketplaces not subject to laws like these and ultimately even less accountable to American consumers than the online marketplaces bills like this are obviously intending to target.

Meanwhile, even the part of the bill that forces platforms to display seller information creates a problem with compelled speech (Section (2)(b)(1)(A)(ii)). While commercial speech can sometimes be proscribed in certain ways without offending the First Amendment, a law drafted as broadly as this one is unlikely to be able to demonstrate the narrow tailoring required to surmount that constitutional hurdle. Especially when it acknowledges with its own exceptions how unnecessary some of its requirements are. Fortunately, it avoids an additional privacy problem by allowing vendors who only have a personal phone number or residential address to not have that information posted publicly (Section (2)(b)(2)(A)(i) and (iii)). Which is good, because if bills like these were to make it functionally impossible for entrepreneurial Americans to avail themselves of ecommerce, it wouldn't be good for them, the economy, or consumers who would have liked to buy their products. But, then again, since, by its own terms, the bill acknowledges that there may be more pragmatic ways of addressing vendor accountability, its overly prescriptive approach, which still lumps far too many dissimilar vendors together with identical requirements, is unlikely to pass constitutional muster. And its practical effect will still amount to being a gratuitous burden on vendors and the online marketplaces they depend on to conduct their businesses, needlessly making it more difficult and expensive to do so.

Then, on top of these drafting infirmities, the House version of this bill would also give state attorney generals enforcement powers (Section (1)(d)), which is always a fraught exercise when it comes to Internet commerce, because it allows some states to exert an effective veto power over online platforms that other states might prefer to benefit from. But even the FTC enforcement power the bill proposes raises issues as well (Section (2)(c)(1)). It may be proper for the FTC to go after any vendor who dupes consumers into purchasing from them, including with the illusion of accountability. But as long as consumers are on notice that they may not be able to track down the vendor later, and not deceived into believing otherwise before making their purchase, then they are as empowered to make their purchasing decisions as the FTC has any business requiring. If consumers need more information before making their purchasing decisions, then that is a pressure they can put on the vendors or online marketplaces to deliver. We don't need a law to force it, especially not one as blunt in its effects as this one.

In fact, everything about this bill is fatally blunt. Although it in theory only applies to "high volume" sellers, the definition of high volume can reach all sorts of casual sellers.

The term “high-volume third party seller” means a participant on an online marketplace's platform who is a third party seller and who, in any continuous 12-month period during the previous 24 months, has entered into 200 or more discrete sales or transactions of new or unused consumer products resulting in the accumulation of an aggregate total of $5,000 or more in gross revenues. (Section (2)(e)(3)*

Also, even if some sort of law might be required to address the sales of dangerous or defective goods, there is nothing in this bill to restrict it to the sales of just these sorts of items. The requirements of the INFORM Act could just as easily reach vendors who sell books, CDs, or t-shirts, even if they only sell them periodically.

The term "consumer product" means any tangible personal property which is distributed in commerce and which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes (including any such property intended to be attached to or installed in any real property without regard to whether it is so attached or installed). (Section (2)(e)(2) (citing 15 USC Section 2301(1)))

Given the expressive nature of these products, the mandatory identification requirements of a seller is something that directly offends the First Amendment's right of anonymous speech. But even less dramatically, it's still a bill that is utterly pointless, yet no less cumbersome, for vendors who sell all sorts of non-dangerous goods.

Or for any possible platform that might enable any sort of sales. While the drafters of this bill might have had certain online marketplaces and certain products in mind when they drafted it, neither its specific details, nor its general regulatory approach of burdening platforms with all responsibility for making sure bad things never happen through the Internet, are nearly so limited.

And that itself is a bad thing.

* The House version of the bill limits disclosure requirements to "any high-volume third party seller with an aggregate total of $20,000 or more in annual gross revenues on such online marketplace," but since the statutory definition is still the lower amount, this alternate term ends up adding in more confusion, rather than relief.

Filed Under: inform act, information, marketplaces, privacy

Twitch Finally Gets Around To Letting Banned Streamers Know Why They Were Banned

from the victory! dept

We've covered Twitch's no good, very bad time for many months now, which should give you an indication just how bad this time has been. If you need a brief background, the major points of contention have been the Amazon-owned company having a laughably one-sided approach to DMCA takedowns of content, its complete inept method for temp-banning its own creative community over copyright claims, and its totally vague approach to banning creators over various rule-breaking when it comes to Twitch's indecipherable guidelines and the capricious manner in which it applies them.

While all of it is frankly bad, the lowest hanging fruit in all of this has always been the lack of communication Twitch has offered its own creative community when it comes to bans, copyright issues, or guidelines. For instance, Twitch, at first, would just disappear content, with little or no notice to the streamer who authored it. When it has given any notice to creators, that notice has traditionally been so devoid of any details so as to be entirely useless. Which I suppose is why the recent announcement by Twitch that it will finally tell streamers who have been hit with a copyright takedown what that infringing content is... is good?

The days of Twitch mysteriously suspending popular streamers are coming to an end. The Amazon-owned streaming platform announced yesterday that it will now actually tell streamers who get temporarily banned why they’ve been punished. It only took 10 years, folks.

“As of today, enforcement notifications sent to suspended users will include the name of the content and the date of the violation to ensure they have better clarity about what content is being actioned on,” Twitch Support wrote on Twitter. Based on a sample screenshot, these new explanations will include what the streamer did that violated Twitch’s Terms of Service or Community Guidelines and which stream it happened on.

So, again, this is a good thing, except, as the opening Kotaku graf hints, this announcement also highlights the absurdity of Twitch not having been doing this the entire time. And this should really also callout the minimalist nature of the "infringement" in question, which oftentimes involves video game audio assets that are part of a Twitch stream, or background music and whatnot. In other words, the need for this level of detail, though definitely crucial, also should let you know that these streamers aren't trying to infringe copyright. If they were, there wouldn't be so much confusion over why they were being banned or having their content taken down.

All of this certainly isn't lost on the very community Twitch is now trying to placate.

Twitch was founded back in 2011 and later acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion. It’s a big business, but only because of the content put there by others. Telling creators why they’ve been occasionally locked out of what is for some a defacto job is the least Twitch could do, though still far from what a lot of users would ideally like. Even now Twitch Support’s announcement tweet for the ban explanations is littered with complaints about the lack of transparency and communication around things like the appeals process.

In other words, now that Twitch has gotten things to where they probably should have been at the jump, the real work to win back its community begins.

Filed Under: content moderation, copyright, dmca, information, policy violations, rules, streamers, takedowns
Companies: twitch

Oncologists Say The Absolute Best Information They're Getting These Days Comes From Twitter

from the it's-not-all-russian-propaganda dept

It's become sort of a common refrain among many that social media is only good for spreading misinformation and disinformation. I've even seen some people claim that social media is to blame for misinformation spreading about COVID-19. This is not to say that such information doesn't exist, and isn't being spread, but it ignores how much useful information is being spread as well. Indeed, nearly all of the accurate and more factual information I received concerning COVID-19 came via experts on Twitter, and generally anywhere from a week to nearly a month ahead of "official" reports. While I haven't seen it officially stated anywhere, I have seen people say that those on Twitter were more likely to quickly embrace social distancing and lockdown, as compared to those not on Twitter.

So it didn't come as much of a surprise to me to hear, on a recent episode of the Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) podcast, a bunch of oncologists all say that the best information they were receiving was via Twitter. The entire episode is quite interesting -- talking with Dr. Bobby Green from Flatiron Health, Dr. Sumit Shah from Stanford's Cancer Center along with A16Z's Vineeta Agarwala (who recently joined A16Z and I believe is still a physician at Stanford's Cancer Center as well) -- about how oncologists are dealing with their cancer patients in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I'd recommend listening to the whole thing, but for the purposes of this post, I wanted to highlight just two short parts. The first one comes starting around 10 minutes in (and I think I've figured out whose voice is whose, so I believe the transcript here is accurate, though I wouldn't guarantee it) where they discuss the importance of Twitter, starting with Dr. Green talking about crowdsourcing ideas.

Agarwala: Who is the group that you're able to engage in real time on such difficult decisions on individual patients?

Green: Well, Vineeta, as one of my seven Twitter followers, you may have seen that I [laughs]...

Agarwala: I saw that you crowdsourced that! Well done...

Green: Yeah, I crowdsourced an early-stage lung cancer question today. We have a multi-disciplinary lung tumor board, Vineeta, where these questions have come up. A lot of curbsiding other docs. That's been my experience. I think what's really interesting about the problems we're facing is that there's sort of the art and the science of medicine. This is one of those circumstances where the art of medicine and judgment and how to apply knowledge about data to great areas of uncertainty, really comes into play. And it's been intellectually challenging to do so.

Agarwala: I'm glad you brought up Twitter. Is that a viable tool for you guys for crowdsourcing for even anecdotal data, advice, decision-making in this area?

Green: I've personally found the discussions on Twitter about this to be really helpful and really informative. So, to me, yes. You have to be a little more general than you would like to be for PHI [Protect Health Information] reasons, obviously, but I find it very useful.

Shah: I actually think that Twitter is the best source of medical information right now. The majority of the data I'm receiving, I"m actually receiving in real-time from my Twitter feed as opposed to waiting for publications to come out. So it's actually been very, very helpful to have access to Twitter, and it's been a tremendous communication tool for experts around the country and the world in general.

I believe this is the "crowdsourcing" tweet that Dr. Green was referring to:

It looks like six oncologists from around the world quickly responded to him. It's kind of amazing to see that in practice.

The second mention of Twitter in the podcast is briefer and comes towards the end. They're discussing how they're handling clinical trials for various cancer treatments and whether or not they can or should continue, and Dr. Shah notes:

We are doing an international cancer registry right now on patients with coronavirus. And this was an effort that was largely led through Twitter actually, by recruiting other physicians from other institutions, to capture all this data.

As I said, the whole podcast is quite worth listening to, covering just how oncologists are dealing with treating cancer patients in the midst of a pandemic -- but I find it especially fascinating to see just how helpful Twitter has apparently been to them, even as we still keep hearing people insisting that Twitter and other social media is nothing but misinformation.

Filed Under: cancer, doctors, information, oncology, social media
Companies: twitter

Be Careful What You Wish For: 'Privacy Protection' Now Used As An Excuse To Cut Off Investigative Journalists From Key Database

from the tradeoffs dept

We've been explaining for a long time that many people don't really understand "privacy." Privacy is a tradeoff not a "thing." Assuming that privacy is a thing -- and that "it" must be protected -- leads to some bad results. Lexis Nexis has a tool called Trace IQ, that is widely used by investigative journalists to find out information about people -- including their addresses and phone numbers. Some people might argue that just addresses and phone numbers should be kept private, but it really wasn't that long ago that such information wasn't just widely available to the public, but every six months or so a giant yellow-covered book was thrown in front of our doors with listings of everyone's phone number and address in your geographic region. Remember that?

However, Lexis Nexis is now cutting investigative journalists off from this service because "privacy."

A Cardiff-based company is banning journalists from accessing a powerful database of names, phones numbers and addresses, in a move the Centre for Investigative Journalism says is symptomatic of the way "popular anxieties about privacy" are gagging investigative reporting.

Lexis Nexis isn't explaining exactly why it's doing this, but various journalism organizations think that it has to do with the new focus on privacy and new laws like the GDPR:

The Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, James Harkin, said the industry has come under threat from legislation in recent times, pointing to the Investigatory Powers Act passed in 2016 and the proposed Espionage Act.

But Harkin said Lexis Nexis' decision to shut out journalists from Trace IQ shows investigative journalism can also be gagged by the new "popular anxieties about privacy".

"In many ways concerns about the Data Protection Act, and concerns about data protection more generally, are more subtle and more insidious, and more directly relevant to the day-to-day work of journalists," Harkin told BuzzFeed News.

Now, I know that some will think that it's no fair that journalists had access to this information in the first place, but those are likely the same people who were just recently complaining in our comments about how awful it is that some in the media publish stories without first talking to everyone involved. One way that you talk to everyone involved is getting the information necessary to talk to them. And things like TraceIQ make that possible. Or did.

Meanwhile, it appears that TraceIQ will still exist for other types of users: debt collectors. Apparently, it's fine for them to get access to this information, but it's not okay for reporters doing their jobs. Yes, privacy is important, but we have to learn that "protecting privacy" means recognizing the appropriate situations and cases where information can be accessed and shared, and recognizing what the tradeoffs in those decisions are. It does not mean that we should cut people off entirely from accessing data. Unless they're debt collectors.

Filed Under: database, information, journalism, privacy, trace iq
Companies: lexis nexis

A Twitter Leak Scuttled An NBA Draft Day Trade This Year

from the the-power-of-tweet dept

It's probably well known at this point that major professional sports leagues have a strange relationship with Twitter. On the one hand, many leagues use the social media site quite well when it comes to sharing highlights and getting their brands out there in front of people. Major League Baseball is particularly good at this, although the NBA is not terribly far behind. On the other hand, these leagues have been known to adopt quite restrictive policies when it comes to who can share what on Twitter. This is especially the case on league draft days. For instance, the NFL insists that its broadcast partners, such as ESPN and the NFL Network, not allow their journalists to tweet out draft picks on draft day before they are announced on television. The league obviously wants as many eyeballs tuned into the drama on television as it can muster and has theorized that making TV the first place to get draft picks announced will help with that.

For anyone that follows sports on Twitter, this is obviously a very, very stupid theory. Many sports journalists are not working for ESPN and NFL Network, and they quite happily inform followers of draft picks before they are announced based on their sources. This is how journalism works.

But it was probably a unique event at the NBA draft the other night that a Twitter scoop actually caused one NBA team to back out of an agreed-upon trade.

Atlanta Hawks GM Travis Schlenk told San Francisco radio station 95.7 The Game this morning that he had a deal in place with the Milwaukee Bucks to move up from the 19th pick to the 17th. The Hawks knew they wanted one of two players—including Maryland shooting guard Kevin Huerter—and were sufficiently convinced that the Bucks and the Spurs (at 18) would take the two guys. So they were prepared to part with future picks in order to move up two spots and get one of their guys.

However, Schlenk said that the deal became unnecessary because Shams Charania reported that the Bucks were going to take Donte DiVincenzo, who was, apparently, not one of the two they wanted. Pick tipping is not just helpful for fans, it turns out.

My first reaction is Schlenk is good at his job, having his team monitor Twitter for this kind of intel. If sources are willing to share another team's intentions on draft night with a journalist who is all too happy to tweet that information out, it only makes sense for Schlenk to want to slurp that information up and let it inform his draft day choices.

But my second reaction is one of worry that the NBA will catch wind of this and absolutely freak the hell out. Leagues as big as the NBA almost can't help themselves when it comes to this kind of thing. The idea that a trade was scuttled due to great reporting and the tipping of a pick almost certainly isn't going to sit well with Commissioner Adam Silver and it feels quite impossible that no action over this will be taken by the league.

If the end result is the NBA trying to lock things down a la the NFL, that would be unfortunate and ultimately ineffective. If they take the much more likely action of trying to cut off access to sports journalists from teams on draft day, that would be worse for fans, for its teams, and for its own marketability. Here's hoping Silver, who is relatively forward-thinking, keeps a cooler head than I fear.

Filed Under: basketball, draft, information, nba draft, travis schlenk, tweets
Companies: nba

Bose Lawsuit For Collecting Headphone Data Is Flimsy, But Highlights Continued Lack Of Real Transparency

from the dumb-tech-is-often-smarter dept

Being transparent about what private consumer data is being collected and sold appears to be a hard lesson for hardware vendors to learn. Earlier this month, Bose was hit with a new lawsuit (pdf) accusing it of collecting and selling personal subscriber usage data of the company's $350 QC 35 noise-canceling headphones. More specifically, the lawsuit claims that the Bose Connect smartphone companion app is collecting user preferences when it comes to "music, radio broadcast, Podcast, and lecture choices" -- and then monetizing that data without making it clear to the end user:

Unbeknownst to its customers, however, Defendant designed Bose Connect to (i) collect and record the titles of the music and audio files its customers choose to play through their Bose wireless products and (ii) transmit such data along with other personal identifiers to third-parties—including a data miner—without its customers’ knowledge or consent...Though the data collected from its customers’ smartphones is undoubtedly valuable to the company, Defendant’s conduct demonstrates a wholesale disregard for consumer privacy rights and violates numerous state and federal laws.

To be clear, the complaint, filed last week by Bose customer Kyle Zak in federal court in Chicago, seems more than a little thin. The suit appears to piggyback on growing concern about the wave of internet of things devices (from televisions to smart dildos) that increasingly use internet connectivity to hoover up as much as possible about consumers. Often, this data is collected and transferred unencrypted to the cloud, then disseminated to any number of partner companies without adequate disclosure.

That said, while Bose marketing insists users need the app to "get the most out of your headphones" and get the "latest features" for their headphones, in this instance, users can avoid data collection by simply not using the Bose companion app. And while Bose only appears to be collecting metadata, the suit tries to somehow claim that collecting this type of metadata -- which any and every music service also happily collects -- somehow violates the Wiretap Act:

... customers must download and install Bose Connect to take advantage of the Bose Wireless Products’ features and functions. Yet, Bose fails to notify or warn customers that Bose Connect monitors and collects—in real time—the music and audio tracks played through their Bose Wireless Products. Nor does Bose disclose that it transmits the collected listening data to third parties.

Were Bose, say, using the headphone jack on a headset to monitor actual user communications, the case might have legs. That said, while the suit's central Wiretap Act claims may be weak, the suit once again highlights that consumer data collection policies, if disclosed at all, are often buried in overlong privacy policies few if any consumers actually read -- using language carefully crafted to obfuscate what precisely is happening. Bose doesn't really help its case all that much in a statement on its website that declares the lawsuit "inflammatory" and "misleading," before being a little misleading itself:

We understand the nature of Class Action lawsuits. And we’ll fight the inflammatory, misleading allegations made against us through the legal system. For now, we want to talk directly to you. Nothing is more important to us than your trust. We work tirelessly to earn and keep it, and have for over 50 years. That’s never changed, and never will. In the Bose Connect App, we don’t wiretap your communications, we don’t sell your information, and we don’t use anything we collect to identify you – or anyone else – by name.

While Bose insists it doesn't "sell your information" -- its app privacy policy does note that it "may partner with certain third parties" to "engage in analysis, auditing, research, and reporting" (hey, it's not selling if we call it something else). And while Bose may not personally identify you "by name," we've long noted that "anonymized" data is far from anonymous. Study after study has made it clear that it only takes a shred of additional contextual data to make "anonymous" data easily and personally identifiable. If "trust" were truly Bose's top priority, they'd actually explain precisely what the app is doing, who data is sent to, and why.

Again, many may not care that Bose is collecting this data. Especially in an age where everybody carries around a miniature computer in their pocket, happily oblivious that their every step and click are being monetized by cellular carriers, app vendors, OS makers, advertising networks, and everybody else in the food chain. The problem is that companies continue to believe there's nothing wrong with hoovering up every shred of data they can, then hiding this collection in overlong, carefully-worded privacy policies -- and the false sense of security "anonymization" is supposed to provide.

Filed Under: information, kyle zak, privacy, tracking, transparency, wiretap act
Companies: bose

Facebook Announces Its Pilot Plans To 'Deal' With Fake News -- Not With Censorship, But With More Info

from the not-a-bad-idea dept

Facebook is now taking clear steps to try to address what some are calling its "fake news" problem. As someone who has argued that the fuss over this is massively overhyped and misleading, I actually find Facebook's steps here to be fairly sensible, and not a cause for concern -- but let's dig into the details.

We've made it clear that we think that people freaking out about fake news on Facebook are overreacting, when they try to "blame" the results of the election, or even how people feel about certain candidates on Facebook. And, we've also warned that the end result of much of the complaining is inevitable calls for censorship, which is dangerous. In fact, we've already seen that both China and Iran are using the hubbub over "fake news" to justify their own draconian censorship and surveillance efforts.

But, that doesn't mean that Facebook should do nothing about it. "Fake news" is unlikely to be influencing the election, but that doesn't mean it's not a nuisance -- though, if we're going to talk about "fake news" at the very least we should divide it into more accurate subgroupings: there's outright made up false news, there's propaganda (those first two can overlap, admittedly), there's erroneous (but well-intentioned) reporting and then there's actually good reporting that people dislike. That last one some may argue is not fake news, but trust me when I say that some people are using this "fake news" storm to lump in those kinds of articles too -- which does a good job of showing why the label "fake news" is a real risk of being abused for censorship.

As for Facebook's actual approach, it appears to take some of the suggestions many have made over the last month or so, and starts to implement some tests to see how good a job they do in real life. The plan is not one based on censorship, but more about providing individuals with more information. There's certainly still the possibility of abuse here, but the initial implementation does seem reasonable. Here are the key changes:

• Making it easier for users to "report" hoax stories. This has been available within Facebook's system already but it's pretty buried, and apparently not widely used. This is very much targeted at purely 100% fake stories, things that were made up solely for clicks, but the real challenge will be to see how it handles vote brigading by people who, say, want to attack a particular article from another bucket described above. In the end, it's likely that some users will be unhappy about this, especially if they attack a story that they disagree with, but which is factually accurate, and Facebook doesn't agree with their assessment.
  
  
• Partnering with fact checking organizations to help flag "disputed" stories. Facebook says that it will use the user-flagging (along with the black box known as "other signals") to alert a number of third party fact checking organizations to look into stories that reach a certain threshold of flagging:

  We'll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations. If the fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed will also appear lower in News Feed.
  
  It will still be possible to share these stories, but you will see a warning that the story has been disputed as you share. Once a story is flagged, it can't be made into an ad and promoted, either.

  Again, this seems reasonable, and should be common (in a slightly different format...) to the way some subreddits use a "disputed" flag. Instead of blocking the content, more information is provided, including links to third party sources that people can check out, and such stories are less likely to appear at the top of the algorithmic feed. This, of course, will also make some people nervous, and you can already predict the viral reaction that's going to shoot around the internet the second some stories get hit with the "disputed" flag. We've already seen lots of claims in our comments from people who don't trust fact checking organizations, and so it's likely that there will be some anger over some of these decisions. Overall, though, this seems like a good solution.
  
  I've also been told that eventually (perhaps not immediately) if someone goes to share a link that's been hit with the "disputed" flag, the user will get a prompt, just making sure they recognize it's disputed and making sure they really still want to share it. This seems like a reasonable approach -- one that involves providing more information, rather than jumping straight to "blocking" information.
  
  
• New signals of what's hoax content: Above I mentioned that some of this is a black box, but it looks like one signal that Facebook will now be using is seeing if people actually go and read an article, and don't share it, compared to those who just share it without reading it first:

  We've found that if reading an article makes people significantly less likely to share it, that may be a sign that a story has misled people in some way. We're going to test incorporating this signal into ranking, specifically for articles that are outliers, where people who read the article are significantly less likely to share it.

  It would be fascinating to see the data on this. It makes sense, but I do wonder how clear and obvious the different sharing rates are on that particular signal.
  
  
• No boosting/promoting spam content: This one seems to just be a version of what Facebook already announced last month. But it looks like they're going a bit further in trying to just stop the pure 100% hoaxers-in-it-for-the-money sites from being able to totally overrun Facebook news feeds:

  On the buying side we've eliminated the ability to spoof domains, which will reduce the prevalence of sites that pretend to be real publications. On the publisher side, we are analyzing publisher sites to detect where policy enforcement actions might be necessary.

  Again, this is a case where how this is actually done is going to matter a lot. However, it does seem that Facebook is suffiiciently concerned about being seen as putting its hands too heavily on the scales, and it seems likely that the company will really target this kind of action only towards the pure spammers. Otherwise, it's likely to face backlash.

One thing that the company is also making clear is that it's testing all of these things to see how they work -- and they could change. I'm still nervous about the possibility for any such systems to be abused, but the approach here seems to be pretty reasonable from a first glance -- and set up in a way that if it's not reasonable, there will be pretty quick public backlash.

Filed Under: fact checking, fake news, information, social media
Companies: facebook

Just How Wise Is It When Marco Rubio Promises To Swear Off Factual Information From Wikileaks?

from the hmmmm dept

Amidst the reporting and fervor over the email hack of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, there has been something of a recent discussion that has begun over the ethics of circulating what is in that hacked cache. Some within the media itself have worried about about reporting either too much on the hacked emails, or even at all in some cases, with still others going for a more nuanced position of encouraging the reporting of information in the public interest while leaving all the personal stuff in the emails undisclosed to whatever degree is possible.

It's not difficult to see the wisdom and morality in some of this, particularly when one witnesses the glee the Clinton campaign's political opponents have taken in circulating internal communications within the campaign that have no real public value other than serving as a point-and-laugh target for the most partisan among us. And it seems as though some in the GOP have in mind that there are certainly people on the other side of the aisle that would take the same joy in all of this, if the shoe were on the other hacked foot, as it were. Marco Rubio, for instance, recently released a statement indicating that anything published by WikiLeaks was out of bounds, as far as he was concerned.

"Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow, it could be us," Rubio said in a statement. "I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks," added Rubio, who is up for re-election. "As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process, and I will not indulge in it."

Frankly, it's refreshing to see a major political partisan actually understand that when you open up every option on the table to attack the political opponent, that can come back and bite you in the ass. But how wise is this particular stance, actually? It appears to rely on two premises: that Russia is behind the email hack and that WikiLeaks is a bad organization for releasing the information it releases. Note that Rubio doesn't say that this particular email hack is out of bounds, but rather that any issue raised as a result of a WikiLeaks release is. That's a hefty barrel of sand in which to put one's head in such a proactive fashion, and it presupposes that WikiLeaks' releases in the past, present, and future have not involved anything of the public interest which politicians and public servants should be talking about and/or addressing.

Time Magazine once said WikiLeaks "could become the most important journalistic tool since the Freedom of Information Act." Why? Well, because the value in WikiLeaks is that it knows far fewer boundaries than the general media and is willing to release information that would otherwise not see the light of day. That it tends to do so en masse rather than with careful curation is a potential downside, certainly, but would Rubio and these others really have the public not know about the killing of journalists in Iraq, the Chinese arrests of Tibetan dissidents, the Peru oil scandal, and the rest? WikiLeaks is not explicitly anti-American, after all, and it has released information that is absolutely in the public interest and has caused discussions of political importance within our country that would have otherwise been impossible.

Put another way, it's quite easy for Rubio to take this stance in the wake of an email hack that represents a fairly routine political scandal. What has been uncovered in the Podesta leaks is not unimportant, but it also isn't earth-shattering. What if the hack and WikiLeaks leak had instead uncovered that Hillary Clinton had made a specific agreement with the Chinese government to offer them favors in exchange for illegal campaign contributions? Would Rubio's stance hold true, despite the overwhelming importance of such information to American voters. It's hard to imagine that it would.

So, a nuanced approach to what should be reported on the WikiLeaks release makes all the sense in the world. Let's have that discussion. But putting a blanket over any information generated by WikiLeaks as an organization isn't just dumb, it's cutting out an important source of public good from the masses.

Filed Under: hacked, information, journalism, marco rubio, news, personal, privacy, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks