House Committee Investigating January 6th Capitol Invasion Goes On Social Media Fishing Expedition; Companies Should Resist

from the not-cool dept

Whatever you think of what happened on January 6th, people should be concerned about the House Select Committee that is investigating those events now demanding information from various social networks. As the committee announced in a press release, it was demanding records from a long list of social media companies.

The letters to the social media companies seek a range of records, including data, reports, analyses, and communications stretching back to spring of 2020. The Select Committee is also seeking information on policy changes social media companies adopted—or failed to adopt—to address the spread of false information, violent extremism, and foreign malign influence, including decisions on banning material from platforms and contacts with law enforcement and other government entities.

The following companies received record demands from the Select Committee:

• 4chan
• 8kun (formerly known as 8chan)
• Facebook
• Gab
• Google
• Parler
• Reddit
• Snapchat
• Telegram
• theDonald.win
• Tik-Tok
• Twitch
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Zello

Some of the information requested may be reasonable to ask for, but the requests are fairly sweeping. I've seen some argue that since the requests are so broad, it shows that they're not biased, but it's not bias I'm concerned about. The reports are demanding over a year's worth of details from each of these websites regarding things like:

All accounts, users, groups, events, messaging forums, marketplaces, posts, or other user-generated content that was sanctioned, suspended, removed, throttled, deprioritized, labeled, suppressed, or banned from your platform(s) related to any of the items detailed in request 1(i)-(iv) above.

The (i)-(iv) discussed are the following:

i. Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation relating to the 2020 election;
ii. Efforts to overturn, challenge, or otherwise interfere with the 2020 election or the certification of electoral college results;
iii. Domestic violent extremists, including racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, QAnon, or other extremists associated with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the January 6, 2021, attack, attacks against other State capitols, and attempted attacks against the January 20, 2021 inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.; and
iv. Foreign malign influence in the 2020 election, including known or suspected coordination between foreign and/or domestic influences to interfere in the 2020 elections, or cause domestic unrest.

Forcing every company to turn over such information seems like a very, very slippery slope towards the government turning that information back around and threatening or intimidating companies over their very much 1st Amendment protected moderation decisions.

There are also things like this -- which it's not clear the government should have access to:

Internal communications, reports, documents, or other materials relating to internal employee concerns about content on the platform associated with any of the items detailed in request 1(i)-(iv) above.

Those kinds of internal deliberations are not particularly relevant to what happened on January 6th -- which the committee is supposedly investigating. It seems a lot more relevant to pressuring social media companies to moderate in a government approved manner. I understand that the Committee is likely investigating whether or not some of those providers eagerly supported those who invaded the Capitol, but this is not a narrowly targeted request, and the potential intimidation factor is high.

Filed Under: capitol hill, fishing expedition, house select committee, insurrection, january 6, policies, social media

The Oversight Board's Decision On Facebook's Trump Ban Is Just Not That Important

from the undue-ado dept

Today is Facebook Oversight Board Hysteria Day, because today is the day that the Facebook Oversight Board has rendered its decision about Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump. And it has met the moment with an appropriately dull decision, dripping in pedantic reasonableness, that is largely consistent with our Copia Institute recommendation.

If you remember, we were hesitant about submitting a comment at all. And the reaction to the Board's decision bears out why. People keep reacting as though it is some big, monumental, important decision, when, in actual fact, it isn't at all. In the big scheme of things, it's still just a private company being advised by its private advisory board on how to run its business, nothing more. As it is, Trump himself is still on the Internet – it's not like Facebook actually had the power to silence him. We need to be worried about when there actually is power to silence people, and undue concern about Facebook's moderation practices only distracts us from them. Or, worse, leads people to try to create actual law that will end up having the effect of giving others the legal power to suppress expressive freedom.

So our pride here is necessarily muted, because ultimately this decision just isn't that big a deal. Still, as a purely internal advisory decision, one intended to help the company act more consistently in the interests of its potential user base, it does seem to be a good one given how it hews to our key points.

First, we made the observation that then-President Trump's use of his Facebook account threatened real, imminent harm. We did, however, emphasize the point that it was generally better to try not to delete speech (or speakers). Nevertheless, sometimes it might need to be done, and in those cases it should be done "with reluctance and only limited, specific, identifiable, and objective criteria to justify the exception." There might not ultimately be a single correct decision, we wrote, for whether speech should be left up or taken down. "[I]n the end the best decision may have little to do with the actual choice that results but rather the process used to get there."

And this sort of reasoning is basically at the heart of the Board's decision: Trump's posts were serious enough to justify a sanction, including a suspension, but imposing the indefinite suspension appeared to be unacceptably arbitrary. Per the Board, Facebook needs to make these sorts of decisions consistently and transparently from here on out.

On January 6, Facebook’s decision to impose restrictions on Mr. Trump’s accounts was justified. The posts in question violated the rules of Facebook and Instagram that prohibit support or praise of violating events, including the riot that was then underway at the U.S. Capitol. Given the seriousness of the violations and the ongoing risk of violence, Facebook was justified in imposing account-level restrictions and extending those restrictions on January 7. However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose an indefinite suspension. Facebook did not follow a clear published procedure in this case. Facebook’s normal account-level penalties for violations of its rules are to impose either a time-limited suspension or to permanently disable the user’s account. The Board finds that it is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.

The Board has given Facebook six months to re-evaluate the suspension in accordance with clear rules.

If Facebook determines that Mr. Trump’s accounts should be restored, Facebook should apply its rules to that decision, including any modifications made pursuant to the policy recommendations below. Also, if Facebook determines to return him to the platform, it must address any further violations promptly and in accordance with its established content policies.

As for what those rules should be, the Board also made a few recommendations. First, it noted that "political leader" versus "influential user" is not always a meaningful distinction. Indeed, we had noted that Trump's position cut both ways: as a political leader, there was public benefit to knowing what he had to say. On the other hand, that position also gave his posts greater ability to do harm. The Board for its part noted that context will matter; while the rules should ideally be the same for everyone, since the impact won't be, it is ok for Facebook to take into account the specific probability of imminent harm in making its decisions.

The Board believes that it is not always useful to draw a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users. It is important to recognize that other users with large audiences can also contribute to serious risks of harm. The same rules should apply to all users of the platform; but context matters when assessing issues of causality and the probability and imminence of harm. What is important is the degree of influence that a user has over other users.

In general, the Board cited to general principles of human rights law, and specifically the Rabat Plan of Action "to assess the capacity of speech to create a serious risk of inciting discrimination, violence, or other lawless action." As for how long suspensions should generally last, they should be long enough to "deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion." Facebook is therefore free to re-impose Trump's suspension as it re-evaluates it, if it feels it remains warranted. It just needs to do so in a more transparent way that would be scalable to other similar situations. As it summarized:

Facebook should publicly explain the rules that it uses when it imposes account-level sanctions against influential users. These rules should ensure that when Facebook imposes a time-limited suspension on the account of an influential user to reduce the risk of significant harm, it will assess whether the risk has receded before the suspension ends. If Facebook identifies that the user poses a serious risk of inciting imminent violence, discrimination or other lawless action at that time, another time-bound suspension should be imposed when such measures are necessary to protect public safety and proportionate to the risk. The Board noted that heads of state and other high officials of government can have a greater power to cause harm than other people. If a head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a period sufficient to protect against imminent harm. Suspension periods should be long enough to deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion.

As we suggested in our comment, the right policy choices for Facebook to make boil down to the ones that best make Facebook the community it wants to be. At its core, that's what the Board's decision is intended to help with: point out where it appears Facebook has fallen short of its own espoused ideals, and help it get back on track in the future.

Which is, overall, a good thing. It just isn't, as so many critics keep complaining, everything. The Internet is far more than just Facebook, no matter what Trump or his friends think. And there are far more important things for those of us who care about preserving online expression to give our attention to than this.

Filed Under: appeals, donald trump, permanent suspension, policies, rules, suspension
Companies: facebook, oversight board

James O'Keefe Sues Twitter For Defamation... For Shutting Down His Account

from the this-is-not-going-to-go-well dept

You may have heard recently that James O'Keefe, the guy behind "Project Veritas" -- a propaganda outlet whose brand of highly edited, surreptitiously recorded videos are often followed by actual media having to come in and debunk the misleading bits -- had his Twitter account shut down recently. He immediately threatened to sue Twitter, and last week he actually did so.

The crux of the lawsuit is that because a reporter claimed that Twitter told him O'Keefe's account was banned for "operating fake accounts," that's defamation. The lawsuit notes that back in February, Twitter also banned the Project Veritas account. In that case, it was because one of Project Veritas' videos allegedly revealed "private information" which violated its rules. In that case, the private information (according to the lawsuit) was that the video showed the house number of a Facebook executive who they were trying to interview. In the lawsuit, O'Keefe's lawyers try to make a big deal of the fact that real media organizations sometimes show where people live as well, leaving out the fact that this does not matter one tiny bit. Twitter sets the rules on its own platform, and when it's making decisions on the rules, they often involve context (and that context may include Project Veritas' long history).

But the key part of the lawsuit is the claim that because a Twitter spokesperson told the media that O'Keefe violated its policy against "fake accounts," and O'Keefe claims he didn't operate fake accounts, this is defamatory. The arguments in the case are going to make some of you laugh:

The false accusation that Mr. O’Keefe operated “fake accounts” is particularly damaging for Mr. O’Keefe because Mr. O’Keefe is a journalist. As such, his reputation for transparency and accurate reporting is fundamental to his profession.

That is... uh... not quite what many people would call Mr. O'Keefe's reputation.

By accusing Mr. O’Keefe of “operating fake accounts,” Twitter was directly attacking Mr. O’Keefe’s fitness for his profession by accusing him of “misleading others” and by effectively running a disinformation outlet akin to the much-discussed “Russian interference”/disinformation bots that plagued the 2016 election and which inspired some political operatives to engage in similar tactics in 2017....

Indeed, Twitter’s entire “fake accounts” policy, which it accused Mr. O’Keefe of violating by stating that he “operat[ed] fake accounts,” stems from the Russian disinformation campaign.

Thus, by claiming Mr. O’Keefe operated “fake accounts,” Twitter was saying Mr. O’Keefe could not be trusted as a journalist because he was “misleading others” via disinformation in the manner the Russian government is widely accused of doing to interfere in the U.S. political process.

That all sounds nice. But if you actually read the Twitter policy in question, it's a lot broader than O'Keefe's lawyers make it out to be. It's quite broad and has to do with a lot more than Russian disinfo accounts. Here's just part of it:

You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter.

We want Twitter to be a place where people can make human connections, find reliable information, and express themselves freely and safely. To make that possible, we do not allow spam or other types of platform manipulation. We define platform manipulation as using Twitter to engage in bulk, aggressive, or deceptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience.

Platform manipulation can take many forms and our rules are intended to address a wide range of prohibited behavior, including:

• commercially-motivated spam, that typically aims to drive traffic or attention from a conversation on Twitter to accounts, websites, products, services, or initiatives;
• inauthentic engagements, that attempt to make accounts or content appear more popular or active than they are;
• coordinated activity, that attempts to artificially influence conversations through the use of multiple accounts, fake accounts, automation and/or scripting; and
• coordinated harmful activity that encourages or promotes behavior which violates the Twitter Rules.

In other words, it's quite broad. And lots of people have been caught up in similar account bans over the past few years, including the Krassenstein brothers who became famous for their anti-Donald Trump tweets, as well as a weird (and somewhat silly) "non-partisan" political party. So, for anyone arguing that this policy is used just against "conservatives," the evidence certainly suggests otherwise. It also does not at all suggest that anyone dinged under this policy is engaged in Russian-style disinformation campaigns.

Like so many of these lawsuits, this one appears to be more performative than serious. It's not difficult to predict how this will end up.

Filed Under: content moderation, defamation, fake accounts, first amendment, free speech, james o'keefe, policies
Companies: project veritas, twitter

Apple Tells Congress That It Will Reallow Parler's App In The App Store, Now That It Has A Moderation Plan In Place

from the because-that's-it's-decision dept

Parler is coming back to the Apple iOS app store. As you'll recall, Apple (and Google) removed Parler's app from their mobile app stores back in January, saying that the app ran afoul of their requirements that platform apps must have reasonable content moderation policies. Parler, of course, falsely claimed not to do any moderation, but the company's then CEO admitted that he enjoyed banning leftist trolls from his site.

After Parler was banned, there was a lot of wasted air screaming about how this was "anti-competitive" and "biased" against conservatives, and all of that was utter garbage. Google and Apple have policies in place, and if you violate them, you can lose access to Google's and Apple's platforms. And, of course, it's since come out that there was quite a battle inside Parler regarding its moderation strategies. While the founder and former CEO, John Matze, had promised more moderation when the service came back, in a lawsuit that Matze has since filed against the company, he claims that he was fired for trying to put in place that moderation policy.

When Parler came back online with new hosting in February, the temporary CEO Mark Meckler had claimed that the service was coming back with AI and human moderators to deal with trolling, but insisted that it would not remove "content that attacks someone based on race, sex, sexual orientation or religion."

It's unclear how much has changed, or how effective such a filter will be, but Apple has apparently decided it's good enough. In response to a demand letter from Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Ken Buck, Apple has said that it will reinstate Parler to the iOS app store. The letter explains, in great detail, how Parler was not following Apple's developer policies, leading to the ban, and how it has now come into compliance.

Apple has in the past communicated with Parler regarding failures in its content moderation efforts, as well as its desire stated at various times to not moderate content at all. Earlier this year Apple was again alerted to posts in the Parler app that violated Apple’s policies with respect to user generated content. In particular, Guideline 1.1.1 (“Objectionable Content”) states in relevant part that apps should not include offensive or discriminatory content, including that which is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group. Guideline 1.2 (“User Generated Content”) requires apps with user-generated content to include the following features to prevent abuse:

1. a method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app;
2. a mechanism to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns;
3. the ability to block abusive users from the service; and
4. published contact information so users can easily reach the developer.

Apple’s App Review Team found a significant number of posts on the Parler app that clearly violated Guideline 1.1.1, including posts that encouraged violence, denigrated various ethnic groups, races and religions, glorified Nazism, and called for violence against specific people. Apple has provided some examples of these posts to your staff. The volume and types of prohibited content available in the Parler app further indicated that Parler also was out of compliance with Guideline 1.2 since their moderation practices were clearly inadequate to protect users from this harmful and dangerous content.

On January 8, 2021, Apple sent a communication to Parler, requesting that it remove specifically identified prohibited content, as well as any similar content. Apple also asked Parler to explain how Parler would improve its content moderation practices to comply with the Guidelines. Given that Apple had previously notified Parler of similar compliance failures on multiple occasions, and in light of the egregiousness of the violations and ongoing potential for further harm, Apple asked Parler to respond within 24 hours. This private developer communication, which is on a secure portal available only to the developer, became public when it was first reported by The Federalist and shared on Twitter by individuals associated with Parler.

In response, Parler did not communicate a sufficient plan to improve its moderation of user-generated content in the app. Thereafter, and consistent with standard app review processes, Apple’s app review team, ARB, and ERB decided to remove the Parler app from the App Store for non-compliance with the Guidelines. Customers who had already downloaded the Parler app prior to its removal from the App Store could still access the app, and Apple understands that Parler’s website is accessible on the Internet, including through a web browser on an Apple device.

In the period since Apple removed the Parler app from the App Store, Apple’s App Review Team has engaged in substantial conversations with Parler in an effort to bring the Parler app into compliance with the Guidelines and reinstate it in the App Store. As a result of those conversations, Parler has proposed updates to its app and the app’s content moderation practices, and the App Review Team has informed Parler as of April 14, 2021 that its proposed updated app will be approved for reinstatement to the App Store. Apple anticipates that the updated Parler app will become available immediately upon Parler releasing it.

It's unclear how this fits with Meckler's earlier statement saying that the app would not block content that attacks people on the basis of race and other characteristics, but perhaps Parler's moderation plans have... been modified.

Either way, this should get people to stop making false claims about "bias" against "conservatives" or how Apple was "too scared" of competition or whatever other garbage excuses will come down -- but of course it won't. The victim-playing culture warriors who now run the Republican Party will not let go, and will insist that, despite all this evidence that it was a straight up contractual violation that was ended when the breach was solved, this was actually some grand scheme to "silence" them. That's not how it works and going around making up lies to play the victim is a silly way to go through life.

Filed Under: app store, apps, content moderation, ios store, policies
Companies: apple, parler

The Most Important Part Of The Facebook / Oversight Board Interaction Happened Last Week And Almost No One Cared

from the pay-attention dept

The whole dynamic between Facebook and the Oversight Board has received lots of attention -- with many people insisting that the Board's lack of official power makes it effectively useless. The specifics, again, for most of you not deep in the weeds on this: Facebook has only agreed to be bound by the Oversight Board's decisions on a very narrow set of issues: if a specific piece of content was taken down and the Oversight Board says it should have been left up. Beyond that, the Oversight Board can make recommendations on policy issues, but the companies doesn't need to follow them. I think this is a legitimate criticism and concern, but it's also a case where if Facebook itself actually does follow through on the policy recommendations, and everybody involved acts as if the Board has real power... then the norms around it might mean that it does have that power (at least until there's a conflict, and you end up in the equivalent of a Constitutional crisis).

And while there's been a tremendous amount of attention paid to the Oversight Board's first set of rulings, and to the fact that Facebook asked it to review the Trump suspension, last week something potentially much more important and interesting happened. With those initial rulings on the "up/down" question, the Oversight Board also suggested a pretty long list of policy recommendations for Facebook. Again, under the setup of the Board, Facebook only needed to consider these, but was not bound to enact them.

Last week Facebook officially responded to those recommendations, saying that it had agreed to take action on 11 of the 17 recommendations, is assessing the feasibility on another five, and was taking no action on just one. The company summarized those decisions in that link above, and put out a much more detailed pdf exploring the recommendations and Facebook's response. It's actually interesting reading (or, at least for someone like me who likes to dig deep into the nuances of content moderation).

Since I'm sure it's most people's first question: the one "no further action" was in response to a policy recommendation regarding COVID-19 misinformation. The Board had recommended that when a user posts information that disagrees with advice from health authorities, but where the "potential for physical harm is identified but is not imminent" that "Facebook should adopt a range of less intrusive measures." Basically, removing such information may not always make sense, especially if it's not clear that the information in disagreement with health authorities might not be actively harmful. As per usual, there's a lot of nuance here. As we discussed, early in the pandemic, the suggestions from "health authorities" later turned out to be inaccurate (like the WHO and CDC telling people not to wear masks in many cases). That makes relying on those health authorities as the be all, end all for content moderation for disinformation inherently difficult.

The Oversight Board's response in this issue more or less tried to walk that line, recognizing that health authorities' advice may adapt over time as more information becomes clear, and automatically silencing those who push back on the official suggestions from health officials may lead to over-blocking. But, obviously, this is a hellishly nuanced and complex topic. Part of the issue is that -- especially in a rapidly changing situation, where our knowledge base starts out with little information and is constantly correcting -- it's difficult to tell who is pushing back against official advice for good reasons or for conspiracy theory nonsense reasons (and there's a very wide spectrum between those two things). That creates (yet again) an impossible situation. The Oversight Board was suggesting that Facebook should be at least somewhat more forgiving in such situations, as long as they don't see any "imminent" harm from those disagreeing with health officials.

Facebook's response isn't so much pushing back against the Board's recommendation -- but rather to argue that it already takes a "less intrusive" approach. It also argued that Facebook and the Oversight Board basically disagree on the definition of "imminent danger" from bad medical advice (the specific issue came up in the context of someone in France recommending hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID). Facebook said that, contrary to the Board's finding, it did think this represented imminent danger:

Our global expert stakeholder consultations have made it clear that, that in the context of a health emergency, the harm from certain types of health misinformation does lead to imminent physical harm. That is why we remove this content from the platform. We use a wide variety of proportionate measures to support the distribution of authoritative health misinformation. We also partner with independent third-party fact-checkers and label other kinds of health misinformation.

We know from our work with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other public health authorities that if people think there is a cure for COVID-19 they are less likely to follow safe health practices, like social distancing or mask-wearing. Exponential viral replication rates mean one person’s behavior can transmit the virus to thousands of others within a few days.

We also note that one reason the board decided to allow this content was that the person who posted the content was based in France, and in France, it is not possible to obtain hydroxychloroquine without a prescription. However, readers of French content may be anywhere in the world, and cross-border flows for medication are well established. The fact that a particular pharmaceutical item is only available via prescription in France should not be a determinative element in decision-making.

As a bit of a tangent, I'll just note the interesting dynamic here: despite "the narrative" which claims that Facebook has no incentive to moderate content due to things like Section 230, here the company is arguing for the ability to be more heavy handed in its moderation to protect the public from danger, and against the Oversight Board which is asking the company to be more permissive.

As for the items that Facebook "took action" on, a lot of them are sort of bland commitments to do "something" rather than concrete changes. For example, at the top of the list were things around confusion between the Instagram community guidelines and the Facebook community guidelines, and to be more transparent about how those are enforced. Facebook says that they're "committed to action" on this, but I'm not sure I can actually tell you what actions it's actually taken.

We’ll continue to explore how best to provide transparency to people about enforcement actions, within the limits of what is technologically feasible. We’ll start with ensuring consistent communication across Facebook and Instagram to build on our commitment above to clarify the overall relationship between Facebook’s Community Standards and Instagram’s Community Guidelines.

Um... great? But what does that actually mean? I have no idea.

Evelyn Douek, who studies this issue basically more than anyone else, notes that many of these commitments from Facebook are kind of weak:

Some of the “commitments” are likely things that Facebook had in train already; others are broad and vague. And while the dialogue between the FOB and Facebook has shed some light on previously opaque parts of Facebook’s content moderation processes, Facebook can do much better.

As Douek notes, some of the answers do reveal some pretty interesting things that weren't publicly known before -- such as how its AI deals with nudity, and how it tries to distinguish the nudity it doesn't want from things like nudity around breast cancer awareness:

Facebook explained the error choice calculation it has to make when using automated tools to detect adult nudity while trying to avoid taking down images raising awareness about breast cancer (something at issue in one of the initial FOB cases). Facebook detailed that its tools can recognize the words “breast cancer” but users have used these words to evade nudity detection systems, so Facebook can’t just rely on just leaving up every post that says “breast cancer.” Facebook has committed to providing its models with more negative samples to decrease error rates.

Douek also notes that some of Facebook's claims to be implementing the Board's recommendations are... misleading. They're actually rejecting the Board's full recommendation:

In response to the FOB’s request for a specific transparency report about Community Standard enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook said it was “committed to action.” Great! What “action,” you might ask? It says that it had already been sharing metrics throughout the pandemic and would continue to do so. Oh. This is actually a rejection of the FOB’s recommendation. The FOB knows about Facebook’s ongoing reporting and found it inadequate. It recommended a specific report, with a range of details, about how the pandemic had affected Facebook’s content moderation. The pandemic provided a natural experiment and a learning opportunity: Because of remote work restrictions, Facebook had to rely on automated moderation more than normal. The FOB was not the first to note that Facebook’s current transparency reporting is not sufficient to meaningfully assess the results of this experiment.

Still, what's amazing to me is that these issues, which might actually change key aspects of Facebook's moderation basically got next to zero public attention last week as compared to the simple decisions on specific takedowns (and the massive flood of attention the Trump account suspension decision will inevitably get).

Filed Under: content moderation, policies, recommendations
Companies: facebook, oversight board

Sheryl Sandberg Makes Disingenuous Push To Argue That Only Facebook Has The Power To Stop Bad People Online

from the oh-come-off-it dept

While Twitter is opening up to have the difficult conversation about how content moderation and the open internet should co-exist at a time when the President of the US has inspired an insurrection, Facebook, perhaps not surprisingly, has taken another approach. It's one that is condescendingly stupid, and simultaneously self-serving.

Sheryl Sandberg went public to say both that most of the planning for the invasion of the Capitol was not done on Facebook, and that only Facebook was big enough to prevent such things from happening.

She says:

"I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, and don’t have our standards, and don’t have our transparency."

Even if that's true (and that's unclear, and we'll get back to that...) it's a very short-sighted and silly thing to say. At a time when the company is literally facing two major antitrust cases, to run around trying to argue that you're the only one who can handle this issue is just painfully dumb. On top of that, there's no way that anyone can totally stop people from spreading these messages on any platform, no matter what abilities/standards/transparency you have -- and pretending that your moderation efforts are somehow perfect is the kind of stupid thing that (1) will come back to bite you and (2) is easy to disprove.

In fact, it was quite easy to prove that Sandberg's claims are not even remotely true. The Washington Post has detailed how bogus that claim is:

A growing body of evidence shows Facebook played a much larger role than Sandberg suggested.

The #StopTheSteal hashtag was widely used on the service until Monday, when a search on Facebook reported that 128,000 people were talking about it and in many cases using it to coordinate for the rally, according to Eric Feinberg, a vice president with the Coalition for a Safer Web.

And two dozen Republican Party officials and organizations in at least 12 states posted on Facebook to coordinate bus trips to the rally, according to research by the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters for America, which published screenshots of the fliers and memes.

“BUS TRIP to DC … #StoptheSteal. If your passions are running hot and you’re intending to respond to the President’s call for his supporters to descend on DC on Jan 6, LISTEN UP!” wrote the Polk County Republican Party of North Carolina in a Facebook post that is no longer publicly available.

Oooof. Meanwhile, even after Facebook and Sandberg said that Facebook had taken down the militias and that it had the "ability to stop hate," it wasn't difficult for a Buzzfeed reporter to find "Stop the Steal" groups still active!

A search on Facebook for the words "Stop the Steal," a rallying cry that the mob who forced Congress to flee chanted, turned up dozens of places where new plots could be coordinated. There are at least 66 groups dedicated to the slogan, the largest of which has over 14,000 members. That group is private, meaning nonmembers can’t access the content, but its description is unambiguous: “to make aware the issues of fraudulent voting practices and Fraudulent ballot counting. also, to make these issues transparent for all!”

Several of these groups were created after the election. The 14,000-member group was created on Nov. 6. Another, with nearly 10,000 members, was started on Nov. 29, and another that has 8,000 members on Dec. 10.

This is the nature of content moderation. You're always going to make mistakes. Big ones. Small ones. Medium ones. You're going to make mistakes. Pretending that you won't is silly and will backfire. And here it's especially stupid given the circumstances.

I'm saying this as someone who has spent plenty of time in the last week explaining to people why it's silly to blame Facebook for what happened at the Capitol. If people didn't plan on Facebook (and, of course, they did), they would have planned this elsewhere. But, it's just gaslighting people to pretend that Facebook has the power to moderate away all bad behavior, and even dumber to pretend that no such planning happened on your platform. I'm sure that plenty of the planning happened elsewhere, but of course some of it happened on Facebook.

I truly do not understand Facebook's continued failure to comprehend how it, and its senior leadership, keep shooting themselves in the foot time after time.

Filed Under: content moderation, impossibility, insurrection, policies, sheryl sandberg, stop the steal
Companies: facebook

Teespring Takes Down Our Copying Is Not Theft Gear, Refuses To Say Why

from the so-now-it's-on-threadless dept

At Techdirt we're no strangers to people disagreeing — often, let's say, vehemently — with our views on copyright. But I've still often been surprised by how angry some people get about the simple, factual observation that copying is not theft. We've made the point many times (and it remains true even if you think copyright infringement is a dastardly crime), and a few years ago we put it on a t-shirt and some other products via the print-on-demand platform Teespring, where we sell a bunch of gear. But you won't find the shirt at those links anymore, because last week we received notice from Teespring that it had been taken down... supposedly for copyright infringement.

At first, it seemed like this was likely a simple error from an automated system (the takedown notification explained that it was not based on a complaint from a third party) and I suspected we had been caught up in Teespring's response to an unrelated (and amusing) phenomenon that was taking place at the same time: a bunch of artists and others online were aiming to prove that there are bots out there copying artwork from social media and selling it on print-on-demand sites, by spreading funny and extremely-infringing images which did, indeed, show up on several print-on-demand t-shirts soon afterwards.

It would hardly be surprising if this spurred print-on-demand services into a not-too-discerning copyright sweep of existing products that the Copying Is Not Theft gear somehow got caught up in. As we are constantly pointing out, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. I figured that a quick email to the "IP Escalations" address offered in the takedown notification, clarifying that the design does not in fact include any "third-party content" as the notification claimed, would get it reinstated. But to my surprise, they responded that they could not reinstate the campaign because it violates Teespring's Acceptable Use Policies. One of the six policies is about intellectual property — explicitly the problem according to the initial notification email — but they offered no response to my claim that the content was entirely original, and it seemed they were backing down from the IP angle and just going for a vague response of "it violates one of these five other rules". Since it certainly contains no nudity, hate speech, or violence, I can only assume they believe it either "promotes illegal activity" or (less likely given the definitions on their policy page) contains "false or misleading claims".

Unfortunately all I can do is guess, because it seems like they really don't like being asked for an explanation. Upon first asking what policy we violated, I got a reply simply linking to the same policy page with no additional information. I clarified that I'd read the page, that we were not in violation of any of the policies, and asked which of the six in the list was the issue. It was at this point their true feelings started to peek through the mandatory please-and-thanks language of customer service:

We apologize if you disagree with our decision and for any inconvenience this matter has caused. Please understand that we are not in a position to debate our policies or discuss this issue further; however, your feedback has been noted and we truly appreciate your time today.

Sincerely,
Team Teespring

I told them I wasn't seeking a debate, and just wanted to know what policy we violated, and...

You've been advised three times that the content has violated our acceptable use policy. You have been provided with the links to this policy for further information. This policy and choice to remove the content are not up for discussion. We apologize if you disagree with the decision. You will not receive anymore communication from us on this matter.

Thank you,
Team Teespring

And so apparently that's that. I enjoy the sleight-of-hand in claiming that a list of six policies is an answer to my question of which specific policy we violated (and the sudden switch in their language from plural to singular when I emphasized this question), and the fact that the "IP Escalations" department we were specifically told to contact if we believed the takedown was in error considers this "not up for discussion". It seems most likely that someone at Teespring believes the phrase "copying is not theft" is promoting illegal acts, when in fact its purpose is to emphasize an important legal (and ethical, and practical) distinction that should be obvious but that a surprising number of people casually ignore or actively oppose — and, as noted, it remains important even if you are a supporter of strong copyright laws.

Of course, Teespring is free to take down our stuff without an explanation or even a reason if it wants, and it doesn't have to offer an escalation contact at all, let alone a helpful one. And if it's true there was some sort of sweep going on and lots of people were contesting takedowns, we may still have simply been victims of sheer scale — though the unhelpful emails still make it clear that the decision was examined and confirmed by an actual human, so I'm still quite curious about the official rationale. But since it's "not up for discussion," the more important conclusion here is that it's time to start exploring alternatives to Teespring for our various lines of Techdirt gear.

So today we're relaunching the Copying Is Not Theft gear in our new store on Threadless.

For now we're just testing the waters with this new platform — the product lines and pricing are a bit different, which means some options are gone (no stickers for now) but we're also able to add some cool new ones, including notebooks, phone cases, buttons, bags and more!

If all goes well, we may consider moving all our designs over to the Threadless store, or we may end up exploring some other options in the future. For now, get yourself some gear and remember: Copying Is Not Theft!

Filed Under: content moderation, copying is not theft, copyright, policies, violating policies
Companies: techdirt, teespring

EFF Sues CBP, ICE Over Refusal To Hand Over Its GPS Tracking Device Policies

from the Garmins-in-boxes-marked-'CLASSIFIED' dept

Roughly a year ago, the government attempted to argue the border search exception applied to GPS tracking devices it surreptitiously attached to a truck crossing the border from Canada and tracked for the next 48 hours, following it from its arrival point in Michigan to its destination in California.

The court disagreed with the government's interpretation of the border search exception. While it may have covered the original warrantless placement of the tracking device, it did not cover the next two days of tracking while the truck traveled far inland.

The government lost its evidence and, eventually, its case. Stuck with evidence solely derived from an unconstitutional search, the government dismissed the charges and the two arrested Canadians were free to return to their home country.

During this case, the government claimed these apparently illegal searches were within policy. Specifically, affidavits filed by the DOJ stated ICE and CBP both had policies that permitted the warrantless, suspicionless installation of tracking devices on vehicles at border crossings.

If these policies exist, no one has seen them. The EFF would like to. It filed FOIA requests with both ICE and CBP, asking the agencies to produce the policies referred to in court. To date, it has received nothing from either agency.

According to the EFF's FOIA lawsuit [PDF], both agencies have violated the law with their continued refusal to produce the requested documents. ICE received the EFF's request last November. Four months later, it said it had found three responsive pages, but that all three pages would be withheld, citing Exemption 7(E). This exemption protects "law enforcement sensitive information" that might give bad guys the jump on the feds if they knew the feds might try to sneak tracking devices onto their vehicles at border crossings.

It would seem the case above -- the one cited in the EFF's lawsuit -- kind of exposed ICE's GPS device subterfuge. The only thing surprising about the use of GPS devices was the government's assertion that the border search exception applies everywhere in the United States, not just at or near its borders.

The EFF's appeal of ICE's decision also pointed out that the Supreme Court's 2012 decision on tracking devices made it pretty clear this super-secret law enforcement technique was actually well-known and understood pretty thoroughly by cops and criminals alike. Upon receipt of this appeal, ICE apparently decided it would no longer discuss its ridiculous exemption deployment.

The CBP, on the other hand, has refused to do anything at all. It too received the EFF's FOIA request last November, but apparently can't even be bothered to look for documents, much less pretend discussion of GPS tracking devices would undermine its covert operations.

The lawsuit seeks the full disclosure of the documents as well as any legal fees incurred by the government's refusal to comply with FOIA law. Should this finally dislodge the documents, we'll all know just a little more about the apparently minimal standards border agencies apply to their use of tracking devices.

Filed Under: cbp, foia, gps, ice, policies, public records, tracking, transparency
Companies: eff

The Impossibility Of Content Moderation Plays Out, Once Again, On YouTube

from the no-one-will-agree dept

I was traveling a bit this week so didn't watch the slow motion train wreck that was happening on YouTube in real time. The latest situation began when Vox video producer Carlos Maza posted publicly on Twitter about Steven Crowder -- one of those ranty angry "comedians" -- kept posting "repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity." He noted that Crowder's fans had taken to harassing and doxxing him and generally being assholes. He "reported" the content to YouTube, saying that he felt the content violated its policies on bullying and harassment. After a few days, YouTube posted via Twitter (oddly) a kinda weird explanation, saying that after reviewing the videos, they didn't actually violate YouTube's harassment policies.

Lots of people got angry about that decision, and then YouTube changed its mind (partly), choosing to (maybe temporarily) demonetize Crowder's channel until he agreed to "address all of the issues with his channel", specifically "continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community" whatever that means.

As Robby Soave at Reason notes, this is a solution that pissed off absolutely everyone and satisfied absolutely no one. Though, there is one thing that pretty much everyone agrees: boy YouTube sure pointed a pretty large cannon at its own foot in dealing with this one (seriously, don't they employ people who have some sort of clue about these kinds of communication issues?).

As Soave points out, there's really no good results here. He's correct that Crowder does seem to be an asshole and there's no reason to express any sympathy for Crowder being a jerk and attacking someone for their sexual orientation or ethnicity. Crowder deserves to be called out and mocked for such things. At the same time, it is quite reasonable to sympathize with Maza, as being on the end of such targeted harassment by assholes is horrific. Part of the problem, here, is the disconnect between what Crowder himself did (just be a general asshole) and what Crowder's followers and fans did (taking Crowder's assholish comments and escalating them into harassment). That puts a platform like YouTube (once again) into a really impossible position. Should it be holding Crowder responsible for the actions of his crazy deranged followers (which it can easily be argued he winkingly/noddingly encouraged) even if Crowder didn't do the harassment directly, and was just generally an asshole? It's a tough call. It may seem like an easy call, but try to apply that standard to other situations and it gets complicated fast.

Katie Herzog, at The Stranger, posted a thoughtful piece about how this particular standard could boomerang back on the more vulnerable and marginalized people in our society (as is the case with almost any effort towards censorship). Even if Crowder is deeply unfunny and a jerk, this standard creates follow on effects:

Crowder is a comic, doing exactly what comics do: Mocking a public figure. There's nothing illegal about that, and if YouTube does reverse its decision and start to ban everyone who mocks people for their sexuality or race, they're going to have to ban a whole lot of queer people of color who enjoy making fun of straight white dudes next. That's not a precedent I'd like to see set.

Of course, the usual response to this is to have people claim that we're making a bogus "slippery slope" argument that isn't there. What they mean is that since you and I can somehow magically work out which assholes deserve to be shut down and which assholes are doing it in pursuit of the larger good, then clearly a company can set in place a policy that works that says "stop just the assholes I don't like."

And there are reasons to be sympathetic to such a position. It's just that we have a couple decades of seeing how this works at scale in actual practice and it doesn't work. Ratchet up the ability to silence assholes and there are plenty of "false positives" -- people getting kicked off for dopey reasons. Go in the other direction and you end up with too many assholes on the platform. As we've discussed for years, there is no right level and there is no way to set the controls in a way that works. No matter what decision is made is going to piss off a ton of people. This is why I've been pushing for platforms to actually move in a different direction. Rather than taking on all of the policing responsibility themselves, open it up. Let others build services for content moderation, push the power to the ends of the network, and let there actually be competition among the moderation options, rather than having it come from a single, centralized source. There will still be problems with that, but it avoids many of the issues with the mess described here.

Filed Under: bullying, carlos maza, content moderation, content moderation at scale, harassment, policies, steven crowder
Companies: youtube

Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads

from the again-and-again dept

I've made it clear that I don't think much of Elizabeth Warren's big plan to "break up big tech," which seemed not particularly well thought out and unlikely to accomplish its actual goals. Even so, I certainly cringed upon hearing the news that Facebook had blocked an ad that Warren's team had taken to promote the plan. I mean, come on. Here is Warren, talking about how Facebook is too powerful and can potentially influence policy by choosing what it allows and what it doesn't allow... and Facebook up and hands Warren the most beautiful gift she could ever hope for: blocking her own ad for her policy to break up Facebook. Basically everyone immediately spun the story as Facebook trying to censor this call to break up itself.

It sure looked bad.

Of course, the reality, again, is a lot more nuanced. And, while everyone will ignore this (and I'm sure some people will make bogus accusations in the comments), the reality is that this isn't proof of Facebook's nefarious attempts to censor people it doesn't like or messages it doesn't like. It's proof of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. As Facebook explained, the original ad violated a Facebook policy that had nothing to do with the message it was sending: you're apparently not allowed to use Facebook's logo in an ad:

“We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo," the spokesperson said. "In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads.”

This is, indeed, true. If you look at Facebook's ad policies it shows the following:

You are, in fact, not allowed to use a Facebook logo in an ad. Warren's ad violated that. Of course, in this context, it looks really, really bad. As Buzzfeed's Ryan Mac noted, this policy -- "which was ostensibly put in place for good reason, is interpreted without nuance."

Yup. Except, here's the thing, as we discussed on our podcast last year, it is literally impossible to invoke nuance when discussing moderation of content at scale. To handle the kind of scale that Facebook and other giant platforms deal with, you need to have thousands (and maybe tens of thousands) of content moderators, and they need to be trained in a manner that they will apply the same rules pretty consistently (which is already an impossible standard). In such a world, there is literally no room for nuance. A system that allows nuance is one that allows arbitrary decision making... leading to just more complaints of inconsistent content moderation.

And, frankly, for all of Warren's attempt to frame this as evidence that Facebook has "too much power" and is "dominated by a single censor," what actually played out suggests why that's inaccurate. These ads weren't getting much attention. Indeed, they had almost no money behind them. According to Buzzfeed, these ads weren't designed to reach a wide audience:

Facebook’s ad archive shows that the four ads had less than $100 in backing each, with three garnering fewer than 1,000 impressions and one garnering between 1,000 and 5,000 impressions.

And then what happened? The ads got taken down, and rather being "censored," the story went crazy viral through other sources, almost as if the Warren campaign maybe found some silly rule to violate just to make this kind of thing happen.... And, of course, the Streisand Effect then guaranteed that for basically a tiny ad spend, a ton more people now became aware of these ads.

I fully expect that the details and nuance here will be ignored by most -- and we'll keep hearing for months (or, possibly, years) about how this somehow "proves" Facebook either "censors critics" or is too dominant and can stifle a message. And, yet, all of the details show something very, very different. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and when Facebook does (for totally different reasons) try to stifle a message (after receiving tons of pressure from people like Elizabeth Warren to better police political ads...), it suddenly became headline news across the political and tech news realms.

Again, there are all sorts of reasons to be concerned about Facebook's market position. And I'd love to see more competition in the market. But, can we at least not jump on the easy narrative when it's wrong, even if it "feels" good?

Filed Under: advertisements, antitrust, censorship, content moderation, elizabeth warren, logos, message, policies, power
Companies: facebook