Congressional Panel On Internet And Disinformation... Includes Many Who Spread Disinformation Online

from the because-of-course dept

We've pointed out a few times how silly all these Congressional panels on content moderation are, but the one happening today is particularly silly. One of the problems, of course, is that while everyone seems to be mad about Section 230, they seem to be mad about it for opposite reasons, with Republicans wanting the companies to moderate less, and Democrats wanting the companies to moderate more. That's only one of many reasons why today's hearing, like those in the past, are so pointless. They tend to bog down in silly "but what about this particular moderation decision" which will then be presented in a misleading or out of context fashion, allowing the elected official to grandstand about how they "held big tech's feet to the fire" or some such nonsense.

However, Cat Zakrzewski, over at the Washington Post has highlighted yet another reason why this particular "investigation" into disinformation online is so disingenuous: a bunch of the Republicans on the panel, exploring how these sites deal with mis- and disinformation -- are guilty of spreading disinformation themselves online.

A Washington Post analysis found that seven Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee who are scheduled to grill the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter about election misinformation on Thursday sent tweets that advanced baseless narratives of election fraud, or otherwise supported former president Donald Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the presidential election. They were among 15 of the 26 Republican members of the committee who voted to overturn President Biden’s election victory.

Three Republican members of the committee, Reps. Markwayne Mullin (Okla.), Billy Long (Mo.) and Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (Ga.), tweeted or retweeted posts with the phrase “Stop the Steal” in the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Stop the Steal was an online movement that researchers studying disinformation say led to the violence that overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Cool cool.

Actually, this highlights one of the many reasons why we should be concerned about all of these efforts to force these companies into a particular path for dealing with disinformation online. Because once we head down the regulatory route, we're going to reach a point in which the government is, in some form, determining what is okay and what is not okay online. And do we really want elected officials, who themselves were spreading disinformation and even voted to overturn the results of the last Presidential election, to be determining what is acceptable and what is not for social media companies to host?

As the article itself notes, rather than have a serious conversation about disinformation online and what to do about it, this is just going to be yet another culture war. Republicans are going to push demands to have these websites stop removing their own efforts at disinformation, and Democrats are going to push the websites to be more aggressive in removing information (often without concern for the consequences of such demands -- which often lead to the over-suppression of speech).

One thing I think we can be sure of is that Rep. Frank Pallone, who is heading the committee for today's hearing is being laughably naïve if he actually believes this:

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the Democrat who chairs the committee, said any member of Congress using social media to spread falsehoods about election fraud was “wrong,” but he remained optimistic that he could find bipartisan momentum with Republicans who don’t agree with that rhetoric.

“There’s many that came out and said after Jan. 6 that they regretted what happened and they don’t want to be part of it at all,” Pallone said in an interview. “You have to hope that there’s enough members on both sides of the aisle that see the need for some kind of legislative reform here because they don’t want social media to allow extremism and disinformation to spread in the real world and encourage that.”

Uh huh. The problem is that those who spread disinformation online don't think of it as disinformation. And they see any attempt to cut back on their ability to spread it to be (wrongly) "censorship." Just the fact that the two sides can't even agree on what is, and what is not, disinformation should give pause to anyone seeking "some kind of legislative reform" here. While the Democrats may be in power now, that may not last very long, and they should recognize that if it's the Republicans who get to define what is and what is not "disinformation" it may look very, very different than what the Democrats think.

Filed Under: congressional hearings, content moderation, disinformation, donald trump, election disinformation, house energy and commerce committee, republicans, section 230, stop the steal
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

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