Thankfully, Jay Inslee's Unconstitutional Bill To Criminalize Political Speech Dies In The Washington Senate

from the don't-criminalize-free-speech dept

Over the last few years, it's been depressing to see politicians from both major political parties attacking free speech. As we noted last month, Washington state governor Jay Inslee last month started pushing a bill that would criminalize political speech. He kept insisting that it was okay under the 1st Amendment because he got a heavily biased constitutional lawyer, Larry Tribe, to basically shrug and say "maybe it could be constitutional?" But the bill was clearly problematic -- and would lead to nonstop nonsense lawsuits against political candidates.

Thankfully, cooler heads have prevailed in the Washington Senate and the bill has died. The bill's main sponsor is still insisting that it would survive 1st Amendment scrutiny, but also recognized that it just didn't have enough political support:

State Sen. David Frockt (D), who sponsored the bill, said, "We have to respect that the bill in its current form did not have enough support to advance despite the care we took in its drafting through our consultation with leading First Amendment scholars."

Inslee, for his part, still insists something must be done:

After the bill was defeated on Tuesday, Inslee said in a statement, "We all still have a responsibility to act against this Big Lie ... we must continue to explore ways to fight the dangerous deceptions politicians are still promoting about our elections."

And, look, I don't disagree that the Big Lie about the 2020 election is a problem. But you don't solve problems by censoring 1st Amendment protected speech. That never ends well. At all.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, election misinformation, free speech, jay inslee, lies, misinformation, political speech, washington

Can You Solve The Miserable Being Miserable Online By Regulating Tech?

from the questions-worth-researching dept

Over the last few months, I've been asking a general question which I don't know the answer to, but which I think needs a lot more research. It gets back to the issue of how much of the "bad" that many people seem to insist is caused by social media (and Facebook in particular) is caused by social media, and how much of it is just shining a light on what was always there. I've suggested that it would be useful to have a more nuanced account of this, because it's become all too common for people to insist that anything bad they see talked about on social media was magically caused by social media (oddly, traditional media, including cable news, rarely gets this kind of treatment). The reality, of course, is likely that there are a mix of things happening, and they're not easily teased apart, unfortunately. So, what I'd like to see is some more nuanced accounting of how much of the "bad stuff" we see online is (1) just social media reflecting back things bad things that have always been there, but which we were less aware of as opposed to (2) enabled by social media connecting and amplifying people spreading the bad stuff. On top of that, I think we should similarly be comparing how social media also has connected tons of people for good purposes as well -- and see how much of that happens as compared to the bad.

I'm not holding my breath for anyone to actually produce this research, but I did find a recent Charlie Warzel piece very interesting, and worth reading, in which he suggests (with some interesting citations), that social media disproportionately encourages the miserable to connect with each other and egg each other on. It's a very nuanced piece that does a good job highlighting the very competing incentives happening, and notes that part of the reason there's so much garbage online is that there's tremendous demand for it:

But online garbage (whether political and scientific misinformation or racist memes) is also created because there’s an audience for it. The internet, after all, is populated by people—billions of them. Their thoughts and impulses and diatribes are grist for the algorithmic content mills. When we talk about engagement, we are talking about them. They—or rather, we—are the ones clicking. We are often the ones telling the platforms, “More of this, please.”

This is a disquieting realization. As the author Richard Seymour writes in his book The Twittering Machine, if social media “confronts us with a string of calamities—addiction, depression, ‘fake news,’ trolls, online mobs, alt-right subcultures—it is only exploiting and magnifying problems that are already socially pervasive.” He goes on, “If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite or because of its frequent nastiness … then there is something in us that’s waiting to be addicted.”

In other words, at least some of this shouldn't be laid at the feet of the technology, but rather us, as humanity, in what we want out of the technology. It's potentially a sad statement on human psychology that we'd rather seek out the garbage than the other stuff, but it also kind of suggests that the "solution" is not so much in attacking the technology, but maybe figuring out solutions that have more to do with our own societal and psychological outlook on the world.

However, as Warzel notes, if social media is preternaturally good at linking up the miserable, and encouraging them to be more miserable together, then you could argue that it does deserve some of the blame.

Misery is a powerful grouping force. In a famous 1950s study, the social psychologist Stanley Schachter found that when research subjects were told that an upcoming electrical-shock test would be painful, most wished to wait for their test in groups, but most of those who thought the shock would be painless wanted to wait alone. “Misery doesn’t just love any kind of company,” Schachter memorably argued. “It loves only miserable company.”

The internet gives groups the ability not just to express and bond over misery but to inflict it on others—in effect, to transfer their own misery onto those they resent. The most extreme examples come in the form of racist or misogynist harassment campaigns—many led by young white men—such as Gamergate or the hashtag campaigns against Black feminists.

Misery trickles down in subtler ways too. Though the field is still young, studies on social media suggest that emotions are highly contagious on the web. In a review of the science, Harvard’s Amit Goldenberg and Stanford’s James J. Gross note that people “share their personal emotions online in a way that affects not only their own well-being, but also the well-being of others who are connected to them.” Some studies found that positive posts could drive engagement as much as, if not more than, negative ones, but of all the emotions expressed, anger seems to spread furthest and fastest. It tends to “cascade to more users by shares and retweets, enabling quicker distribution to a larger audience.”

This part is fascinating to me in that it actually does try to tease out some of the differences between what anger does to us at an emotional level as compared to happiness. It also reminds me of the (misleadingly reported) Washington Post story regarding how Facebook kept adjusting the "weighting" of the various emoji responses it added, especially focused on how to weight the "anger" emoji.

Anger certainly feels like the kind of emotion that will lead something to spread quickly -- we've all had that moment of anger over something, and spreading the news feels like at least some kind of outlet when you feel powerless over something awful that has happened. But I'm still not clear on how to break down the different aspects of how all of this interacts with social media, as compared to how much it's shining a light on deeper, more underlying societal problems that need solving at their core.

Warzel argues that the connecting of the miserable is something different, and perhaps leads to a more combustible world:

But it also means that miserable people, who were previously alienated and isolated, can find one another, says Kevin Munger, an assistant professor at Penn State who studies how platforms shape political and cultural opinions. This may offer them some short-term succor, but it’s not at all clear that weak online connections provide much meaningful emotional support. At the same time, those miserable people can reach the rest of us too. As a result, the average internet user, Munger told me in a recent interview, has more exposure than previous generations to people who, for any number of reasons, are hurting. Are they bringing all of us down?

Some of the other research he highlights suggests something similar:

“Our data show that social-media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society,” Molly Crockett said recently. She is one of the authors of a Yale study of almost 13 million tweets that found that users who expressed outrage were rewarded with engagement, which made them express yet more outrage. Surprisingly, the study found that politically moderate users were the most susceptible to this feedback loop. “Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time,” Crockett said.

But in the end, he notes that, well, this is all interconnected and way more complicated than most people proposing solutions would like to admit. Destroying Facebook doesn't solve this. Removing Section 230 doesn't solve this (and, would almost certainly make this much, much worse).

But the technology is only part of the battle. Think of it in terms of supply and demand. The platforms provide the supply (of fighting, trolling, conspiracies, and junk news), but the people—the lost and the miserable and the left-behind—provide the demand. We can reform Facebook and Twitter while also reckoning with what they reveal about the nation’s mental health. We should examine more urgently the deeper forces—inequality, a weak social safety net, a lack of accountability for unchecked corporate power—that have led us here. And we should interrogate how our broken politics drive people to seek out easy, conspiratorial answers. This is a bigger ask than merely regulating technology platforms, because it implicates our entire country.

I think his suggestion is correct. We need to be looking across the board at how we build a better society -- and in doing so, we're doing everyone a disservice if we just think that "regulating tech" somehow will solve any of the underlying societal problems. But, as the article makes clear, there are so many different factors at play that's it not easy to tease them a part.

Filed Under: content moderation, disinformation, miserable, misery loves company, misinformation, section 230, tech

A Fight Between Facebook And The British Medical Journal Highlights The Difficulty Of Moderating 'Medical Misinformation'

from the what-a-disaster dept

There are multiple efforts under way in the US to pass laws that require social media sites to take down "medical misinformation." As we've described repeatedly, these are really dangerous ideas. Bills like those from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Lujan seek to force social media to remove medical misinformation as declared by the Ministry of Truth... er... Secretary of Health & Human Services. Of course, it was not all that long ago that we had an administration that was actively anti-science, and wanted to declare anything that made the president look bad as "fake news."

Also, in the midst of a pandemic, when the data and the science are rapidly evolving, what might seem reasonable at one point, may later turn out to be misinformation -- and vice versa. Forcing down misinformation leads to all sorts of dangerous consequences. Hell, we saw this in China, where such a law was used to silence a doctor who tried to raise the alarm about COVID-19, and was forced to apologize for spreading "untruthful information online."

But there's another aspect of this which people rarely try to deal with: content moderation involves a lot of very gray areas and an awful lot of context, much of which may not be immediately obvious. An ongoing war of words between the former British Medical Journal (now just "The BMJ") and Meta/Facebook demonstrates nicely just how impossible it is to claim that "medical misinformation" must be taken offline. There's a bit of background here, and it's a, well, touchy subject, so try to go through the whole thing before you react.

First off, the BMJ is not, in any way, anti-vaccine. Somewhat famously, the BMJ was a key player in exposing the fraudulent behavior of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent study created the modern anti-vax movement. That said, in November, The BMJ published an investigative journalism piece, based on a supposed "whistleblower" suggesting that there was some data integrity issues with the way Pfizer's vaccine was tested, specifically involving a research partner of Pfizer, Ventavia Research Group.

Ventavia responded to the allegations by noting that the supposed whistleblower in question had raised the issues a year earlier, and they were investigated and found to be unsubstantiated. That said, many reasonable people noted that this should be further investigated and worried that it might lead to further damaging the public's trust in science.

But, of course, you can fully predict what happened next. It didn't just "damage the public's trust in science," the BMJ article instead was instantly championed by all of the big anti-vax voices all over social media as "proof" that the COVID vaccine was dangerous and rushed into approval -- key talking points among that crowd, repeated despite tons of evidence that the vaccine is both incredibly effective and incredibly safe.

This resulted in Lead Stories, a fact checking organization, to fact check the article, and slap it with a "missing context" label, and calling into question the way that people were interpreting the article:

Did the British Medical Association's news blog reveal flaws that disqualify the results of a contractor's field testing of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, and were the problems ignored by the Food & Drug Administration and by Pfizer? No, that's not true: Pfizer and the FDA were made aware of the allegations about the contractor in 2020. Medical experts say the claims aren't serious enough to discredit data from the clinical trials, which is also what Pfizer and the FDA say they concluded. The FDA says its position is unchanged: The benefits of the Pfizer vaccine far outweigh rare side effects and the clinical trial data are solid.

Because of this fact check and because of the way the article was being used in a misleading way by thousands of anti-vaxxers, users who tried to share The BMJ article were flagged with fact check warnings saying: "Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people," which is accurate, but incomplete, and very dependent on the context of who was sharing it and for what purpose.

The BMJ kinda flipped out about this and published an angry open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (who, I assure you, had nothing to do with the decision on the fact check and flagging). To be honest, I find the BMJ's anger here completely disingenuous. They act like they don't understand at all why Lead Stories highlighted the "missing context" point on their story, when -- of anyone -- the BMJ should be willing to acknowledge how their own article was being weaponized by ignorant anti-vaxxers.

But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]

We find the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.

-- It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong

-- It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”

-- The first paragraph inaccurately labels The BMJ a “news blog”

-- It contains a screenshot of our article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or untrue in The BMJ article

-- It published the story on its website under a URL that contains the phrase “hoax-alert”

We have contacted Lead Stories, but they refuse to change anything about their article or actions that have led to Facebook flagging our article.

The BMJ open letter also gets unnecessarily snarky (which also seems out of character for a prestigious medical journal):

Rather than investing a proportion of Meta’s substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task.

That's ridiculous. Clearly this is a difficult situation. Even if the reporting was accurate -- there is crucial context here. Did the revelations support the claims of anti-vaxxers who were using it as evidence that the Pfizer vaccine was not safe? The answer is no, it did not. And there's a strong argument that The BMJ could have and should have made that point a lot clearer in their own reporting, recognizing how the article would be weaponized by grifters and fed to the ignorant.

Lead Stories then responded to the BMJ, in fairly great detail, more or less saying "you can't honestly be that naïve."

It is ironic to read that BMJ.com objects to the headline on Lead Stories' fact check of a BMJ.com article when the original BMJ piece carries a scare headline that oversells the whistleblower and overstates the jeopardy. Their November 2, 2021, headline "Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer's vaccine trial" is the reason BMJ.com's article has appeared in hundreds of Facebook posts and tweets, many by anti-vaccine activists using it as "proof" the entire clinical trial was fraudulent and the vaccine unsafe.

Lead Stories also points out that The BMJ's headline to its article is extremely misleading, as it can be read to say that there were data integrity issues with the entirety of the Pfizer vaccine test, rather than 3 sites out of 153, and then also highlights that the whistleblower in question is not a scientist who is an expert on this. It also notes that the whistleblower appears to have some... questionable beliefs and associations regarding vaccines:

The BMJ.com article eventually gets around to saying she worked at the lab for just two weeks. But BMJ's open letter fails to mention important context: The Brook Jackson Twitter account agreed with leading COVID misinformation-spreader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s criticism of the "Sesame Street" episode in which Big Bird encourages kids to get a COVID-19 vaccine. "Shocking, actually." she wrote in a November 9, 2021, response to a Kennedy tweet blasting Sesame Street (archived here). Elsewhere on Twitter, the Brook Jackson account wrote to a vaccine-hesitant person that vaccination makes sense if a person is in a high-risk category. When the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a federal employee vaccine mandate, she tweeted "HUGE!" and not with a frowny emoji.

Lead Stories talked to Jackson, looked at available documents (after BMJ refused to permit us to see their basis for the story and did not make the documents available on a transparency site). Unlike BMJ.com, Lead Stories then tested Jackson's assertions with Pfizer, with the lab contractor in question and with the FDA and then published their responses. It's not at all clear yet whether there are data integrity issues if you ask the other stakeholders, and that's the crucial missing context. We also talked to experienced medical researchers for perspective, one of whose credentials BMJ editorial staff demeaned for reasons we can only imagine.

By talking to Ventavia, we contributed context BMJ.com missed: Ventavia said the whistleblower had not worked on the Pfizer trial, but Lead Stories set that straight by embedding in its story a copy of a letter, provided by Jackson in which she was expressly welcomed to the Pfizer trial team. That's what we mean by context.

The BMJ has thus far failed to document what is "inaccurate" in the Lead Stories fact check, but again oversells by using that and other name-calling to vent frustration at our documentation of obvious missing context

All of this involves an awful lot of judgment calls, understanding of context, and a lot more. But under a law that requires the pulling down of medical misinformation, how the hell would anyone handle this kind of scenario? The BMJ story isn't wrong per se, but there is a lot of important context that seems like it's missing (which Lead Stories highlighted above). On top of that, there's all the important context around how people are using the article and stretching an already weaker-than-it-seems story to pretend to be a lot more damning on the overall vaccine.

In other words, how the article is being represented and used is an important piece of context as well. And this is frequently the case with medical misinformation. People will take something that is factual or accurate, and present it out of context or in a misleading light, in order to make an argument that doesn't support it. So which part is the "misinformation" and how do you police that?

In an ideal world, we'd be able to see all the details and the back and forth, and figure it all out. Frankly, when I first heard about this -- via The BMJ's open letter -- I initially thought that the details would support The BMJ, and that Facebook mislabeled something (which, of course, happens all the time because of the old Masnick Impossibility Theorem). It was only after reading multiple articles on both sides of this, and going through the details of Lead Stories' process, that I realized that they had (to me) a much stronger argument, that there's an awful lot of important context that is missing from The BMJ piece that you would hope a journal like that would have considered before publishing the article the way in which it did.

But to expect every social media platform to be able to determine this on every piece of medical sharing out there is next to impossible -- and putting legal liability on top of it, as Senators Klobuchar and Lujan want to do -- would be dangerously impossible.

Filed Under: content moderation, context, covid, fact checking, health, health misinformation, journalism, misinformation, reporting, vaccines
Companies: facebook, lead stories, meta, pfizer, the bmj

NY Senator Proposes Ridiculously Unconstitutional Social Media Law That Is The Mirror Opposite Of Equally Unconstitutional Laws In Florida & Texas

from the just-stop dept

We've joked in the past about how Republicans hate Section 230 for letting websites moderate too much content, while Democrats hate it for letting websites not moderate enough content. Of course, the reality is they both are mad about content moderation (at different extremes) because they both want to control the internet in a manner that helps "their team." But both approaches involve unconstitutional desires to interfere with 1st Amendment rights. For Republicans, it's often the compelled hosting of speech, and for Democrats, it's often the compelled deletion of speech. Both of those are unconstitutional.

On the Republican side, we've already seen states like Florida and Texas sign into law content moderation bills -- and both have been blocked for being wholly unconstitutional.

We've already heard that some other Republican-controlled states have shelved plans for similar bills, realizing that all they'd be doing was setting taxpayer money on fire.

Unfortunately, it looks like the message has not made its way to Democratic-controlled states. California has been toying with unconstitutional content moderation bills, and now NY has one as well. Senator Brad Hoylman -- who got his law degree from Harvard, where presumably they teach about the 1st Amendment -- has proudly introduced a hellishly unconstitutional social media bill. Hoylman announces in his press release that the bill will "hold tech companies accountable for promoting vaccine misinformation and hate speech."

Have you noticed the problem with the bill already? I knew you could. Whether we like it or not, the 1st Amendment protects both vaccine misinformation and hate speech. It is unconstitutional to punish anyone for that speech, and it's even more ridiculous to punish websites that host that content, but had nothing to do with the creation of it.

Believe it or not, the actual details of the bill are even worse than Hoylman's description of it. The operative clauses are outlandishly bad.

Prohibited activities. No person, by conduct either unlawful In itself or unreasonable under all the circumstances, shall knowingly or recklessly create, maintain or contribute to a condition in New York State that endangers the safety or health of the public through the promotion of content, including through the use of algorithms or other automated systems that prioritize content by a method other than solely by time and date such content was created, the person knows or reasonably should know:

1. Advocates for the use of force, is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action;
2. Advocates for self-harm, is directed to inciting or producing imminent self-harm, and is likely to incite or produce such action; or
3. Includes a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.

This is so dumb that it deserves to be broken down bit by bit. First off, any kind of content can, conceivably "endanger the health and safety of the public." That's so ridiculously broad. I saw an advertisement for McDonalds today on social media. Does that endanger the health and safety of the public? It sure could. Second, the bill says no use of algorithms or otherwise automated systems "other than solely by time and date such content was created" meaning that search is right out. Want the most relevant search result for the medical issues you're having? I'm sorry, sir, that's not allowed in New York, as a result might endanger your health and safety.

But it gets worse. The line that says...

Advocates for the use of force, is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action

... is a weird one because clearly someone somewhere thought that this magical incantation might make this constitutional. The "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action" is -- verbatim -- the Brandenburg test for a very, very limited exception to the 1st Amendment. But, do you notice the issue? Such speech is already exempted from the 1st Amendment. Leaving aside how astoundingly little content meets this test (especially the "imminent lawless action" part) this part of the law, at best, seems to argue that "unconstitutional speech is unconstitutional." That's... not helpful.

The second point is even weirder. It more or less tries to mirror the Brandenburg standard, but with a few not-so-subtle changes:

Advocates for self-harm, is directed to inciting or producing imminent self-harm, and is likely to incite or produce such action

Which, nice try, but just because you mimicked the "inciting or producing imminent" part doesn't let you get around the fact that discussions of "self-harm" in most cases remains constitutionally protected. So long as the effort is not lawless, then there's a huge 1st Amendment problem here.

But the really problematic part is point 3:

Includes a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.

Ooooooooooof. That's bad. First of all, most "false statements of fact" and many "fraudulent medical theories" do in fact remain protected under the 1st Amendment. And, last I checked, New York is still bound by the 1st Amendment. Also, this is dumber than dumb. Remember, we're in the middle of a pandemic and the science is changing rapidly. Lots of things we thought were clear at first turned out to be very different -- don't wear masks / wear masks, for example.

In fact, this prong most closely resembles how China first handled reports of COVID-19. Early on in the pandemic we wrote about how China's laws against medical misinformation very likely helped COVID-19 spread much faster, because the Chinese government silenced Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the first doctors in China who called attention to the new disease. The police showed up to Dr. Li's home and told him he had violated the law by "spreading untruthful information online" and forced him to take down his warnings about COVID-19.

And rather than realize just how problematic that was, Senator Hoylman wants to make it New York's law!

It gets worse. The law, like most laws, has definitions. And the definitions are a mess. It uses an existing NY penal law definition of "recklessly" that requires those attempting to prosecute the law to establish the state of mind of... algorithms? Again, the bill says that if an algorithm "recklessly" creates, maintains, or contributes to such banned information, it can violate the law. But the reckless standard requires a "person" be "aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that such result will occur." Good luck proving that with an algorithm.

Then we get to the enforcement provision. Incredibly, it makes this much, much worse.

Enforcement. Whenever there shall be a violation of this article, the attorney general, in the name of the people of the state of New York, or a city corporation counsel on behalf of the locality, may bring an action in the Supreme Court or federal district court to enjoin and restrain such violations and to obtain restitution and damages.

Private right of action. Any person, firm, corporation or association that has been damaged as a result of a person's acts or omissions in violation of this article shall be entitled to bring an action for recovery of damages or to enforce this article in the Supreme Court or federal district court.

The government enforcing a speech code is already problematic -- but then enabling this private right of action is just ridiculous. Think of how many wasteful stupid lawsuits would be filed within seconds of this law going into effect by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers against people online advocating in favor of vaccines and masks and other COVID-preventative techniques?

This law is so blatantly unconstitutional and problematic that it's not even funny. And that's not even getting to the simple fact that Section 230 pre-empts any such state law, as we saw in Texas and Florida. Hoylman, laughably, suggests that he can ignore the pre-emption issue in his press release by saying:

The conscious decision to elevate certain content is a separate, affirmative act from the mere hosting of information and therefore not contemplated by the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Except that's wrong. 230 specifically protects all moderation decisions and that includes elevating content. That's why Section 230 protects search results. And, as Jeff Kosseff rightly notes the 2nd Circuit (which covers NY) already addressed this exact claim in the Force v. Facebook case (the ridiculous case that attempted to hold Facebook liable for terrorism that impacted the plaintiff, because some unrelated terrorists also used Facebook). There the court said, pretty clearly:

We disagree with plaintiffs' contention that Facebook's use of algorithms renders it a non-publisher. First, we find no basis in the ordinary meaning of "publisher," the other text of Section 230, or decisions interpreting Section 230, for concluding that an interactive computer service is not the "publisher" of third-party information when it uses tools such as algorithms that are designed to match that information with a consumer's interests. Cf., e.g., Roommates.Com, 521 F.3d at 1172 (recognizing that Matchmaker.com website, which "provided neutral tools specifically designed to match romantic partners depending on their voluntary inputs," was immune under Section 230(c)(1) ) (citing Carafano, Inc. , 339 F.3d 1119 ); Carafano , 339 F.3d at 1124–25 ("Matchmaker's decision to structure the information provided by users allows the company to offer additional features, such as ‘matching’ profiles with similar characteristics ..., [and such features] [a]rguably promote[ ] the expressed Congressional policy ‘to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services.’ 47 U.S.C. § 230(b)(1)."); Herrick v. Grindr, LLC , 765 F. App'x 586, 591 (2d Cir. 2019) (summary order) ("To the extent that [plaintiff's claims] are premised on Grindr's [user-profile] matching and geolocation features, they are likewise barred ....").

So... the law clearly violates the 1st Amendment, is pre-empted by Section 230, and, if it actually went into practice, would actually be both wildly abused and dangerous.

What's it got going for it?

Well, as Kosseff also points out, if it passed, and somehow the Texas/Florida laws were brought back from the dead, social media websites might get in trouble both for leaving up the same content they could get in trouble for taking down elsewhere. And, at least for those of us who write about content moderation, well, that will be amusing to cover. But, beyond that, this bill is complete garbage. It's the mirror image of the garbage Florida and Texas passed -- equally as dumb, equally as dangerous, and equally as unconstitutional, just at the other end of the spectrum.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, brad hoylman, content moderation, democrats, florida, misinformation, new york, republicans, section 230, social media, texas

Yet Another Study Shows Mainstream Media Is A Key Vector In Spreading Misinformation

from the again-and-again-and-again dept

The common "accepted knowledge" these days among many is that the rise of disinformation and conspiracy theories must be driven by social media, and Facebook in particular (with Twitter and YouTube right behind). This theory has always seemed a bit bonkers, and we've pointed to multiple detailed, data-driven studies that showed that cable news was a much bigger driver of misinformation than social media. Specifically, it found that conspiracy theories and misinformation and the like didn't actually "go viral" until after it appeared on cable news.

So, it's good (but not at all surprising) to find yet another study pointing out the same thing. This one, first highlighted by MediaPost, involved a big survey exploring the spread of conspiracy theories -- and found that the mainstream media is often the biggest vector, rather than social media.

Contrary to popular opinion, we found that while technology (and social media specifically) has a role to play in perpetuating CTs, our data suggests that this is not the only source of information about CTs, and often not the main one either. People are more likely to say they heard about some CTs from a ‘mainstream’ news source (such as TV or a broadsheet or tabloid newspaper) than they are from a social media channel. We therefore need to be careful about locating technology as the source of the problem and indeed as the sole focus for possible solutions

In fact, the study notes:

“Our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in, and the legitimacy of, the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary role.”

Again, none of this says that conspiracy theories aren't spread on social media, because of course they are. But increasing evidence suggests they don't really catch on until the mainstream media gets involved, with TV News being a key vector and newspapers -- both "broadsheets" and "tabloids" -- playing a role as well. And yet, almost no one wants to explore the differing role among these other sources, and many people are solely focused on social media -- perhaps because it's new, and it's always easy to blame the "new" thing.

But it won't get to the root of the problem, and actually can serve to mask the real problems.

Filed Under: cable tv, internet, misinformation, newspapers, social media, tv news

The Role Of Confirmation Bias In Spreading Misinformation

from the it's-everywhere dept

We recently wrote about the need to start thinking differently about mis- and disinformation, as the discussions on it cover a bunch of different -- often unrelated -- concepts. And lumping them together creates problems (as it did with the term "fake news.") Last week (and over the weekend) a good example showed how this plays out in practice.

Rolling Stone put up a story with the extremely provocative title Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says. As people discovered later, that "Doctor Says" hidden at the end of the headline ended up being the load bearing pillar on which the rest of the story stood. And that pillar turned out to be made of fluff and nonsense, as the hospital is now running a massive popup on the front page of its website saying the story is bullshit:

If you're unable to see the image, it says:

Message from the administration of Northeastern Health System - Sequoyah:

Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room.

With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months.

NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose.

All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care.

We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our community’s support.

The Rolling Stone report was based on an earlier report from local TV station KFOR making these claims. But it seems that no one at Rolling Stone called the hospital to check. And then the story got picked up, almost verbatim, a ton of other places. The Guardian had a story. The BBC. So did the Hill (that that one has since been deleted).

The story seemed especially popular in foreign media as a chance to laugh at the US.

And, of course, the fact that so many publications ran with this story contributed to the standard narrative from those who dislike and distrust the mainstream media to argue that they are regular perpetrators of "fake news" or "disinformation." Of course, as Eva Galperin correctly notes, absolutely everyone is susceptible to believing and amplifying stories that confirm our biases.

The real question, of course, is how these kinds of things are dealt with -- and what sort of corrective process there is. This is something that was discussed in the excellent book Network Propaganda, which tries to distinguish how misleading information flows through society -- and whether organizations are willing to correct mistakes and admit to errors. Or, if they continue to stand by them. That's the difference between an honest mistake -- which absolutely everyone is susceptible to falling for -- and those who specialize in bad faith presentation of misleading propaganda.

However, as we've discussed before, when you conflate a mistake with the deliberate bad faith pushing of false information, then that only serves to give more ammunition to those who wish to not just discredit all content from certain publications, but to then look to minimize complaints against "news" organizations that specialize and focus on bad faith propaganda, by simply claiming it's no different than what the mainstream media does in presenting "disinformation."

But there is a major difference. A mistake is bad, and everyone who fell for this story looks silly for doing so. But without a clear pattern of deliberately pushing misleading or out of context information, it suggests a mere error, as opposed to deliberate bad faith activity. The same cannot be said for all "news" organizations.

Filed Under: confirmation bias, covid, disinformation, hospitals, ivermectin, misinformation
Companies: rolling stone