Disproving The Nonsense About The FBI & Jan. 6th Would Be Easier If The FBI Didn't Have A History Of Entrapping People In Made Up Plots

from the you-guys-made-this-worse dept

There's a very, very dumb conspiracy theory making the rounds -- and I want to be very clear on this -- that has zero evidence to support it, that the FBI was actually behind the January 6th invasion of the Capitol. It was originally reported by a wacky extremist news organization that I won't even bother naming here, and then got a lot more attention when Fox News made it a story via Tucker Carlson's show. The underlying confusion is that a (former Trump admin official who was let go after attending a conference with white nationalists but then later appointed to a new job within the Trump White House) reporter completely misunderstood what "unindicted co-conspirator" means in various charging documents.

What it generally means are people the government has not yet charged, and who they don't want to name so they don't tip them off (or where they don't yet know who they are, or don't have enough evidence to charge, or for a variety of other reasons). What it absolutely never means, is an undercover FBI agent or informant. Those people are not ever described as unindicted co-conspirator. But the reporter somehow got it into his head that this meant they were FBI agents, and then went to town with a conspiracy theory blaming the FBI for the insurrection, claiming that it was designed to "frame the entire MAGA movement."

As noted, this is false, and there is no evidence to support this. At all. It's a fiction of imagination from someone who has no idea what he's talking about, and of course Tucker Carlson ran with it, because that's what Tucker Carlson does.

But... here's the thing: it would be a hell of a lot easier to debunk this nonsense if the FBI (especially since 9/11) didn't have a depressingly long history of... setting up fake terrorist plots in order to entrap people to get big headlines around an arrest of someone who never had any means to actually carry out the attack. We've covered examples of these kinds of FBI activities for years. We've written about examples of this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

No doubt, what the FBI does in those cases is disgusting and highly questionable. It often involves them searching out people who are either mentally troubled or really desperate, and then proposing they get involved in a completely fictional terrorist plot -- a plot that the individuals would have no possible chance of actually carrying out on their own. The undercover FBI agents (or the confidential informant working for the FBI) then proceed to do all the actual "planning" including buying any of the necessary materials and getting all the details in order. Then, after the planning has reached a certain point and the sucker is bought in on the plan, they're arrested, and the FBI claims it "stopped" a terrorist attack -- which usually gives the FBI lots of glowing press attention.

Of course, the reality is that there was no threat. There was no actual plot. There is never any ability to actually carry anything out. The weapons or bombs or whatever are all faked or never actually in existence. It's all a shadow play so the FBI can try to get some headlines and pretend they're doing something.

But that's clearly not what happened with January 6th. For one thing, the events of January 6th actually happened. The Capitol was actually invaded. Damage was actually done. If the FBI was planning it as per their usual homegrown plots, no actual attack would have happened. Also, if you look at the pattern of who the FBI has gone after with these plots... it's not really been the Trump supporting MAGA militia type.

Either way, though, people wouldn't have to be doing this big silly debunking of this kind of nonsense conspiracy theory if the FBI didn't actually have a track record of doing this kind of thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

So, you know, perhaps they should stop doing that.

Filed Under: conspiracy theory, doj, entrapment, fbi, january 6th, own plot, tucker carlson, undercover

Thanks To Crappy Cable Channel Bundles, Non-Watchers Hugely Subsidize Tucker Carlson And Fox News

from the fossilized-business-models dept

We've talked about the problem with bloated, expensive cable TV channel bundles for a long time. You might recall the push for "a la carte" TV channels (being able to buy cable TV channels individually) was even a pet project of the late John McCain, though his legislative efforts on that front never really went anywhere. And while the rise of streaming competition helped mitigate the problem somewhat, the tactic of forcing US cable TV consumers to buy massive bundles filled with channels they don't watch remains a very real annoyance.

The latest case in point: many folks are realizing that the attempt to drive advertisers away from white supremacy apologists like Tucker Carlson aren't really working, in part thanks to the traditional cable TV bundle. In short, because Fox News is included in most cable TV lineups, millions of Americans are throwing money at Fox News despite never watching the channel:

I spent much of February talking to as many media scholars as I could for a piece trying to find a solution for the Fox News disinformation problem. The reality is there are very few policy proposals that wouldn't run afoul of the First Amendment, especially with a rightward-lurching Supreme Court. One that might actually help work remains pushing actively to eliminate the bloated cable TV bundle:

"You’d kill those stations in a heartbeat if they didn’t get bundled in every cable package,” said Christopher Terry, assistant professor of media law at the University of Minnesota. “All of those outlets thrive in the delivery to the audience they get by being included in every package, but in an a la carte cable package, only a handful of the true believer crowd would be willing to pay extra for them."

“Imagine if they had to survive in an actual market-based scenario where the number of viewers they could have was limited by the people who would pay to have access to that specific content,” he added. “You’d cut them off at the knees and use their own rhetoric to do so while making cable companies more accountable to the local customer base."

Actually competing for attention, imagine that! Again, this was something that was supposed to be addressed by market forces via the streaming revolution, though many of the same failures in traditional cable simply wandered over to the streaming sector (not surprising since the same broadcasters and telecom giants dominated both arenas). And while streaming does provide greater choice, cable TV remains the dominant platform. As a result, Fox News still hauls in massive subsidies from a dated business model that involves tens of millions of Americans paying for a channel they never watch:

"Fox News makes $1.8 billion from the carriage fees it charges cable TV providers to include the channel in bloated, increasingly expensive cable TV bundles. But just 3 million of the nation’s 90 million cable TV subscribers actively watch the channel. In other words, 87 million Americans pay their cable company for and thus subsidize Fox News—despite rarely if ever actually watching the channel."

"According to a survey conducted late last year, about 14% of cable TV subscribers watch Fox News regularly. But every cable TV subscriber pays an average of $1.72 a month to receive Fox News. In contrast, 31% of cable TV subscribers regularly watch FX (owned by Disney) but the channel adds just $0.81 to an average cable bill.

Judd Legum recently crunched the numbers further, showing how a lot of Fox News' income comes utterly unearned, from people who may have zero interest in the racist tirades of a frozen TV dinner empire heir:

"According to a survey conducted late last year, about 14% of cable TV subscribers watch Fox News regularly. But every cable TV subscriber pays an average of $1.72 a month to receive Fox News. In contrast, 31% of cable TV subscribers regularly watch FX (owned by Disney) but the channel adds just $0.81 to an average cable bill.

This means, for every actual viewer, Fox News receives a $7.75 subsidy from people who never watch Fox News. This is a higher subsidy than other non-sports channels, like FX ($1.79), CNN ($3.18), and TBS ($2.79), receive. And none of those channels regularly spreads white nationalist talking points to millions of viewers."

But again, as John McCain showed, breaking this logjam is easier said than done. Maine, for example, recently tried to pass a law forcing cable giants to sell channels individually, but found itself quickly sued by Comcast, which claimed the law violated the company's free speech rights (Comcast's winning that battle so far). The cable and broadcast industry has lobbied relentlessly to ensure this shift to individual channels never happens, claiming that moving to an a la carte model would kill niche channels and raise consumer prices (both things that repeatedly happened anyway).

Granted this isn't just about not liking the channel or disagreeing with the channels politics. There's clear evidence, especially on the COVID front, that the bullshit pouring out of the Rupert Murdoch empire is actively harming human health:

"A media watchdog found over 250 cases of COVID-19 misinformation on Fox News in just one five-day period, and economists demonstrated that Fox News had a demonstrable impact on non-compliance with public health guidelines,” the lawmakers wrote."

If you can't rely on the wisdom of the courts, free market competition, or regulators to disrupt the Fox News disinformation parade, that leaves activists like Media Matters, which have increasingly been trying to target the problem with it's Unfox My Cable Box campaign. But even if we're to simply wait for the purely organic death of the traditional cable TV channel bundle at the hands of the streaming television and pissed consumers, it's not entirely clear, based on the popularity of many bigoted influencers, that dangerous dipshittery won't just find a new form to inhabit.

Bullshit is more profitable than truth under the engagement-driven, ad-based business models we're building, and that's simply a fact. Policies that change this reality won't be easy to come by. The world's top media policy experts are glacially pondering practical solutions to the toxic sludge of disinformation pouring out of the face of trolls like Tucker Carlson, but you may want to go read a book, because it's gonna be a long wait.

Filed Under: bundles, cable bundles, fox news, subsidization, tucker carlson
Companies: news corp

Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: That Time Twitter Nazis Got A Reporter Barred From Twitter Over Some Jokes

from the free-speech? dept

Reporter Jon Schwarz, over at The Intercept, has yet another story of content moderation at scale gone wrong, focusing this time on Twitter and his own account. It seems that a bunch of white supremacists on Twitter got mad at him, found an old joke, taken out of context, reported it en masse, and Twitter blocked him over it. Schwarz's story is worth reviewing in detail, but I think he gets the wrong message out of it. His take is, more or less, that Twitter doesn't much care about lowly users, and can't be bothered to understand the context of things (we'll get to the details of the spat in a moment):

It would be easy to interpret this as active contempt by Twitter for its users. But it’s more likely to be passive indifference. Like any huge corporation, Twitter is focused on the needs of its customers, which are its advertisers. By contrast, Twitter’s users are not its customers. They’re its product. Grocery stores don’t care if a can of soup complains about being taken off the shelf.

Similarly, contrary to speculation by some, I don’t think CEO Jack Dorsey secretly sympathizes with his Nazi user base. He probably just enjoys being a billionaire. As he’s said, “from a simple business perspective … Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.” Whatever else you want to say about Nazis, they definitely drive engagement, which in turn lets Twitter charge higher prices for diaper ads.

I even sympathize a little bit with Twitter’s conundrum. They aspired to be a globe-straddling highly profitable monopoly that had no responsibility for what their users did. This was a circle that couldn’t be squared. Proctor & Gamble doesn’t want its promoted tweets to appear right above hypothetical user @hh1488 livestreaming himself massacring 17 congregants at an Albuquerque mosque.

I was simply caught in the natural dynamics that flow from this contradiction. The structure of multinational publicly-traded corporations inevitably puts them somewhere politically from the center-right to the hard-right.

While an interesting take, I'd argue that it gets nearly every important point confused. Indeed, I'd argue that Schwarz is making the very same mistake that conservatives who blame Twitter for supposedly anti-conservative bias are making: looking just at their own situations and the content moderation choices they're aware of, and imparting on the company some sort of natural political motive. Twitter is neither "liberal" nor is it, as Schwarz says, "center-right to the hard-right." It's a company. It doesn't have political beliefs like that. (Relatedly, in the past, I've made it quite clear how misleading and unhelpful the whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" line is).

So, now let's dig into the specifics of what happened to Schwarz and why, rather than it being some sort of political bias at play, or (as Schwarz hints at in his opening) Twitter bending over to appease white supremacists, that this is yet another manifestation of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem... that it's impossible to do content moderation well at scale.

What happened here was that first Schwarz made a joke about Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who appeared to be doing some dog whistling:

As Schwarz notes, he is referencing a joke from the sitcom "30 Rock":

In fact, I was referring to a famous “30 Rock” joke, which had now assumed human form in Carlson. When NBC executive Jack Donaghy decides that TGS, the TV-show-within-the-show, doesn’t have wide enough appeal, he complains to its head writer Liz Lemon:

JACK: The television audience doesn’t want your elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing —

LIZ: Jack, just say Jewish, this is taking forever.

That's not the joke he got blocked over, though. Instead, former KKK leader and all around awful person, David Duke, took that joke and paired it with another out-of-context joke from a few years earlier to mock Schwarz. I'm not linking to Duke's tweet, but this was the joke that he paired with the one above to say "These are not good people, folks." Which, truly, is some world class projection.

In case you're unable to load the image, Schwarz's 2015 tweet had said:

you know, it actually would make much more sense if jews and muslims joined forces to kill christians.

As Schwarz explained, in context, this is actually the kind of snarky reply that Duke would have historically agreed with, because it was part of a longer thread criticizing Israel (something Duke does frequently, though perhaps with other motivations in mind):

But Duke is such a cretin that it never occurred to him that my 2015 joke was exactly what he adores: criticism of Israel. That’s hopefully clear even out of context. But thanks to Twitter’s advanced search function, you can see that I was talking specifically in the context of two events — the publication of photographs of Gaza taken after Israel’s bombing campaign in Operation Protective Edge, and the murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That week I also wistfully suggested, “how about nobody kill anybody and then we go from there.”

Either way, lots and lots of Carlson and Duke fans reported that particular tweet to Twitter (and, of course, bombarded Schwarz with the kind of Twitter barrage that seems all too common these days) and Twitter took action over that tweet.

I have no great insight into how this particular decision went down, but having spent a lot of time in the past few years talking with content moderation folks at Twitter (and other social media platforms), what's a lot more likely than Schwartz's theory is simply this: Twitter has constantly had to tweak its rules over time, and because there is a decently large number of people on the "trust and safety" team, they need to have rules that can be easily understood and carried out -- and that means that understanding context is generally not possible. Instead, there will be some more bright line rules -- things like "no references to killing or violence directed at specific protected classes of people." This is the kind of rule that you could easily see put in place on just about any set of content moderation rules.

And, when looked at through that lens, Schwarz's tweet, even in jest, would trip that line. It's a statement about killing people of a particular religion.

As for why it only caused trouble four years after the tweet, again, the reason is pretty simple. It's not because Twitter Nazis were reporting it so often, but because anyone reported it. Twitter doesn't review each and every tweet. They review tweets that come to their trust & safety team's attention. And, I've heard first hand from people at Twitter that if they come across older tweets, even ones that have been up for many years, if they violate current rules, they will be subject to action.

Again, from the position of thinking about how to run a content moderation/trust & safety team at scale, you can totally see how these rules would get put in place, and how they'd actually be quite sensible. I'm guessing just about every internet platform that has any kind of content policy has just such a rule. And it's easy to sit here and say, "but in context, it's clear that he's making a joke" or "it's clear he's trying to make a very different point and not literally advocating for Jews and Muslims to kill Christians."

But how do you write those exceptions into the rules such that an entire diverse team of employees on a trust & safety team can understand that?

You can try to put in an "except for jokes" clause, but that would require everyone to be able to recognize a joke. Also, it would lead to gaming the system where people would advocate for such killings... and then claim "just joking!" It would also require a team that is culturally sensitive and able to recognize humor, context, and joking for nearly every cultural group around the globe.

That's literally impossible.

And that's why this is just yet another example of why content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. It has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with left-right. It has nothing to do with Twitter appeasing neo-Nazis. It has everything to do with the impossibility of moderating speech at scale.

Filed Under: content moderation, content moderation at scale, david duke, jokes, jon schwarz, masnick's impossibility theorem, tucker carlson