Hey Tom Wheeler: Stick To Net Neutrality, Because Your Understanding Of Section 230 Is... Not Right

from the the-return-of-dingo dept

Remember back when former FCC chair Tom Wheeler surprised us all and turned out not to be a dingo. That was cool. But now that he's out of government and working at the Brookings Institution, he's perhaps not a dingo, but he does seem very, very confused.

He's written a very strange piece entitled Technology, tribalism, and truth, which sounds like it should be interesting, but turns out to be quite a head-scratcher. It starts out talking about the vote counting fiasco at the Iowa caucus caused by faulty technology, and how it could "sow seeds of doubt about the functioning of democracy itself." As we wrote in our piece about it -- that's not exactly a reasonable lesson to take from the fact that using software meant that votes were counted later than people had hoped. There are plenty of other concerns about the functioning of democracy itself that can come out of the Iowa caucus process -- but those have little to do with the faulty software.

But Wheeler then uses that one faulty app, that simply delayed vote counts, as a weird springboard to attack social media:

Social media undermines what the Founding Fathers were focusing on when they wrote “We the People” and established the motto “E Pluribus Unum” (out of many, one). The concept of “We” and the formation of a “Unum” is essential for democracy to work. Humans are inherently tribal. Democracy requires us to overcome that tribalism—to find our Unum—in the pursuit of a greater good. In contrast, the business plans of the dominant digital companies are built on dividing us into tribes in order to sell targeted access to each tribe.

I know that many people have a faith-based belief that social media has divided us into tribes, but there's little empirical evidence to back that up. Indeed, social media has connected more people to other "tribes" and other people than any other system in history. And there's little in the "business plans" of social media that is helped by "dividing us into tribes." Indeed, I think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others would be a ton happier if their platforms weren't used for tribal behavior, and if they could stop having to respond to news reports claiming as such.

And then, apparently it's all Section 230's fault, again, for unclear reasons:

Not only does the business plan of the internet enable such attacks, but also the lack of curation allows lies to run rampant. In 1996 Congress exempted digital services from liability for what they distribute. It was a time when the internet was defined by screeching modems, services such as AOL and CompuServe, and a technology full of promise. A quarter of a century later that exemption—known as Section 230—has become the pathway for liars, both foreign and domestic. Instead of protecting the open flow of a rich debate, this law has protected the secret sorting and delivery of untruths and half-truths without accountability.

This paragraph is so full of wrong it's embarrassing. First of all, just a paragraph earlier in the piece, Wheeler was attacking curation, in that it allowed Russians to influence an election -- and then in the very next paragraph he argues that Section 230 (the 1996 act of Congress he's discussing), there's a "lack of curation." Uh, which is it? Also, there is no lack of curation. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, they all curate. They curate a ton. That's why lots of people are angry at them. Others are angry that they curate too much. But to argue they don't curate... is... just... wrong. Very, very, wrong.

And, by the end of the paragraph, he's back to admitting that they do curate. They just don't curate the way he wants them to. I'm curious as to how he thinks 230 has anything to do with that? If his complaint is the "secret" part of the sorting -- well, that's not a 230 issue at all. If his complaint is with the delivery of untruths and half-truths... well, then his complaint is with the 1st Amendment. If his complaint is with the curation part itself, then he's still confused because he doesn't seem to understand how it works at any social media platform.

And then... it gets even more bizarre. He brings up the Fairness Doctrine -- which the FCC used to enforce in making broadcast TV stations have to show "both sides" of various stories. Republicans hated it and fought hard against it. Many Republicans also falsely claimed that net neutrality was a "fairness doctrine for the internet" (it was not). Ironically, many of those Republicans (Hi Ted Cruz!) are now supporting what is a special fairness doctrine for the internet, designed to stop internet platforms from banning Nazis, who happen to support their campaigns.

But, Wheeler brings up the Fairness Doctrine... to explain why Rush Limbaugh got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as a lead in to why the internet is bad... and I've read this multiple times and still can't figure out what he's trying to say.

Congress acted to assure that conflicting ideas had access to the airwaves. After seeing how Hitler manipulated the German public using the media, and with the rising fear of Communism, in 1949 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters to require the airing of all sides of a controversial issue.

The Fairness Doctrine was repealed by the Reagan FCC in 1987. The result was conservative talk radio. That Rush Limbaugh could stand and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union is testimony to the effect of eliminating the requirement for radio stations to present all sides of an issue.

Sure, the end of the Fairness Doctrine allowed for one-sided radio and TV. We know that. But what's that got to do with the internet?

But you can turn the dial if you don’t want to listen to Rush. There is less choice with social media. What economists call “network effects” mean everyone wants to be on the social media platform everyone else is on. The result is a captive audience to be secretly sorted and served by software.

What? No, Tom, no. That's not how any of this works. There is plenty of choice in social media. You can choose who you follow. You can choose who to block and who not to follow. You can choose not to use certain platforms. You have tons of choice. It does not force things upon you like you claim. Has Tom Wheeler ever actually used social media?

What should replace Section 230? Our democracy, after all is built on strong First Amendment protections. However, laws require advertisers to be truthful in their claims, and for broadcasters to follow behavioral standards. Newspapers can be held liable for what they publish—but what about the newspaper’s digital equivalent? Because a digital company distributes information on the internet, Section 230 sets it free of basic responsibilities.

Your complaint is with the First Amendment, not 230, Tom. Even if Section 230 sets them "free of basic responsibilities," that ignores just how much responsibility each and every internet platform has taken. And that's for two reasons. First, Section 230 does allow them to moderate content and to experiment with the best way how. That's important. But, more important, is that every platform moderates because of public pressure to do so. Every platform has hired thousands upon thousands of moderators, and invested in all sorts of technology, because they know if they don't, their platforms become filled with nonsense and spam and abuse and harassment.

The complaint that Tom has about moderation is that it doesn't moderate content the way they want them to moderate. But that's not a 230 issue. That's a "you're not the ones making the moderation decisions" problem.

Unfortunately, Wheeler's piece is all too similar to many of the other people, ignorant of how content moderation actually works, think: they think that mistakes they find out about in moderation are due to some malicious reason -- either a failure to moderate, or a willingness not to moderate for economic reasons. But that's not what's happening. All these platforms spend a ton on moderation, and mistakes are still made because mistakes are inevitable. That's not the fault of Section 230. And a fairness doctrine doesn't help.

The solution remains the same as Wheeler thought it was for radio: just turn the damn dial. Don't follow people who spew misinformation. Don't like their posts and don't share them. Or debunk them, like I'm doing with all of the misinformation in Wheeler's own post.

Truth cannot be allowed to become a casualty of technology. The search for democratic Unum cannot be allowed to become a casualty of technology. It is no wonder cynicism abounds when untruth and tribalism are the result of our principal communications tool. Historically, society has stepped up to the challenges of new technology. Now is our historic moment.

The untruth and tribalism are your post, Tom. That's the problem.

Filed Under: content moderation, disinformation, section 230, tom wheeler, tribalism

The View From Somewhere: The Press Needs To Be Anti-Partisan, Not Bi-Partisan

from the read-this dept

For somewhere close to a decade we've talked about journalism professor Jay Rosen's important concept of "the view from nowhere." This is the "professional" stance that many media operations (mainly big time newspapers) take in reporting the news, in which they stupidly refuse to actually take a stand on truth and instead tend to report the news in a "he said/she said" fashion, never bothering to tell you which one is actually true. Indeed, we've long argued that if journalists want to actually be relevant, they need to have a point of view, and that point of view should be about what is true, not granting "equal weight" to both sides of a story that doesn't deserve it. Taking the side of truth and pointing out lies for what they are is not bias, it's real journalism.

If you want a recent example of the moronic "view from nowhere," which is so frequently practiced by the NY Times, entitled Trump Now Says He Accepts U.S. Intelligence Reports on Russian Election Meddling. There's nothing factually incorrect there, but it's... complete bullshit in terms of what is actually happening. Yes, Trump says that, but an accurate report would explain why that's almost certainly a false statement from Trump given everything else he said about the situation during his press conference with Putin. Joshua Benton succinctly summarizes just a couple of the many, many problems with the NY Times "view from nowhere" approach:

The problem is again not that the Times description is inaccurate, but rather that it is meaningless if you understand the actual context -- with that context being that what Trump says this time clearly does not accurately portray the situation due to the many, many times he's said the opposite, or attempted to undermine the investigation, let alone the fact that he seems incapable of even comprehending that Russian meddling may be a separate issue from "there's no collusion!" But the NY Times insists that this is how it has to cover the President (even as the President likes to call the NY Times out as "fake news" pretty frequently), because it stupidly thinks that this "view from nowhere" helps them appear unbiased. But that's dumb. It doesn't make them appear unbiased. It makes them appear stupid and unwilling to do the job that reporters should be doing in helping to suss out the truth.

And "the truth" is not "just report the facts." The truth means putting the facts in context so that the news is actually meaningful. That means dropping "the view from nowhere" and picking up the view from somewhere. And that somewhere should be reality-based.

Reporter Dan Froomkin has a long and fascinating post at Medium that has gotten much less attention than it deserves on this subject, and I urge everyone to read it (especially if they're reporter). In it, Froomkin argues that the way past the "view from nowhere" is that newspapers (in particular, the LA Times) should take "the view from California":

So from California, the view is clear: Trump is a profoundly regressive force whose actions and statements are dangerous. And he’s being enabled. Congress has abdicated its role as a check to presidential power. The Supreme Court is no longer committed to protecting minority rights. The result: an irrational and unrestrained president threatens the future of our country as a pluralistic constitutional democracy.

A bureau that openly embraces this view as a baseline, and is unafraid to call out assaults on pluralism, for instance, would cover Trump very differently from more typical DC reporters, who censor themselves for fear of appearing to take sides.

It would operate almost like a foreign bureau. That means no undue deference to authority and no allegiance to stifling local conventions.

Some will -- incorrectly -- argue that he's suggesting they just take an "anti-Trump" stance, which would make them no better than various partisan news organizations that are either pro- or anti-Trump. But that's not what he's actually arguing if you read closely. He's arguing that it's time to take a reality-based approach. That's not a pro- or anti- any particular party or politician. It's just pro-reality.

And that takes us to what I think is the most important point in Froomkin's article: there are publications that take partisan viewpoints, and a bunch that claim to be "bi-partisan" or "non-partisan." Indeed, so much of the bad NY Times and Washington Post coverage we've seen tend to be them bending over backwards to try to appear "bi-partisan," which usually means bringing on some "conservative" opinion columnists to supposedly "balance out" their "liberal" reporters (though all of those labels are pretty silly). But that just leads to more nonsense for everyone. It's just reinforcing he-said/she-said. Instead, Froomkin says the good journalists today need to be anti-partisan:

I’m talking about being anti-partisan. Anyone coming to Washington who is not blinded by political ambition can see that both parties have failed and are corrupt and are out of step with most Americans.

That doesn’t mean they are similarly culpable. Other than sharing the Republican Party’s slavish devotion to money, the Democratic Party has an entirely different set of failings. Its leaders remain the same elitist career politicians who brought you Hillary Clinton and managed to lose to Trump. They are inconstant, hedging, observably insincere, and prone to seeing the least-popular political positions as pragmatic.

In spite of this, mainstream reporters continue to craft their articles to reflect the presumption that there are exactly two sides to each issue — one Democratic and one Republican — that they are facially equally valid, and that people with alternate views are extremists. This is what The Atlantic’s James Fallows and others have so aptly called “false equivalence.”

But in reality, the American common ground may actually lie outside the current Democratic-Republican axis, rather than at its middle, which opens up a world of interesting political-journalism avenues.

In short, stop covering everything as if it's a horse race, with two horses: one red, and one blue. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are deeply flawed institutions, in different ways and (perhaps) to different degrees. But the real problem is the stupidly partisan nature of basically everything. We've long noted here at Techdirt that we're not even remotely partisan. We try to avoid naming any politician's political party because as soon as we do it seems to drop the intelligence level of any conversation as people immediately jump in with nonsense claims about "well, obviously he'd do something dumb he's a [Democrat/Republican], they all believe in [pure anti-American nonsense]."

And yet, any time we criticize someone from either party, we're also then automatically lumped in (falsely) as being a clear supporter of the other party. It's this tribalistic nature of partisan politics that leads to an inability to actually tackle large issues. Being anti-partisan and focusing on actual truth, as Froomkin suggests, has to be the way forward for news organizations these days. Obviously, there will always be those who are clearly partisan on one side or the other, but the supposedly "bi-partisan" view from nowhere news organizations are doing everyone a disservice. In pretending to be unbiased and "just presenting facts," they're failing to present truth by failing to present actual context or any sense of reality.

Anyone and everyone working in journalism today should read Froomkin's article (which is much longer and goes into more detail). I don't necessarily agree with every point in there, but on the key point, I wholeheartedly agree. The press today needs to be anti-partisan and anti-tribal. It shouldn't be looking for point/counterpoint on tough issues. It should be ferreting out the truth.

Filed Under: anti-partisan, bi-partisan, donald trump, journalism, partisanship, the view from nowhere, the view from somewhere, tribalism, truth