Media Spends Years Insisting Facebook Makes Society Worse; Then Trumpets A Poll Saying People Think Facebook Makes Society Worse

from the nice-work-there dept

It still is amazing to me how many people in the more traditional media insist that social media is bad and dangerous and infecting people's brains with misinformation... but who don't seem to recognize that every single such claim made about Facebook applies equally to their own media houses. Take, for example, CNN. Last week it excitedly blasted out the results of a poll that showed three fourths of adults believe Facebook is making society worse.

Now, there is an argument that Facebook has made society worse, though I don't think it's a particularly strong one. For many, many people, Facebook has been a great way to connect and communicate with friends and family -- especially during a pandemic when many of us have been unable to see many friends and family in person.

Either way it's undeniable that the traditional media -- which, it needs to be noted, compete with social media for ad dollars -- has spent the last five years blasting out the story over and over again that pretty much everything bad in the world can be traced back to Facebook, despite little to no actual evidence to support this. So, then, if CNN after reporting about how terrible and evil Facebook is for five years, turns around and polls people, of course most of them are going to parrot back what CNN and other media have been saying all this time. Hell, I'm kind of surprised that it's only 76% of people who claim Facebook has made society worse.

I mean, just in the past couple months, every CNN story I can find about Facebook seems to be completely exaggerated, with somewhat misleading claims blaming pretty much everything wrong in the world on Facebook. It's almost like CNN (and other media organizations) are in the business of hyping up stories to manipulate emotions -- the very thing that everyone accuses Facebook of doing. Except with CNN, there are actual human employees making those decisions about what you see. Which is not how Facebook works. Here are just a few recent CNN stories I found:

• Tech billionaire: Facebook is what's wrong with America
• Former Zuckerberg adviser: Facebook's problem is its business model
• 'We need to admit reality,' Facebook whistleblower says. Here's what might happen next
• Facebook's public relations strategy seems increasingly desperate
• Facebook's alarming plan for news feeds
• Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files series prompts comparisons to Big Tobacco
• Facebook is having a tougher time managing vaccine misinformation than it is letting on, leaks suggest
• How to protect ourselves against Facebook's failures

I mean, if all my info about Facebook came from CNN, I'd agree that it was making society worse. But I could just as easily argue that CNN is making society worse by presenting a very misleading and one-sided analysis of anything having to do with Facebook. Hell, CNN is owned by AT&T, which (1) has been trying and failing to compete with Facebook in the internet ads business, and (2) literally paid to set up an outright propaganda network known as OAN. I think there's tremendous evidence to suggest that AT&T is making society way worse than anything that Facebook has ever done.

This is not a defense of Facebook, because I still believe the company has lots and lots of problems. But the idea that a poll from CNN tells us anything even remotely useful or enlightening is just pure misinformation.

Filed Under: media, narrative, polls, society
Companies: cnn, facebook

Surprising, But Important: Facebook Sorta Shuts Down Its Face Recognition System

from the good-to-see dept

A month ago, I highlighted how Facebook seemed uniquely bad attaking a long term view and publicly committing to doing things that are good for the world, but bad for Facebook in the short run . So it was a bit surprising earlier this week to see Facebook (no I'm not calling it Meta, stop it) announce that it was shutting down its Face Recognition system and (importantly) deleting over a billion "face prints" that it had stored.

The company's announcement on this was (surprisingly!) open about the various trade-offs here, both societally and for Facebook, though (somewhat amusingly) throughout the announcement Facebook repeatedly highlights the supposed societal benefits of its facial recognition.

Making this change required careful consideration, because we have seen a number of places where face recognition can be highly valued by people using platforms. For example, our award-winning automatic alt text system, that uses advanced AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired, uses the Face Recognition system to tell them when they or one of their friends is in an image.

[....]

But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.

One interesting tidbit buried in this is that only about 1/3 of Facebook users opted in to use Facebook's facial recognition tool (despite the company pushing it heavily on users). At the very least, it showed that a large number of users weren't comfortable with the technology.

There's also the issue that, while they're turning off the tool and deleting the facial prints, the NY Times notes they're hanging on to the algorithm that was built on all those faces:

Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said.

That's resulted in some (expected) amount of cynicism from Facebook's critics that Facebook "got what it wanted" and is now moving on. However, I think that's a bit silly. Facebook could have easily kept the facial recognition program going. Of all the regulatory pressures the company is facing, this was way down the list and barely on the radar.

And, to make a bigger point, here's a case where the company is actually doing the right thing: turning off a questionable product and deleting a ton of data it collected. And we should at least encourage both Facebook and other companies to be willing to make that decision based on recognizing the societal risks, and without waiting around until they're forced to do so.

Filed Under: ai, data, deepface, facial recognition, privacy, society, trade-offs
Companies: facebook

New Research Shows Social Media Doesn't Turn People Into Assholes (They Already Were), And Everyone's Wrong About Echo Chambers

from the seems-notable dept

We recently wrote about Joe Bernstein's excellent Harper's cover story, which argues that we're all looking at disinformation/misinformation the wrong way, and that the evidence of disinformation on social media really influencing people is greatly lacking. Instead, as Bernstein notes, this idea is one that many others are heavily invested in spreading, including Facebook (if the disinfo story is true, then you should buy ads on Facebook to influence people in other ways), the traditional media (social media is a competitor), and certain institutions with a history of having authority over "truth" (can't let the riffraff make up their own minds on things).

We've also seen other evidence pop up questioning the supposed malicious impact of social media. Yochai Benkler's work has shown that Fox News has way more of an impact on spreading false information than social media does.

And even with all this evidence regarding disinformation, there are also people who focus on attitude, and insist that social media is responsible for otherwise good people turning awful. Yet, as was covered in an fascinating On the Media interview with Professor Michael Bang Petersen, there really isn't much evidence to support that either! As Petersen explained in a useful Twitter thread, his research has shown that there's no real evidence to support the idea that social media turns people hostile. Instead, it shows that people who are assholes offline are also assholes online.

But in the interview, Petersen makes a really fascinating point regarding echo chambers. I've been skeptical about idea of online echo chambers in the past, but Petersen says that people really have it all backwards -- and that we're actually much more likely to live in echo chambers offline than online, and we're much more likely to come across different viewpoints online.

One way to think about social media in this particular regard is to turn all of our notions about social media upside down. And here I'm thinking about the notion of 'echo chambers.' So we've been talking a lot about echo chambers and how social media creates echo chambers. But, in reality, the biggest echo chamber that we all live in is the one that we live in in our everyday lives.

I'm a university professor. I'm not really exposed to any person who has a radically different world view or radically different life from me in my everyday life. But when I'm online, I can see all sorts of opinions that I may disagree with. And that might trigger me if I'm a hostile person and encourage me to reach out to tell these people that I think they are wrong.

But that's because social media essentially breaks down the echo chambers. I can see the views of other people -- what they are saying behind my back. That's where a lot of the felt hostility of social media comes from. Not because they make us behave differently, but because they are exposing us to a lot of things that we're not exposed in our everyday lives.

And then this upside down view of echo chambers also explains why people feel like the internet is a more hostile place full of assholes and trolls. It's more that it's because we're now being exposed to these points of view and can respond. As he notes, this kind of hostility actually happens all the time, but it's usually just not witnessed by more than a couple people at a time. Now, online, it's witnessed by a much larger audience, and so we overcorrect and think that it's making people worse.

In our offline lives, there is a lot of hostility as well, but that happens behind closed doors, in private. It happens in bars where we cannot hear what is going on. But we're exposed to all that when we enter the online realm.

Another interesting tidbit in the interview (and in his Twitter thread) is the idea that people who tend to share misinformation often know that it's misinformation, but they don't care because they're just so focused on pissing off the people they don't like (see: "owning the libs") that they don't care. It's more important to anger the "other side" than to share legit info. This was based on a detailed study they did of people on Twitter.

The people who are sharing misinformation are not ignorant. They are used to navigating social media and the internet. They know more about politics than the average person. But where they're really different from the average is they have much more negative feelings towards members of the other party. And that's really what's predicting, not only their sharing of fake news, but also their sharing of real news. They want to derogate people that they don't like, and they are actively searching for information that they can use for that purpose.

So it's not that social media turns people into assholes, nor does it put them into echo chambers where their minds are turned to mush by disinformation. The evidence suggests that some people -- who were already predisposed to such kinds of "us/them" bickering, just jump right into the fray online as a kind of status thing to anger the people they don't like. Because those people can actually hear them now.

Later, he notes that it's not that they're purposefully sharing misinformation -- it's just that whether or not something is true or false is "not part of the calculus." All that matters is basically "will this trigger people I dislike."

And then the interview brings us back around to a similar issue that we noted with Yochai Benkler's research about the problems of Fox News. Petersen notes that his research has shown that Republicans tend to share somewhat more misinformation than Democrats, but it's not because (as some people believe) the relative education levels, but rather that the media ecosystem set up for Republicans (i.e., Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, etc.) is much more designed to feed them the kinds of news that they want to share for this very purpose -- the "own the libs" kind of stories. Though, as he then notes, the fact that these kinds of news sources exist and feed into this is (like the social media panic) more of a symptom, rather than the real problem.

His conclusion?

Misinformation is not, in itself, a big problem. So that's the good news. The bad news is that it's a symptom of a much worse problem. And here we come back to the polarization in society, because that is what's driving the sharing of misinformation. I think we've been focusing a lot on the symptoms -- Fox News, Trump, Facebook -- but I think that there is some evidence that suggests that rising inequality over the last decade has been a fundamental driver of political instability in the US and beyond. It's a problem in many Western Democracies. That's where I would start to look for solutions.

All of this is quite fascinating -- and backed up by his research. And, it does get back to the point that some of us have been making for years. That social media isn't so much "the problem" as it is a mirror that reflects the kinds of societal problems that civilization has been dealing with for centuries. It's just that now it plays out in a way where more people can see it all happen.

Filed Under: echo chambers, michael bang petersen, social media, society, trolls
Companies: facebook

Facebook: Amplifying The Good Or The Bad? It's Getting Ugly

from the the-mirror dept

When the New York Times reported Facebook’s plan to improve its reputation, the fact that the initiative was called “Project Amplify” wasn’t a surprise. “Amplification” is at the core of the Facebook brand, and “amplify the good” is a central concept in its PR playbook.

Amplify the good

Mark Zuckerberg initiated this talking point in 2018. “I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad,” he said after the Russian election meddling and the killings in Myanmar.

Then, other Facebook executives adopted this notion regardless of the issue at hand. The best example is Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram.

In July 2019, addressing online bullying, Mosseri said: “Technology isn’t inherently good or bad in the first place …. And social media, as a type of technology, is often an amplifier. It’s on us to make sure we’re amplifying the good and not amplifying the bad.”

In January 2021, After January 6 Capitol attack, Mosseri said: “Social media isn’t good or bad, like any technology, it just is. But social media is specifically a great amplifier. It can amplify good and bad. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we amplify more good and less bad.”

In September 2021, after a week of exposés about Facebook by the WSJ, The Facebook Files, Mosseri was assigned to defend the company once again. “When you connect people, whether it’s online or offline, good things can happen and bad things can happen,” he said in his opening statement. “I think that what is important is that the industry as a whole tries to understand both those positive and negative outcomes, and do all they can to magnify the positive and to identify and address the negative outcomes.”

Mosseri clearly uses the same messaging document, but Facebook’s PR template contains more talking points. Facebook also asserts that there have always been bad people or behaviors, and the current connectivity simply makes them more visible.

A mirror for the ugly

According to the “visibility” narrative, tech platforms simply reflect the beauty and ugliness in the world. Thus, social media is sometimes a cesspool because humanity is sometimes a cesspool.

Mark Zuckerberg addresses this issue several times, with the main message that it is just human nature. Nick Clegg, VP of Global Affairs and Communications, repeatedly shared the same mindset. “When society is divided and tensions run high, those divisions play out on social media. Platforms like Facebook hold up a mirror to society,” he wrote in 2020. “With more than 3 billion people using Facebook’s apps every month, everything that is good, bad misogynist and ugly in our societies will find expression on our platform.”

“Social media broadly, and messaging apps and technology, are a reflection of humanity,” Adam Mosseri repeated. “We communicated offline, and all of a sudden, now we’re also communicating online. Because we’re communicating online, we can see some of the ugly things we missed before. Some of the great and wonderful things, too.”

This “mirror of society” statement is being criticized for being intentionally uncomplicated. Because the ability to shape, not merely reflect, people’s preferences and behavior is also how Facebook makes money. Therefore, despite Facebook’s recurring statements, it is accused of not reflecting but increasing the bad and ugly.

Amplify the bad

“These platforms aren’t simply pointing out the existence of these dark corners of humanity,” John Paczkowski from BuzzFeed News, told me. “They are amplifying them and broadcasting them. That is different.”

After an accumulation of deadly events, such as the Christchurch shooting, Kara Swisher wrote about amplified hate and “murderous intent that leaps off the screen and into real life.” She argued that “While this kind of hate has indeed littered the annals of human history since its beginnings, technology has amplified it in a way that has been truly destructive.”

It is believed that bad behavior (e.g., disinformation) is induced by the way that tech platforms are designed to maximize engagement. Thus, Facebook’s victim-centric approach refuses to acknowledge that perhaps bad actors don’t misuse its platform but rather use it as intended (“machine for virality”).

Ev Williams, the co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, said he now believes that he had failed to appreciate the risks of putting such powerful tools in users’ hands with minimal oversight. “One of the things we’ve seen in the past few years is that technology doesn’t just accelerate and amplify human behavior,” he wrote. “It creates feedback loops that can fundamentally change the nature of how people interact and societies move (in ways that probably none of us predicted).”

So, things had turned toxic in ways that tech founders didn’t predict. Should they have foreseen them? According to Mark Zuckerberg, an era of tech optimism led to unintended consequences. “For the first decade, we really focused on all the good that connecting people brings … But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough,” he said After the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He admitted they didn’t think through “how people could use these tools to do harm as well.” Several years after the Techlash coverage began, there’s a consensus that they needed to “do more” to purposefully deny the ability to abuse them.

One of the reasons it was (and still is) a challenging task is their scale. According to this theme, the growth-at-all-cost “blinded” them, and they turned so big to be successfully managed at all. Due to their bigness, they are always in a game of cat-and-mouse with bad actors. “When you have hundreds of millions of users, it is impossible to keep track of all the ways they are using and abusing your systems,” Casey Newton, from the Platformer newsletter, explained in an interview. “They are always playing catch-up with their own messes.”

Due to the unprecedented scale at which Facebook operates, it is dependent on algorithms. Then, it claims that any perceived errors result from “algorithms that need tweaking” or “artificial intelligence that needs more training data.” But is it just an automation issue? It depends on who you ask.

The algorithms’ fault vs. the people who build them or use them

Critics say that machines are only as good as the rules built into them. “Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all regularly shifted the blame to algorithms, but companies write the algorithms, making them responsible for what they churn out.”

But platforms tend to avoid this responsibility. When ProPublica revealed that Facebook’s algorithms allowed advertisers to target users interested in “How to burn Jews” or “History of why Jews ruin the world,” Facebook’s response was: The anti-Semitic categories were created by an algorithm rather than by people.

At the same time, Facebook‘s Nick Clegg argued that human agency should not be removed from the equation. In a post titled “You and the Algorithm: It takes two to Tango,” he criticized the dystopian depictions of their algorithms, in which “people are portrayed as powerless victims, robbed of their free will.” As if “Humans have become the playthings of manipulative algorithmic systems.”

“Consider, for example, the presence of bad and polarizing content on private messaging apps - iMessage, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp - used by billions of people around the world. None of those apps deploy content or ranking algorithms. It’s just humans talking to humans without any machine getting in the way,” Clegg wrote. “In many respects, it would be easier to blame everything on algorithms, but there are deeper and more complex societal forces at play. We need to look at ourselves in the mirror and not wrap ourselves in the false comfort that we have simply been manipulated by machines all along.”

Fixing the machine vs. the underlying societal problems

Nonetheless, there are various attempts to fix the “broken machine,” and some potential fixes are discussed more often. One of the loudest calls is for tougher regulation – legislation should be passed to implement reforms. Yet, many remain pessimistic about the prospects for policy rules and oversight because regulators tend not to keep pace with tech developments. Also, there’s no silver-bullet solution, and most of the recent proposals are overly simplistic.

“Fixing Silicon Valley’s problems requires a scalpel, not an axe,” said Dylan Byers. However, tech platforms are faced with a new ecosystem of opposition, including Democrats and Republicans, antitrust theorists, privacy advocates, and European regulators. They all carry axes.

For instance, there are many new proposals to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But, as Casey Newton noted, “it won’t fix our politics, or our broken media, or our online discourse, and it’s disingenuous for politicians to suggest that it would.”

When self-regulation is proposed, there is an inherent commercial conflict since platforms are in the business of making money for their shareholders. Facebook only acted after problems escalated and caused real damage. For example, only after the mob violence in India (another problem that existed before WhatsApp, and may have been amplified by the app) the company instituted rules to limit WhatsApp’s ‘virality.’” Other algorithms have been altered in order to eliminate conspiracy theories and their groups from being highly recommended.

Restoring more human control requires different remedies: from decentralization projects, which seek to shift the ownership of personal data away from Big Tech and back toward users, to media literacy, which seek to formally educate people of all ages about the way tech systems function, as well as encourage appropriate, healthy uses.

The proposed solutions could certainly be helpful, and they all should be pursued. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to be adequate. We will probably have an easier time fixing algorithms, or the design of our technology than we will have fixing society, and humanity has to deal with humanity’s problems.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick recently addressed the underlying societal problems that need fixing. “What we see - what Facebook and other social media have exposed – is often the consequences of huge societal failings.” He mentioned various problems with education, social safety nets, healthcare (especially mental healthcare), income inequality and corruption. Masnick concluded we should be trying to come up with better solutions for those issues rather than “insisting that Facebook can make it all go away if only they had a better algorithm or better employees.”

We saw that with COVID-19 disinformation. After President Joe Biden blamed Facebook for “killing people,” and Facebook responded by saying they are “helping save lives,” I argued that this dichotomous debate sucks. Charlie Warzel called it (on his Galaxy Brian newsletter) “an unproductive, false binary of a conversation,” and he is absolutely right. Complex issues deserve far more nuance.

I can’t think of a more complex issue than tech platforms’ impact on society, in general, and Facebook’s impact in particular. However, we seem to be stuck between the storylines discussed above, of “amplifying the good vs. the bad.” It is as if you can only think favorably or negatively about “the machine,” and you must pick a side and adhere to its intensified narrative.

Keeping to a single narrative can escalate rhetoric and create an insufficient discussion, as evidenced by a recent Mother Jones article. The “Why Facebook won’t stop pushing propaganda” piece describes how a woman tried to become Montevallo’s first black mayor and lost. Montevallo is a very small town in Alabama (7,000 people), whose population is two-thirds white. Her race loss was blamed on Facebook: The rampart of misinformation and rumors about her affected the voting.

While we can’t know what got people to vote one way or another, we should consider that racism was prevalent in places like Alabama for a long time. Facebook was the candidate's primary tool for her campaign, highlighting the good things about her historic nomination. Then, racism was amplified in Facebook’s local groups. In the article, the fault was centered on the algorithm amplification, on Facebook's “amplification of the bad.” Facebook’s argument that it only “reflects the ugly” does not hold true here if it makes it more robust. Yet, the root cause in this case remains the same, racism. Facebook “doing better” and amending its algorithms will not be enough unless we also address the source of the problem. WE can and should “do better,” as well.

Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt is the author of The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication

Filed Under: algorithms, amplification, mark zuckerberg, society
Companies: facebook

Basecamp Bans Politics, An Act That Itself Is Political

from the you're-not-actually-helping dept

On Monday, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried came out with a blog post announcing not only a cutback in employee benefits, but that it would be banning social and political conversations on the company's platforms as well:

"These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It's not healthy, it hasn't served us well. And we're done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore."

In an accompanying post, CTO David Heinemeier Hansson added a little more context:

"There are many places to be involved, exposed, and engaged in those conversations. Basecamp shouldn't be one of those places. Basecamp should be a place where employees can come to work with colleagues of all backgrounds and political convictions without having to deal with heavy political or societal debates unconnected to that work."

While the executives' public-facing posts make it sound like the company (and all of its 60-odd employees) was somehow awash with uncontrollable off-topic partisan division, insiders are telling a different story. According to employees, the saga actually started when employees began to balk at a running, 10-year old list of customer names being consistently shared among customer service reps because some of the names "sounded funny." As a cultural reckoning over race, speech and corporate responsibility grew, employees wanted to apparently have candid conversations about mocking folks on the list:

Some of the names on the list were laughed at for harmless reasons. But given some of the names on the lists were of Asian and African decent, some employees felt uncomfortable. So in other words, the "ban on politics" was really a ban on having basic internal conversations about the company's own juvenile behavior and whether Basecamp could do better as a company.

It should be obvious that it's unrealistic to believe that in an era of daily police brutality, racist violence, mass shootings, a plague (and idiotic politicization of said plague), rampant corruption, and life-threatening climate change triggered events, that "don't talk about reality on your work accounts" is a serious and effective adult position you can take. Especially in an era where governments are seemingly incapable of meeting the needs of their people, and companies are often foisted into political leadership roles (whether they like it or not).

The other problem, of course, is that the assumption that politics and work are isolated, separate entities is just kind of naive:

The founders of Basecamp assume that conversations about politics and society are unrelated to work. It’s a false assumption. Politics and societal issues shape the world of work in myriad ways, including both the products that Basecamp builds and the experiences that people have while working there. We know, for example, that people’s racial and gendered biases get built into algorithms; that programming terms can reflect racist histories; that conversations about transgender and LGBTQ rights can apply to something as concrete as company policy surrounding pronouns; and that the #MeToo movement prompted a much-needed conversation about how sexism and sexual harassment are rampant in many workplaces."

The other, more notable problem is that banning political conversations is itself a political act, something noted by journalist Will Oremus:

Someone who has a lot of power (CEOs making significant cash) telling others with less power and wealth to "not talk about politics" is itself an act of politics. It's also an act of wishful thinking that protects and defends the status quo, whether the folks making the restrictions understand that or not. It's an act that prioritizes the comfort of those who think politics is a gross distraction. Folks who don't understand "politics" can often mean "I'd simply like to not be murdered for being black" or "I'd simply like to have clean drinking water" and that muzzling those worries at work is an additional kick to the groin.

If the status quo is a broken system that largely benefits wealthy white executives, then of course said executives would just prefer to see politics as this superfluous annoyance that should be muzzled and locked in the basement. But it's a foolish distinction that's not only not going to work, it's only going to net you bad PR for not understanding how the world works.

Filed Under: culture, jason fried, politics, society, work
Companies: basecamp

Why The Problems With Police And Social Media Both Are Symptoms Of The Same Disease: A Failure Of Society To Actually Help Those In Need

from the a-link dept

I've written in the past, many times, about how so many people keep wanting to blame social media companies, or intermediary liability laws, for what are only a manifestation of larger societal issues. Social media is only serving to make evident what was previously hidden. A few weeks ago, we quoted UK tech policy expert Heather Burns noting that intermediary liability laws were being expected to pick up the slack for a wide variety of other failures regarding mental health care, social safety nets, criminal and civil justice issues and more. Basically, a whole bunch of government failures were leading to problems in society, which were then being seen online. And rather than trying to fix the underlying causes of those, people were... blaming the internet. Burns later came on our podcast and we had a great detailed discussion about this issue.

A few days later, I heard a fascinating interview on NPR's Fresh Air. The interview was with Rosa Brooks, a law professor and human rights activist, who joined the Washington DC police force as a reserve officer for a period of four years (for most of the Trump administration). The interview is really quite fascinating on a variety of levels, but one thing stood out to me -- that actually connects back to the point that Burns raised about how we're expecting the internet and intermediary liability laws to fill in for all the massive failures of society. To some extent, Brooks made the same point about the police: we've undermined so many other social safety nets, that we now expect the police to fill in for just about everything else.

This isn't a new idea, of course. Tim Cushing has covered this point over and over again right here on Techdirt, including just recently, in writing about Denver's test to switch to sending out mental health professionals rather than police on distress calls that did not appear to involve criminal behavior, and how it had been a huge success. For many years, Tim has posted other similar stories, where it's just so dumb to send police to deal with a societal failing -- often in the mental health arena, but elsewhere as well.

In the Brooks interview, she notes how silly it is to have armed cops handling traffic stops. So many needless police shootings involve traffic stops where the cops overreact and shoot someone they stopped for some minor infraction. We could easily separate out the roles, and make traffic enforcement done entirely differently, by traffic enforcers who are not police with guns, but have a more administrative role.

And when you combine all of this, you realize that both of these threads really are about the same thing, from different angles. Society has failed to deal with mental health. It has failed to deal with extreme poverty. It has failed to deal with criminal justice and civil justice reform. And those are all creating messes. But rather than expect the government and public policy to actually clean up the messes -- we're dumping them on social media companies... and the police. And both are leading to disastrous outcomes.

Filed Under: mental health, police, safety nets, social media, society

The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

from the free,-libre,-open dept

One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman's GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption -- things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That's what Ecuador's FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. "FLOK" is derived from "free", "libre" and "open knowledge"; here's how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project:

The FLOK Society bills its mission as "designing a world for the commons." The research project will focus on many interrelated themes, including open education; open innovation and science; "arts and meaning-making activities"; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining. The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualize the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.

There is a detailed research plan, "Transitioning to a Commons-Based Society", and numerous texts providing more detailed information. But probably the best introduction to FLOK Society and its ideas is an interview with the project's research leader, Michel Bauwens, conducted by Richard Poynder, best known for his unmatched profiles of key figures in the world of open access. Bauwens describes the background to the FLOK Society project as follows:

The legitimacy and logic of the project comes from the National Plan of Ecuador, which is centred around the concept of Good Living (Buen Vivir), which is a non-reductionist, non-exclusive material way to look at the economy and social life, inspired by the traditional values of the indigenous people of the Andes. The aim of FLOK is to add "Good Knowledge" as an enabler and facilitator of the good life.

That sounds inspirational, but how will it work in practice? In particular, how will those participating in the "Good Life" earn a living through this "Good Knowledge"? Bauwens explains:

Think of the core model of our economy as the Linux economy writ large, but one in which the enterprises are actually in the hands of the value creators themselves. Imagine this micro-economic model on the macro scale of a whole society. Civil society becomes a series of commonses with citizens as contributors; the shareholding market becomes an ethical stakeholder marketplace; and the state becomes a partner state, which "enables and empowers social production" through the communication of public services and public-commons partnerships.

Central to the success of Linux has been the adoption of the GNU General Public License, which allowed code to be shared widely but in a way that prevented the software commons being enclosed by companies taking and using that code without contributing back. Building on the GNU GPL's ideas, Bauwens and his team have drawn up a new license, tailored to the needs of the FLOK Society project and the people of Ecuador:

traditional communities have suffered from systematic biopiracy over the last few decades, with western scientists studying their botanical knowledge, extracting patentable scientific results from it, and then commercialising it in the West.

So fully shareable licenses like the GPL would keep the knowledge in a commons, but would still allow full commercialisation without material benefits flowing back to Ecuador. So what we are proposing is a discussion about a new type of licensing, which we call Commons-Based Reciprocity Licensing. This idea was first pioneered with the Peer Production License as conceived by Dmytri Kleiner.

Such licences would be designed for a particular usage, say biodiversity research in a series of traditional communities. It allows for free sharing non-commercially, commercial use by not-for-profit entities, and even caters for for-profit entities who contribute back. Importantly, it creates a frontier for for-profits who do not contribute back, and asks them to pay.

Although the license and FLOK Society are very consciously geared to the needs of the Ecuadorean nation that has sponsored them, the long-term goal is much more ambitious, and has at its heart ideas that have often been discussed here on Techdirt:

To work for a sustainable society and economy is absolutely crucial for the future of humanity, and while we respect the freedoms of people to engage in market dynamics for the allocation of rival goods, we cannot afford a system of infinite growth and scarcity engineering, which is what capitalism is.

In other words, today, we consider nature infinite and we believe that infinite resources should be made scarce in order to protect monopolistic players; tomorrow, we need to consider nature as a finite resource, and we should respect the abundance of nature and the human spirit.

Bauwens himself admits that FLOK Society is unlikely to transform an entire nation overnight, or even in the foreseeable future, but sees it as a crucially-important step towards that larger goal of global change:

the publication and the dialogue about the plan itself, and some concrete actions, legislative frameworks, and pilot projects, are the best we can hope for. What this will do is give real legitimacy to our approach and move the commons transition to the geo-political stage. Can we hope for more?

Personally, I believe that even if only 20% of our proposals are retained for action, I think we can consider it a relative success. This is the very first time such an even partial transition will have happened at the scale of the nation and, as I see it, it gives legitimacy to a whole new set of ideas about societal transition.

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Filed Under: abundance, commons, culture, david bollier, ecuador, flok, flok society, free, knowledge, libre, open knowledge, sharing, society

Newspaper Boss Says Newspapers Need More Money... Because New Media Steals & May 'Destroy Civil Society'

from the luddite-much? dept

Via Mathew Ingram, we learn of Alan Crosbie, the chair of Thomas Crosbie Holdings, a large Irish media conglomerate, which apparently believes all of this online claptrap could be on its way to destroying civil society -- which is apparently why we need to fund more newspapers. Or something. Honestly, the guy barely seems to be making any sense at all. He says that old media property likes newspapers, radio and television are important and should get funded because they "produce good information." But that new media "sometimes give credibility to news that maybe should not have credibility."

It would appear that Crosbie is, well, confusing the medium for the message. There are plenty of newspapers, radio and television news efforts that equally (if not more so) give credibility to news that should not have credibility. That, alone, has nothing to do with the medium in question. And yet, to Crosbie, new media could be the end of civil society:

There is a tsunami of information coming from new media, some of which has the "capacity to destroy civil society and cause unimaginable suffering."

Again, what does this have to do with new media vs. old media? The details come out later. Apparently, he just thinks that new media "steals" from old media, and thus old media can't afford to produce their good news any more:

"The fact is that, to generate good information carries a cost. It requires money. Unless you steal it like most new media companies do.

"And, if you bring that argument to its logical conclusion all you'll get on their news sites is a blank screen, because they eventually will have no one left to steal from."

We've been hearing these arguments for years, and yet, somehow, it seems like more news than ever before is being produced. And rather than "stealing" from old media, plenty of new media sources are adding value to those sources (value that the old media folks could provide if they just stopped blaming new media). Either way, comments like these are the sort of comments that should make any board of directors immediately question what out of touch luddite they have in charge of their media properties...

Filed Under: alan crosbie, new media, newspapers, society

Updated Research Showing, Yet Again, That Weaker Copyright Has Benefited Culture And Society

from the good-news dept

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a draft version of a paper from Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas concerning the impact of weaker copyright enforcement on society. It appears that they've now updated that paper and, as a whole bunch of you have been submitting, it's finally getting some press attention. The full paper is embedded below, and is quite similar to the draft we discussed last year, but since so many people seem unfamiliar with it, we thought it was worth reposting the whole thing, and some key points from it: The paper looks at the overall market, rather than just the narrow market for direct sales of content, and finds, as we've been pointing out for years, that the increased ability to make, share, promote and distribute content hasn't hurt the content market at all. In fact, the opposite has happened:

Data on the supply of new works are consistent with our argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers. The publication of new books rose by 66% over the 2002-2007 period. Since 2000, the annual release of new music albums has more than doubled, and worldwide feature film production is up by more than 30% since 2003. At the same time, empirical research in file sharing documents that consumer welfare increased substantially due to the new technology.

... While file sharing disrupted some traditional business models in the creative industries, foremost in music, in our reading of the evidence there is little to suggest that the new technology has discouraged artistic production. Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.

One of the key points that the paper makes is that many people have difficulty (especially beforehand) in recognizing whether certain products are substitutes or complements. If products substitute for others (i.e., downloads take away from sales), then a market can be harmed. However, if the products are actually complements (i.e., more content boosts other parts of the market), then a market can actually be helped. The detailed research that Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf go through clearly shows (pretty unequivocally) that file sharing is a complementary good that has massively boosted many different ancillary markets, and created a fantastic consumer surplus without actually decreasing output. In fact, quite to the contrary, as noted above, creative output has risen at a dramatic pace. And, when you actually look at the overall market, you see that the actual spend on these markets is increasing, not decreasing:

The role of complements makes it necessary to adopt a broad view of markets when considering the impact of file sharing on the creative industries. Unfortunately, the popular press -- and a good number of policy experts -- often evaluate file sharing looking at a single product market. Analyzing trends in CD sales, for example, they conclude that piracy has wrecked havoc on the music business. This view confuses value creation and value capture. Record companies may find it more difficult to profitably sell CDs, but the broader industry is in a far better position. In fact, it is easy to make an argument that the business has grown considerably. Figure 7 shows spending on CDs, concerts and iPods. The decline in music sales -- they fell by 15% from 1997 to 2007 -- is the focus of much discussion. However, adding in concerts alone shows the industry has grown by 5% over this period. If we also consider the sale of iPods as a revenue stream, the industry is now 66% larger than in 1997.

The report also takes on the policy questions, and notes (as we have so many times) that too much of the policy debate is on how to help a particular industry, which is not what copyright is intended to do at all:

Copyright exists to encourage innovation and the creation of new works; in other words to promote social welfare. The question to ask is thus whether the new technology has undermined the incentives to create, market, and distribute entertainment. Sales displacement is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for harm to occur. We also need to know whether income from complementary products offset the decline in income from copyrighted works. And even if income fell, welfare may not suffer if artists do not respond to weaker monetary incentives.

From there, the report notes evidence that the income from complementary products has, in fact, increased while at the same time pointing out that artistic output is clearly not suffering. While the report notes that further study on these issues is definitely required, it's amazing that so few people are talking about this. I've brought it up to both the USTR and the IP Enforcement Coordinator, and neither seems inclined to care. Both seem wholly focused on responding to the claims of industry lobbyists that they are being harmed. But industry players failing to react is not the same thing as actual societal harm, and -- as we have pointed out repeatedly -- the entire point of copyright law is supposed to be about benefiting society as a whole.

Filed Under: benefits, copyright, felix oberholzer-gee, koleman strumpf, society

Canadian Law Professors Insist Banning The Sale Of Word Is Good For Society & Innovation

from the really,-now? dept

Rob Hyndman points us to two Canadian law professors, Michael Trebilcock and Edward Iacobucci, insisting that patents are "the mother of invention" in an article that mostly spends its time trying to defend the silly injunction (already put on hold) barring Microsoft from selling Word or Office, because it supposedly violates a patent, 5,787,449, on XML editing of a word processed document. There are all sorts of problems with the column, kicking off with Hyndman's question as to how law professors should be considered experts on innovation...

But, let's dig further into the details.

Patents are essential to the modern system of innovation. Once produced, information can be transmitted at zero cost. In the absence of patent protection, would-be inventors become vulnerable to competition that would drive the value of their discovery to zero, leaving them with no compensation for the costs of producing that information in the first place.

This is the usual story. And it sounds good. But there's no factual evidence to support it. That's because it ignores reality. Yes, information can be transmitted at zero cost, but that does not mean that implementation is assured, or that the market stands still. Besides, I'm curious as to the claim "vulnerable to competition," as if competition is a bad thing. Most people recognize that competition drives innovation -- and yet, these law professors are suggesting the exact opposite. That you need less competition to drive innovation.

Furthermore, they are wrong in claiming that in the absence of patent protection "the value of their discovery" is driven to "zero, leaving them with no compensation." They say this as if the compensation is for the idea, rather than the implementation. That is simply wrong. No one compensates you directly for an idea. If you have a good idea, you need to bring a product to market and sell it. If someone else copies that idea, you still have a large first mover advantage and you understand the market better. On top of that, you should be ahead of the curve in terms of improving on the concept for the next iteration. That's competition. It doesn't mean the value of the idea is zero or that there's no compensation. Claiming such makes no sense.

Again, beyond common sense, the historical evidence suggests that these law professors are simply wrong. Countries with no or weak patent protection have seen tremendous innovation over time. And it's because it's competition that's the mother of innovation, not a lack of competition. For well over two hundred years, economists have recognized that monopolies that remove competition are bad for innovation. These lawyers are insisting that the opposite is true, and present no proof.

Microsoft objects that the injunction ordered by the trial judge goes too far. (It has been put on hold until after the appeal, which is to begin Wednesday.) But injunctions are almost always ordered to prevent continuing infringement, and for good reason. To simply order money damages for future infringement would be to force i4i to license out its technology at a court-imposed price.

This is misleading. While it is true that in the past injunctions were the norm, since the US Supreme Court's MercExchange ruling more than three years ago, courts recognize that injunctions often do not make sense. The reason they don't make sense is because they require stopping the sale of an entire product (or lines of products) due to a single infringing feature. That makes no sense, and the courts have recognized this. I'm not sure why these law professors do not.

Just as there are good reasons not to compel citizens to sell or rent out their homes at prices set by judges, there are very good reasons in general to avoid compulsory licensing of intellectual property. Court determinations of the value of intellectual property are necessarily somewhat conjectural, yet damages awards require courts to act, in effect, as price regulators. By contrast, injunctions do not prevent a licensing deal from being done, but rather cede to the owner of the property the authority to set a price. Just as giving homeowners the right to decide whether to sell or rent out their houses does not destroy the housing market, in terrorem arguments about the death of Word under this injunction are without merit.

Again, this is quite misleading. It implies that an injunction leads to the natural market setting the price for licensing, but nothing could be further from the truth. If someone is pointing a gun at your head and negotiating over how much you have to pay to stay alive, that's not exactly a fair and open economic transaction that both parties enter into under their own free will. Claiming that this is somehow a more accurate market is pure folly.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has vociferously argued that despite the trial judge's careful vetting of the evidence, i4i did not establish at trial a firm basis for its damages claim for past infringement. This claim about the speculative nature of past damages sits uncomfortably with Microsoft's opposition to injunctions. Given the complexity of measuring supply and demand for a unique product, it must be true that there is some empirical uncertainty about the precise level of past damages. But if patents are to have value, this uncertainty is unavoidable: A damages award is the only available remedy for infringement that has already taken place.

Again, I have to admit confusion over these claims, which seem to have no basis in reality. It is not "the patent" that has value. It is the product. For sale in the market. And it's the consumer who values it. The fact is that many more people seemed to value a complete package of Microsoft Word. They were not buying it because of i4i's silly and questionable patent. They were buying it because Microsoft Word is a useful product. The difference in sales for Microsoft Word if it had not included XML editing would likely be negligible at best. There is no evidence of damages. If i4i and these lawyers are claiming that the "damages" are i4i's inability to sell its own product, again, that is difficult to square with reality. Competition happens all the time, and it's as good thing. i4i's inability to come up with a product or marketing plan that people wanted is its problem, not Microsoft's.

Also, the lawyers, in claiming that there was "careful vetting of the evidence," conveniently leave out that this was done in East Texas, which has a long history of vetting in favor of patent holders. Don't ask me, ask the bull that TiVo bought.

Protecting i4i's patent protects incentives to invent and the competitive process. In this case, the trial judge wisely offered such protection, while recognizing the court's own institutional limitations, by ordering damages for past infringement and injunctions going forward. While the decision was not a good one for Microsoft, it was clearly in the best interests of society.

Really? So, completely banning the sale of an entire office suite offering because one tiny, rarely used, feature might infringe on some random other company's products is "in the best interests of society"? That seems wholly without support. That would mean making every user of Microsoft's office suite suffer, for the benefit of a small 30 person company that developed a rather obvious concept. How is that possibly in the best interests of society?

Filed Under: canada, edward iacobucci, injunctions, innovation, michael trebilcock, patents, society
Companies: i4i, microsoft