Trump Calls On Social Media Companies To Become Pre-Crime Agents

from the paging-Tom-Cruise dept

Every time there are mass shootings in America, the public discourse disolves into a muck of tribal finger-pointing. We blame guns, video games, past Presidents, Congress, homosexuality, the decline of the nuclear family, mental illness, the internet, and on and on. Nothing gets done, no proposed solutions are adopted, and those proposed solutions gradually become all the more insane. The truth is more nuanced than can fit into a soundbite on some cable news program, but somehow the debates soaked in blood and grief never acknowledge this. If there is to be a sea change in the rate of incidents of mass violence in this country, this will have to change.

Or, if you're President Trump, you just tell the same social media companies you've regularly railed against for being biased to be your pre-crime agents instead.

After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters.

While delivering a speech on the recent violence, Trump said “we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs,” and he suggested social media companies could develop new ways of catching “red flags.”

“I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local state and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,” Trump said in the speech.

This is one of those things that, to the lay person, sounds reasonable. It isn't. Being in the industry of corporate IT services, I find myself far too often informing business owners that I cannot solve their Human Resources problems with technology. This is similar: we aren't going to solve the nuanced problem of mass shootings by throwing technology at it.

And we should know that by now. All kinds of law enforcement agencies have engaged in so-called "predictive policing" and it's been routinely discussed just how problematic these practices are. Traditionally, these programs have involved feeding algorithms historical crime data in order to get a sense of where that data suggests more violent crime will take place and by whom. If you don't already see the problem with that, you don't know the history of how justice has been meted out differently among the masses in America. The problem here isn't the machine or the algorithm, but the human decisions that go into the data that is feeding that algorithm.

In the case of social media companies partnering with law enforcement to do this sort of behavioral pre-crime, the problems will be all the worse. Algorithms aren't great at nuance, nor are they good at such subtleties as humor, embellishment, vernacular, and different cultural norms. People talk to each other, and post on social media, in different ways. The number of folks that will be caught up for otherwise innocent behavior, garnering visits from law enforcement worried that they will be shooting up their local big box store, is going to be enormous.

And that would be the case even if Trump had an actual plan rather than these vague proclamations, which he very much does not.

While the president did not specify what those “tools” might look like, Trump seemed to be suggesting that companies could use predictive software to single out potential shooters based on their activity on a platform. Crucially, this would mean taking action before a person commits violent crimes. Data-mining tools are in wide use, but creating a detection system for violence would inevitably raise a host of privacy and accountability issues.

In other words, this is pablum designed to distract the public from the fact that he isn't talking about any interests he wants to protect in the debate on mass shootings. It's meaningless foot-shuffling, rather than anything resembling an actual plan.

GOP responses to the shootings writ large has ranged thus far from "video games are evil!" to "nerd harder, social media!" Whatever those stances are, they are most certainly not agents of change.

Filed Under: algorithms, donald trump, mass shooting, social media, surveillance

Why Is Our First Reaction To Mass Shootings To Talk About Censorship?

from the avoiding-the-real-discussions dept

There were more mass shootings this weekend in the US. The Onion has been busy running more copies of its infamous ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens articles which run after every such shooting. And yet, it seems that many people want to talk about censorship. And this is true on both sides of the mainstream political aisle. Rep. Kevin McCarthy got the nonsense kicked off with the usual fallback for Republicans who don't want to talk about guns, by blaming video games. This happens all the time -- often from people who claim that they're "Constitutionalists." Of course, it's hard to see how you can be a Constitutionalist if you dump on the 1st Amendment to protect the 2nd.

But it's not just Republicans with an aversion to having any sort of actual discussion about gun control who jump to censorship. Given that some of the most recent shootings have involved angry, ignorant, idiotic rants posted on 8chan (stop calling them manifestos, guys), there's been a vocal discussion this past weekend on whether or not 8chan should be censored or shut down. 8chan, as you may recall, was founded as something of an alternative to 4chan, after some people (somewhat ridiculously) felt that that site was moderated too much. It was founded with the same hubris as the ignorant people who insist that there should never be any content moderation on any site, without realizing what that means in reality. And now, with even the site's own founder saying that it should be shut down (people might want to go back and look at what he was saying during the GamerGate era...), Cloudflare has now been pressured into cutting off its services for 8chan as well.

This is a perfectly reasonable move for the company to make, as part of being in society and providing services to society is determining what kinds of services you want to provide and to whom. I appreciate that Cloudflare is reluctant to get into the business of making any sorts of judgment calls on content, but no one can avoid those questions forever. However, as Cloudflare notes, it's not clear that a company like Cloudflare making this decision will change much in the long run:

Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem.

I have little doubt we'll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online. It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we've solved our own problem, but we haven't solved the Internet's.

Indeed, by far the best take on this issue comes from Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed, who notes that The Problem Isn't 8chan. It’s Young American Men:

Shutting down the site is unlikely to eradicate this new extremist culture, because 8chan is anywhere. Pull the plug, it will appear somewhere else, in whatever locale will host it. Because there's nothing particularly special about 8chan, there are no content algorithms, hosting technology immaterial. The only thing radicalizing 8chan users are other 8chan users.

There's a lot more in that article that is worth thinking about. As noted above, I have no problem with any particular platform deciding that it doesn't want to be a host to the horrible, racist, bigoted, hateful content found on 8chan -- but merely focusing on cutting off that conversation does literally nothing to deal with the people behind that racist, bigoted, hateful content. And that's an issue. Rather than focusing first on censorship, can we start talking about how to stop people from being so confused, ignorant, and hateful? Can we talk about ways to recognize alienated, disillusioned people, and seeking ways to actually do something positive, and keep them from becoming so hateful in the first place? Some will argue that part of that is shutting down the places where these people gather, but as the articles linked above noted, that's next to impossible. So it seems like a better plan is to figure out a way to arm people -- especially young people -- with knowledge and facts that will help them resist the lure of darkness, alientation, anger and hate.

Filed Under: 8chan, censorship, mass shooting

Bobby Jindal Announces Violent Games/Movies To Blame For All Those Mass Shootings

from the wrong dept

Not long ago, I wrote a post about the aftermath of the Oregon mass shooting and how every media outlet would retreat to familiar stances looking to blame all manner of things on idealogical grounds. That, of course, happened. Left out of that post is how grandstanding politicians would do the same: shifting attention toward familiar punching bags while diverting attention from other targets in their own interests. One of the first to do so, as it turns out, is Bobby Jindal, who certainly doesn't get any points for originality in trotting out the violent media scapegoat to sate some of the public's need to place blame for the shooting.

First on his hitlist was Hollywood.

We glorify sick and senseless acts of violence in virtually every element of our pop culture, and we have been doing that for at least a generation. Our movies and TV shows feature a continuous stream of grotesque killing of every kind imaginable. And this is true of virtually every genre, from horror to drama to comedy. We celebrate and document every kind of deviant behavior and we give out awards to producers who can push the envelope as far as possible. Rape, torture, murder, mass murder, all are cinematic achievements.

This, obviously, is overstating things by several orders of magnitude. First, it's noteworthy that Jindal's suggestion that violent movies, ever ramping up, cause violence within the real world fly in the face of simple statistical analysis. The national murder rate, for instance, is roughly 60% of what it was in the 1970s. Does anyone want to argue that movies have become less violent since the 70s? I didn't think so. But, assuming that Jindal is solely talking about the mass shooting phenomenon, the data doesn't get any better for Jindal. An otherwise dumb opinion piece at National Review at least helpfully included the fact that, when taking the long view and looking at mass shooting incidents over the past century, they are no more common today than in the past. In fact, the high water mark for mass killings looks to have been achieved in the 1920s. Again, anyone want to argue that media in the 20s was more violent than it is today? I didn't think so.

I shouldn't have to say this, but none of this is to suggest that America doesn't have a very real violence and mass killing problem. We do. But it simply doesn't correlate to violence in movies. Nor in video games, which were Jindal's second target.

We have generations of young boys who were raised on video games where they compete with other young boys around the country and the world to see who can kill the most humans. We make it so fun, so realistic, so sensational.

Oh, we make sure that we stop them from bullying at school, but we are completely fine with them watching people get murdered and raped on the internet after school, and we are willing to let them go to the basement and join a fantasy world where they pretend they are killing people for 2 hours after school.

Quick show of hands: who is totally chill with their children watching people get murdered and raped on the internet after school every day? Actually, what the hell is Jindal talking about here? I'm fairly connected in the world of internet-ing, and I'm also a father, and I have no idea what Jindal is referring to. Where is this place where kids go to sit and watch people get raped and tortured? Is he referring to video games here, as he does in his culminating line, where kids are sitting down and super-murdering digital humans for 2 hours every day? Because does that really happen, either? Keep in mind, for all the hand-wringing over violent video games, the average age of the average gamer is going up and currently stands at something like "probably balding or in mid-management by now." For youths that find themselves playing games meant for adults, that's strictly a parenting issue, not a culture issue (for all the reasons described for violent movies above). And, regardless, there's nothing even remotely close to a scientific consensus that violent video games have any negative effect on children at all. In fact, many studies indicate there is no link between gaming and violence at all.

So what is this? Well, it's a politician employing the aftermath of tragedy to gain support, headlines, and attention so as to better compete with a god damned reality show host in a presidential election cycle. And if that doesn't make you sick, no amount of violence in movies or games will either.

Filed Under: blame, bobby jindal, mass shooting, moral panic, movies, oregon shooting, video games, violence