If You Want To Know Why Section 230 Matters, Just Ask Wikimedia: Without It, There'd Be No Wikipedia

from the also-just-grow-up,-china dept

It sometimes seems that Techdirt spends half its time debunking bad ideas for reforming or even repealing Section 230. In fact, so many people seem to get the law wrong that Mike was moved to write a detailed post on the subject with the self-explanatory title "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act". It may be necessary (and tiresome) work rebutting all this wrongness, but it's nice for a change to be able to demonstrate precisely why Section 230 is so important. A recent court ruling provides just such an example:

On September 15th, in a victory for the Wikimedia movement and for all user-driven projects online, a Florida judge dismissed claims of defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress against the Wikimedia Foundation. The judge found that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes the Wikimedia Foundation from liability for third-party content republished on Wikipedia. In other words, Section 230 helps Wikimedia safely host the work of Wikipedia's contributors and enables the effective volunteer-led moderation of content on the projects.

As the Wikimedia blog post notes, this was an absolutely crucial result. If collaborative projects that are created, maintained, and curated by volunteers could be held liable every time a user contributed something that was inaccurate or offensive, none of them would last very long -- not least because they generally lack the resources to fight expensive court cases. Back in 2017, Wikimedia wrote a detailed post on Section 230, and why it made Wikipedia and other sites possible

The court's ruling is a big win for Wikimedia. On the other hand, in something of a (minor) defeat, China has yet again blocked the Wikimedia Foundation's application for observer status at WIPO -- the only country to object. This is the second time it has done so, and for the same reason:

As in 2020, China's statement falsely suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was spreading disinformation via the independent, volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. The United States and the group of industrialized countries at WIPO -- which also includes many European Union member states, Australia, Canada, the Holy See, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom -- expressed their support for the Foundation's application. Since WIPO is generally run by consensus, any one country may veto accreditation requests by non-governmental organizations.

China's blocking of a small, apolitical organization that aims to promote knowledge around the world just looks incredibly petty, and is hardly befitting for a world power.

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

Filed Under: china, defamation, free speech, internet platforms, section 230, taiwan, wikipedia, wipo
Companies: wikimedia foundation, wikipedia

Google And Facebook Didn't Kill Newspapers: The Internet Did

from the check-the-data dept

There is an infamous chart in media circles. It shows newspaper advertising revenue steadily rising until about the year 2000. A few years later, it drops off a cliff. Superimposed on this chart is the exponential growth of Google and Facebook:

Source: Thomas Baekdal

The obvious implication, at least to those who work in journalism, is that Google and Facebook killed their industry. That’s certainly the conclusion Matt Stoller comes to in a recent op-ed for the New York Times:

The collapse of journalism and democracy in the face of the internet is not inevitable. To save democracy and the free press, we must eliminate Google and Facebook’s control over the information commons. That means decentralizing these markets and splitting information utilities from one another so that search, mapping, YouTube and other Google subsidiaries are separate companies, and Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook once again compete.

First, it’s important to note that newspaper advertising revenue peaked a few years before the rise of Google (and many years before Facebook). That’s one hint a broader phenomenon is at work. But more generally, Stoller frames the history of advertising and journalism in a fundamentally incorrect way. He argues as if the ad-based business model for local journalism was the natural state of the world — upended only by Facebook’s and Google’s so-called "monopolies." In reality, print newspapers had a monopoly on local information distribution due to the prevailing technologies of their time. These regional monopolies were slowly eroded by the introduction, first, of radio and then television (see Lorain Journal Co. v. United States). But, ultimately, newspapers were disrupted by the internet.

Source: Matthew Ball

So, why did newspapers have a local monopoly in the first place? Mostly due to the high fixed costs (e.g., printing presses, warehouses, reporters, delivery trucks) and low marginal costs (i.e., paper and ink) of newspaper production and distribution. Therefore, it was very easy for newspapers to dominate the local market with one bundled product, which included everything from political news and opinion to sports and classifieds. The monopoly profits were used to fund, among other things, investigative journalism (which would lose money as a standalone business but provides value and prestige as part of a bundle).

The internet blew this arrangement to pieces. No longer was owning printing presses and delivery trucks sufficient to charge advertisers and readers whatever you wanted. The newspaper was unbundled by many internet companies, large and small. The infographic below shows how different digital services peeled off a piece of the newspaper value proposition:

Source: Haseeb Qureshi

For example, Craigslist, eBay and other free or low-cost digital classified ad services out-competed print classified ads:

Source: Business Insider

Google and Facebook entered the ad market with more efficient self-service platforms for advertisers and quickly gained market share. Stoller attributes their success not to superior efficiency but to anti-competitive acquisitions:

Enabled by a loose merger policy, there was a roll-up of the internet space. From 2004 to 2014, Google spent at least $23 billion buying 145 companies, including the advertising giant DoubleClick. And since 2004, Facebook has spent a similar amount buying 66 companies, including key acquisitions allowing it to attain dominance in mobile social networking. None of these acquisitions were blocked as anti-competitive.

What this merger analysis omits, however, is that the vast majority of these were vertical mergers, meaning the acquired company wasn’t a direct competitor with the acquirer. In other words, Google is not dominant in search today because it engaged in killer acquisitions of rival search engines. Of the 66 Facebook acquisitions, only Instagram is a plausible case of horizontal integration between social media companies (and, even then, Facebook invested heavily post-acquisition).

But Stoller also exaggerates the extent of their market power, calling them “global monopolies sitting astride public discourse.” In 2018, the global ad market was about $540 billion. Google’s revenue from advertising was $116 billion; Facebook’s was $55 billion. That’s a combined 32 percent market share. Not quite a monopoly (or duopoly, technically).

Source: Benedict Evans

And if you expand the market definition to include both advertising and marketing, as Benedict Evans shows in the chart below, then Google and Facebook’s share gets cut in half.

Source: Benedict Evans

Stoller concludes by saying, “Advertising revenue should once again flow to journalism and art.” But even if we break up all the big tech companies, your local newspaper will not magically have a profitable ad business again. The money currently flowing to consolidated Facebook would go to the newly independent Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (or other digital services if you curtail advertising on social media). Internet platforms are simply more efficient at matching advertisers with customers than are traditional newspapers.

If we want to “fix” journalism, it will require a new path forward (i.e., innovative business models). We've tried radical protectionism before: In 1970, Nixon signed the Newspaper Preservation Act, which gave newspapers a special carve-out from the antitrust laws. According to the NYT (in 1999!), it had no effect on the end result:

But in the world of 1999, does the loss of a newspaper matter as much as it did in 1970, when the scores of cable channels and hundreds of Web sites did not exist?

The new media landscape and the growing competition for advertising dollars, make it harder for a weak newspaper to survive, and make its survival less urgent, Mr. Lacy believes. ''I'm not sure I'd call the Newspaper Preservation Act a failure,'' he said. ''Just a nonsuccess. People back then did not realize that this would not make a difference in the long run.''

It’s possible policymakers could construct another special protection for journalism. But it would entail massive state control of media that no one would be satisfied with. Resurrecting the regional monopolies once enjoyed by local newspapers is both undesirable and unrealistic.

Filed Under: ads, business models, competition, democracy, internet platforms, journalism, matt stoller, trust
Companies: facebook, google

Axel Voss Says Maybe YouTube Shouldn't Exist

from the say-what-now? dept

I'm beginning to think that Axel Voss, the Member of the European Parliament in charge of ramming through the EU Copyright Directive, doesn't have much of a clue about how either copyright or the internet works. Last week, we pointed out that he was making provably false statements about Article 13, and wondered why he'd be doing that. But the more he talks, the more I'm wondering if he simply doesn't understand the basics of either copyright law or the internet. The latest comes in some quotes he gave in a great article by DW.com, which correctly highlights how Article 13 is going to lead to widespread censorship. Voss tries to defend it with some truly bizarre claims:

“We are just concentrating on platforms that are infringing on copyrighted works like YouTube. Not for dating platforms or merchandising or local social platforms. Only 1.5% of internet platforms will be affected.”

Only 1.5% of platforms will be affected? I think we're going to need to slap a giant "citation needed" on that one. According to the released text, the law will apply to the following:

‘online content sharing service provider’ means a provider of an information society service whose main or one of the main purposes is to store and give the public access to a large amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes. Providers of services such as not-for profit online encyclopedias, not-for profit educational and scientific repositories, open source software developing and sharing platforms, electronic communication service providers as defined in Directive 2018/1972 establishing the European Communications Code, online marketplaces and business-to business cloud services and cloud services which allow users to upload content for their own use shall not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive.

The special carve-outs for "non-profit online encyclopedias, not-for profit educational and scientific repositories, open source software developing and sharing platforms" came after Wikipedia and Github pointed out how impossible Article 13 would make their future existence. Either way, the giant misunderstanding here, is that basically everything is covered by copyright. So, any site that enables user-generated content, and is a for profit entity, will "store and give access to a large amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users which it organizes and promotes for profit-making purposes." That's called the internet. The law clearly impacts way more than 1.5% of internet platforms.

Even more to the point: even if Voss and his allies can scrape together some nonsense by listing out all sorts of other websites that wouldn't be impacted by this, the number of websites is the wrong metric. The real question is about how much of the internet that people interact with on a daily basis would be impacted: and there the answer is a ton of it. There are a whole bunch of rankings of the "top websites" out there, but skimming through a bunch of them you see that a huge number of the most popular websites would be impacted by this: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitch, Imgur, Pornhub, Wordpress and more. If you add in some of the top Chinese sites, it gets even bigger.

But here's the bigger issue: Voss then seems to suggest none of these sites should even exist. No, really:

“We all have legal obligations to fulfill. If you have a massive platform like YouTube you will have to use a technological solution. Everyone has these obligations. They have created a business model with the property of other people – on copyright protected works. If the intention of the platform is to give people access to copyright protected works then we have to think about whether this kind of business should exist. The new legislation is improving the situation for the European creators industry.”

Say what now? Not exist at all? This whole thing seems to be based on the false premise -- often pushed by the RIAA and MPAA -- that YouTube was solely created to allow users to upload others' professional content. That's not accurate at all. The entire basis for YouTube was to allow people to express themselves. And they do. The top channels on YouTube are not people uploading other people's infringing content, but independent creators creating their own amazing new content that wouldn't have been possible in an age before YouTube.

So how is it that Axel Voss is considered an authority on this? He doesn't seem to understand that every new work is covered by copyright, so any website that hosts user-uploaded content -- audio, video, text, images, etc. -- is subject to this law. He also doesn't seem to understand that none of these sites are built with the intent of having people upload infringing material, it's just that some segment of the population will do that. Because that's part of how the internet works. But the good from all this -- the ability for anyone to create and share their content, as well as the vast ability of people to find and discover new and amazing content -- greatly outweighs the fact that it might change the business model for a few legacy companies.

Voss' final line is a real kicker. "Improving the situation for the European creators industry." Uh, no it's not. More people are creating than ever before, and they're using the tools that Article 13 will punish to do so. When people have fewer places to share their content or to make money from their content, that's not helping creators or the "creators industry." Sure, it might help a very small number of old gatekeeper companies -- record labels, book publishers, movie studios -- be in a position to demand more money from internet companies, but thinking that those old gatekeepers represent the "creators industry" is ludicrously out of touch.

Still the fact that Voss is now admitting that the real goal behind Article 13 is to move us to a world where "maybe" YouTube "shouldn't exist," perhaps he can apologize for his comments last week in which he insisted that all he really wanted "is what already exists" and which "online platforms have already put into practice." Yes, just last week, he was saying that the rules "will not go beyond what is currently in place and things will largely remain as they are now." And this week he's saying, well, actually maybe "this kind of company should not exist."

Axel Voss seems willing to say anything, no matter how contradictory, how obviously incorrect, to push through Article 13.

Filed Under: article 13, axel voss, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, internet platforms, user generated content
Companies: youtube

A Conversation With EU Parliament Member Marietje Schaake About Digital Platforms And Regulation, Part II

from the the-view-from-the-EU dept

Yesterday we published Part I of Danish journalist/author and Cato Institute Fellow Flemming Rose's very interesting conversation with Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake concerning questions around internet platforms and regulation. This is the second and final part of that conversation.

FR: I want to focus on the small players. People concerned about regulation say that if you only focus on the big players like Facebook, Google or Twitter and how to regulate them, you will make it very difficult for the small players to stay in the market because transaction costs and other costs connected to regulation will kill the small companies. Regulation becomes a way to lock in the existing regime and market shares because it takes so many resources and so much money to stay in the market and compete. And new companies will never be able to enter the market. What do say to that argument?

MS: It depends on how the regulations are made but it is a real risk. It is the risk of GDPR (general data protection regulation), and with filtering as suggested now. The size of a company is always a way to assess whether there is a problem, and I think we should do the same with these regulations so that there could be a progressive liability depending on how big the company is or there could be some kind of mechanism that would help small or medium size companies to deal with these requirements. Indeed, it is true that for companies that have billions of euros or dollars of revenue, it's easy to deploy lots of people. A representative of Google yesterday (at a conference in the European Parliament) said they have 10,000 people working on content moderation. Those are extraordinary figures, and they are proportionate because of the big the impact of these companies, but if you are a small company you may not be able to do it, and this is always an issue. It's not the first time we have been dealing with this. With every regulation the question is how hard it is for small and medium enterprises.

FR: The challenge or threat from misinformation is also playing a big role in the debate about regulation and liability. We will soon have an election in Denmark. Sweden recently had an election where there was a big focus on misinformation, but it turns out that misinformation doesn't work as well in Denmark as in the US or some other countries because the public is more resilient. Why not focus more on resilience and less on regulation so people have a choice? We are up against human nature, these things are triggered by tribalism and other human characteristics. To counter it you need education, media pluralism, and so on.

MS: I think you need to focus on both. First, what is choice if you have a few near monopolies dominating the market? Second, how much can we expect from citizens? If you look at the terms of service for a common digital provider that you and I use, they are quite lengthy. Is that a choice for a consumer? I think it's nonsense. That's one thing. Moreover, we are lucky because we are from countries where basic trust is relatively high, media pluralism exists, there are many political parties, and our governments will be committed to investing in education and media pluralism, knock on wood. How will this play out in a country like Italy where basic trust is lower and where there is less media pluralism, how are you ever going to overcome this with big tech, so I think there is a sufficient risk if you look at the entire European Union, Hungary and other countries, that governments will not commit resources to what is right and they will create the kind of resilience that our societies already have. In the Netherlands trust in the media is among the highest, and it's probably also because of a certain quality of life and certain kind of freedom that people have enjoyed for a long time. Even in our country you see a lot of anti-system political parties rise, so it's not a given that this balance will continue forever because it requires public resources to be spend on media and other factors. So I think both are very important and I don't want to suggest that we should not involve people but I don't know if we can expect of the average citizen to have the time and the ability to have access to information it would take to make them resilient enough on their own.

FR: Do you think a version of the German "Facebook law" with the delegation of law enforcement to the digital platforms will make it to the agenda of lawmakers in the European Parliament?

MS: No, I think there are too many flaws in it. It's bad. Some form of responsibility on behalf of companies to take down information will exist, but I hope the law will be the primary tool. The companies will take down content measured against the law with the proper safeguards and proportionality. If there are incentives like big fines to be overtly ambitious in taking down information, that's a risk. But on the other hand, the platforms as private companies already have all the freedom they want to take down any information with a reference to their terms of use. We are assuming that they are going to take the law as guidance, but nothing indicates they will. In fact, Facebook doesn't accept breastfeeding pictures, so they are already setting new social norms. A new generation may grow up thinking breastfeeding is obscene. The platforms are already regulating speech, and people who are scared about regulation should understand that it is Mark Zuckerberg who is regulating speech right now.

FR: Recently the EU praised the Code of Conduct to fight hate speech online that they signed with the tech companies in 2016. A lot of speech has been taken down according to the EU: 89 percent of flagged content within 24 hours in the past year, but my question is: Do we know how much speech has been taken down that should not have been taken down?

MS: No, we don't know.

FR: That will concern those who value free speech. You have the law and you have community standards and then you have a mob mentality, i.e. the people who are complaining most and screaming louder will have their way and they will set the standards. So if you organize people to complain about certain content, it will be taken down to make life easier for Facebook and Twitter and Google.

MS: Yes.

FR: So you agree that it's a concern?

MS: It's a huge concern. If you believe in freedom of expression which I know you do, and I think it's one of the most important rights and so many people have been fighting for it, why will we give it up? Just a little bit of erosion of freedom of expression is a huge danger and therefore to put responsibility on these companies to take down content without a check against the law is a risk, to allow these companies to set their own terms of use that can be at complete odds with the law and also with social norms (consider the restrictions on the breastfeeding, on Italian Renaissance statues as pornographic, or on the photo of a naked girl hit by napalm in Vietnam). Let me give you an example from my own experience. I gave a speech here in parliament, it was a very innocent and clearly political speech, but it was taken down by YouTube. They said it was marked as spam, which I don't believe. I have never posted anything that was labeled spam. What I think happened was that my speech was about banning goods and trade that can be used for torture and the death penalty. I think that the machine flagged torture because torture is bad, but a political debate about torture is not bad. I took a screenshot of the fact that YouTube took it down, posted it on twitter and said "wow!, see what happened", and they were on the phone within two hours, but that's not the experience most people (including the people I represent) will have. That's the danger. We also know examples of Russians having flagged Ukrainian websites and then they were taken down. And if that happens to a political candidate in the last 24 hours before an election it could be decisive, even if the companies say they'll restore it within 24 hours.

FR: I spoke to a representative from one of the tech companies who said that when they consult with German lawyers whether something is legal or not, they will get three different answers from three different lawyers. He said that his company would be willing to do certain things on behalf of the government, but it requires clear rules and today the rules aren't clear.

MS: Right, so now you see incentives coming from the companies as well. It's no longer working for them to take on all these responsibilities whether they are pushed to do so or just asked to do it. The fact that they have to do things is also a consequence of them saying "don't regulate us, we can fix this." I think it's a slippery slope. I don't want to see privatized law enforcement. What if Facebook is bought by Alibaba tomorrow? How happy would we be?

FR: I want to ask you about monopolies, competition and regulation. If you go back to 2007 MySpace was the biggest platform, then it was outcompeted by Facebook. As you say, there are concerns about the way Facebook manages our data and its business model with ads and sensational news driving traffic and getting more eyeballs. But why not let the market sort things out? If there is dissatisfaction with the way Facebook is running their business and our data, why not set up a competing company based on a different business model that will satisfy customers' need?

MS: States don't built companies in Europe.

FR: I was having private companies in mind. Netflix has a subscription model, wouldn't a digital platform like Facebook be able to do the same?

MS: I think it would be difficult now, because there is a lock-in effect. In Europe we are trying to provide people with the ability to take their data out again. If you use gmail for 12 years, your pictures, your correspondence with your family and loved ones, with your boss and colleagues, it could all be in there, and you want to take all those data with you. It's your correspondence, it's private, you may need it for your personal records. You may have filed your taxes and saved your returns and receipts in the cloud. If you are not able to move that data to another place, then competition exist only in theory. Also, if you look at Facebook, almost everybody is on Facebook now. For somebody else to start from scratch and reach everybody is very difficult. It's not impossible but it's difficult. And for those models to make money the question is how much are customers willing to pay as required by the subscription model?

Facebook and Google already have so much data about us. Even if I am not on Facebook, but all my friends are, then a sketch of my identity emerges because I am the empty spot between everybody else. If people start posting pictures of a birthday party with the 10 people who are on Facebook and the one person that is not, and then somebody says I can't wait to go on holiday with Marietje or whatever, then at some point it would be clear who I am, even if I am not on the platform, so they already know so much and they already has access to so much data about people's behaviour that effectively it will be very hard for any competitor to get close, and we have seen it in practice. Why hasn't there been more competition?

FR: Do you compare notes with US lawmakers on this? And do you see that your positions are getting closer to one another?

MS: Yes.

FR: Can you say a bit more about that?

MS: First of all the talk has changed. The Europeans were dismissed as being jealous of US companies and therefore proposing regulations, i.e. we were proposing regulations in order to destroy US competitors. I don't think that's true, but this stereotypical view has been widespread. Also, we were being accused of being too emotional about this, so we were dismissed as being irrational which is quite insulting, but not unusual when Americans look at Europeans. I think we are in a different place now with a privacy law in California, with New York Times editorials about the need for tougher competition regulations, with senators proposing more drastic measures, with organizations like the Center for Humane Technology focusing om time well spent, and with Apple hiring people to focus on privacy issues. Recall also conversations about inequality in San Francisco. We have a flow of topics and conversations that suggest that the excessive outcomes of this platform economy need boundaries. I think this has become more and more accepted. The election of Donald Trump was probably the tipping point. We learned later how Facebook and others had been manipulated.

FR: You said that the problem with these companies is that they have become so powerful and therefore we need to regulate them. Is the line between public and private as blurred in Europe compared to the US? You focus on power no matter whether it's the government or a private company when it comes to protection of free speech, while in the US the First Amendment exclusively deals with the government. Do you see that as a fundamental distinction between Europe and the US?

MS: There are more articulated limitations on speech in Europe: for example, Holocaust denial, hate speech and other forms of expression may be prohibited by law. I think there is another context here that matters. Americans in general trust private companies more than they trust the government, and in Europe roughly speaking it's the other way round, so intuitively most people in Europe would prefer safeguards coming from law than trusting the market to regulate itself. That might be more important than the line between private and public and the First Amendment compared to European free speech doctrine.

Filed Under: eu, eu parliament, flemming rose, free speech, intermediary liability, internet platforms, marietje schaake, regulations

Activism & Doxing: Stephen Miller, ICE And How Internet Platforms Have No Good Options

from the and-for-fun,-the-cfaa-and-scraping dept

Last month, at the COMO Content Moderation Summit in Washington DC, I co-ran a "You Make the Call" session with Emma Llanso from CDT. The idea was to turn the audience into a content moderation/trust & safety team of a fictionalized social media platform. We showed numerous examples of content or accounts that were "flagged" and then showed the associated terms of service, and had the entire audience vote on what to do. One of the fictional examples involved someone posting a link to a third-party website "contactinfo.com" claiming to have the personal phone and email contact info of Harvey Weinstein and urging people "you know what to do!" with a hashtag. The relevant terms of service included this: "You may not post personal information about others without their consent."

The audience voting was pretty mixed on this. 47% of the audience punted on the question, choosing to escalate it to a supervisor as they felt they couldn't decide whether to leave the content up or take it down. 32% felt it should just be taken down. 10% said to just leave it up and another 10% said to put a content warning flag on the content. We joked a bit during the session that some of these examples were "ripped from the headlines" but apparently we predicted the headlines in this case, because there are two stories this week that touch on exactly this kind of thing.

Example one is the story that came out yesterday, in which Twitter chose to start locking the accounts of users who were either tweeting Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller's cell phone number, or merely linking to a Splinternews article that published his cell phone number (which I'm guessing has since been changed...).

Splinternews decided to publish Miller's phone number after multiple news reports attributed the inhumane* decision to separate children of asylum seekers from their parents to Miller, who has defended the plan. Other reports noted that Miller is enjoying all of the controversy over this policy. Splinternews, citing Donald Trump's own history of giving out the phone numbers of people who anger him, thought it was only fair that people be able to reach out to Miller.

This is -- for fairly obvious reasons -- a controversial decision. I think most news organizations would never do such a thing. Not surprisingly, the number spread rapidly on Twitter, and Twitter started locking all of those accounts until the tweets were removed. That seems at least well within reason under Twitter's rules that explicitly state:

You may not publish or post other people's private information without their express authorization and permission.

But, that question gets a lot sketchier when it comes to locking the accounts of people who merely linked to the Splinternews article. A la our fictionalized example, those people are not actually publishing or posting anyone's private info. They are posting a link to a third party that purports to have that information. And, of course, in this case, the situation is complicated even more than our fictionalized example because Splinternews is a news organization (owned by Univision), and Twitter also has said that it has a "newsworthy" exception to its rules.

Personally, I think it's the wrong call to lock the accounts of those linking to the news story, but... as we discovered in our own sample version, it's not an easy call and lots of people have strong opinions one way or the other. Indeed, part of the reason why Twitter may have decided to do this was that supporters of Trump/Miller started calling out the article as an example of doxxing and claiming that leaving it up showed that Twitter was unfairly biased against them. It is a no win situation.

And, of course, it wouldn't take long before people started coming up with clever workarounds, such as Parker Higgins (citing the infamous 09F9 controversy in which the MPAA tried to censor the revelation of a cryptographic key that broke the MPAA's preferred DRM, and people responded by posting variations on the code, including a color chart in which the hex codes of the colors were the code), who posted the following:

Would Twitter lock his account for posting a two color image? At some point, the whole thing gets... crazy. That's not to argue that revealing someone's private cell phone number is a good thing -- no matter how you feel about Miller or the border policy. But just on the content moderation side, it puts Twitter in a no win situation in which people are going to be pissed off no matter what it does. Oh, and of course, it also helped create something of a Streisand Effect. I certainly hadn't heard about the Splinternews article or that people were passing around Miller's phone number until the story broke about Twitter whac'ing at moles on its site.

And that takes us to the second example, which happened a day earlier -- and was also in response to people's quite reasonable* anger about the border policy. Sam Lavigne decided to make something of a public statement about how he felt about ICE by scraping** LinkedIn for profile information on everyone who works at ICE (and who has a LinkedIn public profile). His database included 1595 ICE employees. He wrote a Medium blog post about this, posted the repository to Github and another user, Russel Neiss, created a Twitter account (@iceHRgov) that tweeted out info about each of those employees from that database. Notice that none of those are linked. That's because all three companies took them down (though you can still find archives of the Medium post). There was also an archive of the Github repository, but it has since been memory-holed as well.

Again... this raises a lot of questions. Github claimed that it removed the page for "violating community guidelines" -- specifically around "doxxing and harassment, and violating a third party's privacy." Medium claimed that the post violated rules against "doxxing" and specifically the "aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten or endanger." Twitter, in Twitter's usual way, is not commenting. LinkedIn put out a statement saying: "We do not support or condone what immigration authorities are doing at the border, but we can’t allow the illegal use of our member data. We will take appropriate action to ensure our members’ data is protected and used properly."

Many people point out that all of this feels kind of ridiculous, seeing as this is all public info that the individuals chose to reveal about themselves on a public website. While Medium's expansive definition of doxxing makes things interesting by including an intent standard in releasing the info, even if it is publicly available, the whole thing, again, demonstrates how complex this is. I know that some people will claim that these are easy calls -- but, just for fun, try flipping the equation a bit. If you're anti-Trump, how would you feel if a prominent alt-right person compiled and posted your info -- even if publicly available -- on a site where alt-right folks gather, with the clear intent of having hoards of Trump trolls harassing you. Be careful the precedent you set.

If it were up to me, I think I would have come down differently than Medium, Github and Twitter in this case. My rationale: (1) all of this info was public information (2) that those individuals chose to place on a public website, knowing it was public (3) they are all employed by the federal government, meaning they are public servants and (4) while the compilation was done by someone who is clearly against the border policy, Lavigne never encouraged or suggested harassment of ICE agents. Instead, he wrote: "While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers, journalists and activists will find it useful." He separately noted that he believed "it's important to document what's happening, and by whom." That seems to actually make a strong point in favor of leaving the data up, as there is value in documenting what's happening.

That said, reasonable people can disagree on this question (even if there should be no disagreement about how inhumane the policy at the border has been*) of what is the appropriate way for different platforms to handle these situations -- taking into account that this situation could play out with very different players in the future, and there is value in being consistent.

This is the very point that we were demonstrating with that game that we ran at COMO. Many people seem to think that content moderation decisions are easy: you just take down the content that is bad, and leave up the content that is good. But it's pretty rare that the content is easily classified in one of those categories. There is an enormous gray area -- and much of it involves nuance and context, which is not always easy to come by -- and which may look incredibly different depending on where you sit and what kind of world you think we live in. I still think there are strong arguments that the platforms should have left much of the content discussed in this post up, but I'm not the one making that call.

When we ran that game in DC last month, it was notable that on every single example we used -- even the ones we thought were "easy calls" -- there were some audience members who selected every option in the game. That is, there was not a single situation in our examples in which everyone agreed what should be done. Indeed, since there were four options, and all four were chosen by at least one person in every single example, it shows just how difficult it really is to make these calls. They are subjective. And what plays into that subjective decision making includes your own views, your own perspective, your own reading of the content and the rules -- and sometimes third party factors, including how people are reacting and what public pressure you're getting (in both directions). It is an impossible situation.

This is also why the various calls to mandate that platforms do this or face legal liability are even more ridiculous and dangerous. There are no "right" answers to these decisions. There are solutions that seem better to lots of people, but plenty of others will disagree. If you think you know the "right" way that all of these questions should be handled, I guarantee you're wrong, and if you were in charge of these platforms, you'd end up feeling just as conflicted as well.

This is why it's really time to start thinking about and talking about better solutions. Simply calling on platforms to be the final arbiters of what goes online and what stays offline is not a workable solution.

* Just a side note: if you are among the small minority of ethically-challenged individuals who gets upset that I describe the policy as inhumane: fuck off. The policy is inhumane and if you're defending it, you should seriously take time to re-evaluate your ethics and your life choices. On a separate note, if you are among the people who are then going to try to justify this policy as "but Obama/others did it too," the same applies. Whataboutism is no argument here. The policy is inhumane no matter who did it, and pointing out that others did it too doesn't change that. And, as inhumane as it may have been in the past, it has been severely ramped up. There is no defense for it. Attempting to defend it only serves to out yourself as a horrible person who has issues. Seriously: get help.

** This doesn't even fit anywhere in with this story, but scraping LinkedIn is (stupidly) incredibly dangerous. Linkedin has a history of suing people for scraping public info off of LinkedIn. And even if it's lost some of those cases, the company appears to take a pretty aggressive stance towards scrapers. We can argue about how ridiculous this is, but, dammit, this post is already too long talking about other stuff, so discuss it separately.

Filed Under: activism, content moderation, doxing, harassment, ice, internet platforms, phone numbers, stephen miller, takedowns
Companies: github, linkedin, medium, twitter

News Publishers Ask For Monopoly Powers To Fight Back Against Google/Facebook Monopoly

from the if-you-can't-beat-them,-join-them-in-antitrust-violations dept

Cool. Cool. More two wrongs make a right legislation is being routed through the federal government. The first wrong? Facebook and Google have "too much" power, apparently, and they're strangling the life out of news agencies. Allegedly. This would seem to raise antitrust issues, if they're actually big enough to throttle newspapers and other publishers into submission. That's a big if, but why wait until the facts are in to decide? How do you fight a supposed monopoly? By allowing more monopoly, apparently.

Representative David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island) plans to introduce a bill that would exempt publishers from antitrust enforcement so they can negotiate collectively over terms for distributing their content. Cicilline says the bill is designed to level the playing field between publishers and the tech giants, not dictate the outcome. Without an exemption, collective action by publishers could run afoul of antitrust laws around colluding over price or refusal to deal with competitors.

Oddly enough, several media companies are onboard with this hot monopoly-on-monopoly action. The News Media Alliance -- representing 2,000 newspapers across the US and Canada -- thinks it doesn't have enough leverage to negotiate with social media companies. So, it wants to be allowed to break the law to make things more fair. It seems that if the problem is a social media/search engine monopoly, then legislators might want to have a word with the monopolists before allowing another set of media companies to collude to make the internet a shitty place to find news.

To make this plea for government-blessed collusion, the head of the NMA, David Chavern, has decided to belittle the internet and the people who use it.

[C]havern believes the news business warrants intervention because of its role in a healthy democracy. “The republic is not going to suffer terribly if we have bad cat video or even bad movies or bad TV. The republic will suffer if we have bad journalism,” he says, pointing to data from Pew that shows newspaper advertising fell by $4 billion from 2014 to 2016, even though web traffic for the top U.S. newspapers grew 42 percent during the same time period.

This is some prime elitist claptrap. The internet can be used for more than one thing. People who watch cat videos also read local reporting. People who enjoy bad TV also enjoy in-depth journalism. None of this is mutually exclusive and none of this has anything to do with Google or Facebook or media companies seeking permission to get the band back together and engage in monopolistic behavior. If you're so dead set on "saving the republic," why is your first move to punch holes in antitrust laws? Are you that obtuse? Do you think that hole won't be made wider by competitors for consumers' attention, resulting in even less traffic and ad revenue for news publishers?

While I understand the desire to "level" the playing field, the mechanism is completely wrong. Many, many publishers have complained about Facebook and Google destroying them but none have ever put their remaining money where their mouth is and walked away from whatever these tech companies have offered. Maybe they feel a bad deal is better than no deal at all. Or maybe they actually recognize these companies drive traffic to their sites -- traffic they wouldn't have otherwise.

At the bottom of this is a demand for money. Publishers want Google and Facebook to pay (more) for sending them traffic. Since they can't produce enough leverage to sell this worthless bill of goods, they want the government to give them a pass on antitrust charges until they get the payout they want. This won't work out the way they want it to and it will create a hole in antitrust laws others will exploit, all in the name of "fairness."

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, david cicilline, internet platforms, journalism, monopolies, news
Companies: facebook, google, news media alliance

It's Time to Talk About Internet Companies' Content Moderation Operations

from the transparency dept

As discussed in this post below, on February 2nd, Santa Clara University is hosting a gathering of tech platform companies to discuss how they actually handle content moderation questions. Many of the participants have written short essays about the questions that will be discussed at this event -- and over the next few weeks we'll be publishing many of those essays. This first one comes from Professor Eric Goldman, who put together the conference, explaining the rationale behind the event and this series of essays.

Many user-generated content (UGC) services aspire to build scalable businesses where usage and revenues grow without increasing headcount. Even with advances in automated filtering and artificial intelligence, this goal is not realistic. Large UGC databases require substantial human intervention to moderate anti-social and otherwise unwanted content and activities. Despite the often-misguided assumptions by policymakers, problematic content usually does not have flashing neon signs saying "FILTER ME!" Instead, humans must find and remove that content—especially with borderline cases, where machines can't make sufficiently nuanced judgments.

At the largest UGC services, the number of people working on content moderation is eye-popping. By 2018, YouTube will have 10,000 people on its "trust & safety teams." Facebook's "safety and security team" will grow to 20,000 people in 2018.

Who are these people? What exactly do they do? How are they trained? Who sets the policies about what content the service considers acceptable?

We have surprisingly few answers to these questions. Occasionally, companies have discussed these topics in closed-door events, but very little of this information has been made public.

This silence is unfortunate. A UGC service's decision to publish or remove content can have substantial implications for individuals and the community, yet we lack the information to understand how those decisions are made and by whom. Furthermore, the silence has inhibited the development of industry-wide "best practices." UGC services can learn a lot from each other—if they start sharing information publicly.

On Friday, a conference called "Content Moderation and Removal at Scale" will take place at Santa Clara University. (The conference is sold out, but we will post recordings of the proceedings, and we hope to make a live-stream available). Ten UGC services will present "facts and figures" about their content moderation operations, and five panels will discuss cutting-edge content moderation issues. For some services, this conference will be the first time they've publicly revealed details about their content moderation operations. Ideally, the conference will end the industry's norm of silence.

In anticipation of the conference, we assembled ten essays from conference speakers discussing various aspects of content moderation. These essays provide a sample of the conversation we anticipate at the conference. Expect to hear a lot more about content moderation operational issues in the coming months and years.

Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University School of Law. He has researched and taught Internet Law for over 20 years, and he blogs on the topic at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

Filed Under: companies, content moderation, filtering, intermediary liability, internet platforms, moderation