Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Yes, Let’s Cancel Some “Culture”

In January 2017, after far-right extremist Richard Spencer was attacked on Inauguration Day, a semi-rhetorical question began trending on social media. Is it okay to punch the Nazi? While I would tend to say that it is rarely ethical to throw the first punch at anyone, can we at least agree that it is not only fair, but morally imperative, to tell the Nazi to fuck off?

It strikes me that there are two conversations occurring on the subject of “cancel culture,” though it should really be one declaration and one conversation. The declaration should be directed at those Americans, whether they are ordinary citizens or Members of Congress, who have decided that “conservative” is now synonymous with religious or ethnic nationalism, or just plain crazy-ass nonsense like QAnon. And the declaration is simple enough: No, you are not owed a conversation, a seat at the table, a platform, or even basic courtesy because your views are well-known predicates to fascism. Take it from Serbian immigrant and author Aleksander Hemon, writing in 2018 about why he laments the deference he once showed to his best friend, as he watched that friend become consumed by nationalism until he ultimately rationalized genocide:

My relationship with the war has always been marked by an intense sense that I failed to see what was coming, even though everything I needed to know was there, before my very eyes. While Zoka took active part in enacting the ideas I’d argued against, my agency did not go beyond putting light pressure on his fascist views by way of screaming. I have felt guilty, in other words, for doing little, for extending my dialogue with him (and a few other Serb nationalist friends) for far too long, even while his positions—all of them easy to trace back to base Serbian propaganda—were being actualized in a criminal and bloody operation. 

Embed from Getty Images

The lessons of history are clear. It is not only permissible to shut down fascist propaganda, it is essential. Trumpism and its overt appeals to white nationalism and rank thuggery is an existential threat to the nation, no matter what happens next to Donald Trump himself. And the immediacy of that threat has helped write the latest chapter in the conversation about the internet and its capacity to radicalize people to the point of engaging in domestic terrorism. Because now that the immediate danger has passed, and the Facebook Oversight Board gathers to decide whether Trump gets back on that platform, the “digital rights” organizations appear to be rehashing false dichotomies when addressing the challenge at hand.

For instance, the EFF, similar organizations, and Facebook’s Oversight Board all seem to acknowledge that deplatforming Donald Trump was a critically necessary response to the insurrection of January 6. But since Biden’s peaceful inauguration, they have reprised the broad, frankly rhetorical, question that asks, Do we want Facebook and Twitter to wield so much power and to be the arbiters of truth? No, we do not want that. But it doesn’t matter because that’s the wrong question. Facebook Twitter, Google et al are not the arbiters of truth—especially not with regard to countless examples in which truth is anything but arbitrary.

There were not two sides when the former president advocated the medical advice of a witch doctor. There are not two sides to the allegations of consequential fraud in the 2020 election. And there are not two sides to the belief that a conspiracy of pedophile cannibals is running the world. The list of examples, sadly, goes on for miles; but the point is that in many instances of consequence, the social sites do not need to be arbiters of truth. Site managers can use the same resources—experts, professional journalists, courts, and common sense—that the rest of us use to know what is true, and which lies (e.g. all of the above) can be very dangerous.

Why Can’t AI Assist Ordinary Reasoning?

What we should want the major social sites to do is not judge truth, but rather to employ their considerable computing power to identify when momentum is building around narratives that have the capacity to foster acts of tremendous harm. And, by the way, making that determination is not necessarily the job of a bunch of computer programmers or sage academics, and perhaps we should simply get comfortable with Facebook et al notifying the FBI. That said, what does the tipping point look like to site managers? What clues would alert them to the possibility that a page may be transitioning from a forum for political opinions (even rancorous opinions) into a petri dish growing new domestic terrorists? The answer is not uncharted territory: it begins with that word narrative.

When this blog launched, I did a podcast interview with Christopher Dickey, who passed away in July 2020 after a long career as an international journalist, author, and expert on terrorism and extremism. In a subsequent post, I cited Dickey’s observation that there are the three ingredients found in most acts of terrorism—Testosterone, Narrative, and Theater—TNT. Narrative, he defined broadly as a “belief that one is righting some great wrong.” And I would argue that the animating word in that definition is belief. Righting wrongs can be a virtue, though not usually by violence, and never in cases when the alleged wrong does not exist—like an election that was not stolen or pedophile cannibals who are not running the government.

So, can social media managers, with the help of their all-knowing AI, determine when a false narrative (e.g. on a group page) is metastasizing into a movement, and then assess whether that movement is approaching a threshold toward dangerous action? Conversely, if the answer to that question is yes, can the social media managers also determine when chatter is relatively benign, even if it may be generally divorced from reality? Probably. Because metrics exist.

If Facebook, Google et al can influence a market decision, it seems highly likely that they can identify extremist tipping points because certain criteria (like Dickey’s TNT) will likely be present every time. For instance, I would propose the metrics virality, latent toxicity, and kinetic toxicity as three starting metrics. The first, virality, is something these companies measure all day long, and assessing relative significance is not a difficult logical leap. For example, if fifty people opine in a handful of threads that vaccines cause autism, that is not nearly so significant a measure of virality as five-million people repeating this nonsense across multiple pages.

The second metric assesses the latent toxicity of a viral narrative, which is not simply a matter of volume. Five-million adults who believe that vaccines cause autism has high toxicity, whereas thirty-million adults who believe in ghosts has low toxicity. But this assessment is also influenced by the third metric which assesses kinetic toxicity. If the action taken by the five-million antivaxxers is to shun vaccines and, thereby, force society to risk the return of polio, that action has very high toxicity. On the other hand, if half of the thirty-million ghost believers want to go specter hunting on their next vacations, that action has very low toxicity.

But, as we see happen all the time, if a splinter group of say 5,000 ghost enthusiasts coalesces around a new narrative, perhaps originating on 8Chan, that evil poltergeists are running America’s public transportation systems, this subgroup has just increased its latent toxicity based on the original narrative. At this point, the social media managers have reason to comb the splinter group’s page for kinetic toxicity, assessing whether the group is beginning to advocate, for instance, an assault on city busses and subways in order to purge the evil spirits from the system.

Nothing I just hypothesized is one bit loonier than the multiple narratives that collided at the Capitol on January 6. And none of the metrics I propose (name them or amend them however you like) is beyond the capacity of Facebook, Twitter, et al to measure and assess. The question is not whether taking such an approach is a civil liberties issue; these companies use these kinds of data all day long for their own pecuniary interests. The question is whether these companies have the moral integrity to risk losing market share by removing (or reporting) extremism, even when that extremism emanates from the highest levels of government.

Of course, it is beyond even the hubris of Zuckerberg to tackle America’s existential crisis of the moment, when it is clear that tens of millions of our citizens either do not know or do not care that the former president and members of their party committed sedition. Facebook and friends cannot solve that, but they can help mitigate galloping disinformation and nascent fascism. And they should look to their analog forebears for guidance. Returning to that same article by Aleksander Hemon, he responds to a moment when The New Yorker‘s editors first invited Steve Bannon to a discussion and then rescinded the invite, which was then called censorship by various parties. Hemon’s insight is relevant to the social platforms, if they choose to listen:

The error in Bannon’s headlining The New Yorker Festival would not have been in giving him a platform to spew his hateful rhetoric, for he was as likely to convert anyone as he himself was to be shown the light in conversation with Remnick. The catastrophic error would’ve been in allowing him to divorce his ideas from the fascist practices in which they’re actualized with brutality. If he is at all relevant, it is not as a thinker, but as a (former) executive who has worked to build the Trumpist edifice of power that cages children and is dismantling mechanisms of democracy.

Divorcing ideas from practice may be one of the most accurate expressions ever written to describe the fallacy underlying nearly all platform governance, or lack of governance, to date. And the folly needs to end now that we have seen some of the worst evidence imaginable that online madness, like QAnon, is not merely inert speech. The United States is a very delicate idea. And we have no reason to equivocate when rejecting ideas—least of all wild conspiracy theories or old ideas grounded in doctrines of cruelty—that are fatally incompatible with the nation’s existence. Fascism is the consequence of all forms of fundamentalism, and genocide is the aim of all forms of fascism.  So, yes, we must cancel that before it cancels us all. To that end, certain voices do not deserve a platform. And no apology is owed for telling them to fuck off.

Photo by: mikdam

On Cyber Policy, Biden Should Make a Fresh Start

As the Biden administration seeks to restore normalcy in American governance—from constitutional legality to ordinary decency to an actual response to the COVID crisis—it is little surprise to see officials from the Obama administration return to Washington. But as we emerge from the political and emotional rubble, the new administration should recognize and reject one of the major errors made by its Democratic predecessor—a seemingly technophilic friendship with Big Tech that placed Google in particular at the heart of the executive branch.

President Biden stated in his inaugural address that we must reject the assault on truth that has galvanized cult-like beliefs among too much of the electorate, and which exploded at the Capitol on January 6th. Amen. But in order to effectively address the unprecedented role the internet has played in the transmission of conspiracy theories and other toxic content, the Biden administration must understand the relationship between the dire outcomes we have witnessed and Big Tech’s influence on public policy—namely antitrust law, privacy law, and copyright enforcement.

By carving out its own exceptions within these and other legal frameworks, the major internet companies have for too long shirked their responsibilities as corporate citizens, and the new administration should make every effort to begin with a blank slate vis-à-vis cyber policy and not reopen the revolving door that once facilitated contact between Google and the White House.

In 2016, Vox reported that the Obama White House had more interaction with Google lobbyists than those representing any other industry. In 2017, the Campaign for Accountability published a report identifying extensive Google funding of academic papers “tied to specific issues that Google sought to influence,” of which two-thirds reportedly did not disclose Google’s backing. We cannot return to this paradigm in which Big Tech writes its own rules of the game. We need to hit the reset button on the whole conversation.

Silicon Valley’s historic positions on antitrust, privacy, patent and copyright enforcement, and more recently on disinformation and anti-harassment initiatives have something in common. To many of us, they look like familiar guardrails of societal norms, but the tech industry has often characterized these as obstacles to the frictionless flow of data—i.e. their bottom line. Let’s be clear. By the time Facebook, Twitter, Google et al finally began to remove radicalizing misinformation and propaganda from their platforms, they
had already earned billions monetizing that same content right up to the point when it became untenable from a PR perspective.

The New Administration Should Listen to American Artists

Songwriters, for instance, had good reason to raise concern last week about reports that the DOJ might rehire Renata Hesse as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. In 2016, Hesse determined that rather than end the age-of-radio licensing regime that eviscerates songwriter royalties in the streaming market, she proposed aggravating matters by ending “fractional licensing,” for works with multiple authors—in essence using her antitrust authority against the Davids instead of the Goliaths in the room.

Similarly, as of last night, it appears the administration has tapped Gene Kimmelman for the antitrust role, and again, this rings alarm bells. Kimmelman was formerly CEO of PublicKnowledge, a Google-funded organization that rarely advocates a position incompatible with Big Tech’s interests. And as author and monopolist critic Matthew Stoller noted in a tweet: “Kimmelman is generally a consumer welfare advocate, and he supported the DOJ under Obama suing book publishers on behalf of Amazon because supporting Amazon’s monopoly would lower consumer prices. It’s possible he has rethought his approach.”

Tech millionaires are not the people who need support from the Biden administration. The creators do—the people whose works we recognize mean more than ever in a time of crisis and isolation. While the EU has much more forcefully addressed Google and others’ non-competitive practices, figures like Hesse and Kimmelman have both advocated ways to exacerbate creators’ already weakened bargaining position in the 21st century market. That is the opposite direction we need to go—especially when a global health crisis has revealed 1) how profoundly dependent we are upon the arts; and 2) how economically precarious artists are in the digital age.

Big Tech did not cause the pandemic or the consequent shutdown of many sources of artists’ revenues—from live theater to film shoots to classroom teaching. And admittedly, those companies get some of the credit for helping to build the infrastructure that gives us access to music, shows, movies, etc. when we are all stuck at home. But on a much more profound level, Big Tech practices and policy agendas obliterated the source of revenue that might otherwise help sustain many creators in a time of crisis:  sales of works at fair-market prices, backed by strong copyright enforcement and anti-piracy initiatives. Efforts in this regard gained little purchase in the Obama years, especially once Google flooded the zone with lobbyists beginning in early 2012.

As many have discussed in the past, policymakers can learn a great deal from the creative community. Musical artists were the proverbial canaries in the coal mine we called the digital revolution, and from the moment citizens were sold the premise that copyrights were outdated, it was a short logical hop to the argument that permission itself was outdated. And so, the floodgates opened until the romanticism of the internet as wild west eventually looked too much like the real wild west—feral, lawless, and violent. Of the many things that need restoring in Washington, showing the major internet companies more deference than scrutiny should not be on that list.

Copyright Advocacy in Turbulent Times

copyright war

It is admittedly difficult, maybe even a bit ridiculous, to think about a policy matter as arcane as copyright law when the headline story of the moment is an attempted coup d’etat—let alone one fomented by the President of the United States and endorsed by some Members of Congress. But against the backdrop of existential threat from within, I am also reminded why I believe a subject like copyright is so important:  first, because it exemplifies the hard truth that our democracy is built on fragile principles requiring careful and persistent stewardship; and second, because it expresses the almost quixotic hope among the founders that the nation might eventually be great enough to produce art and culture. In a different post, I cited this quote from a letter written in May of 1780 by John Adams to Abigail:

 I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Although Adams could not possibly envision the modern, technological media that would emerge in the late nineteenth century, his allusion to such delicate arts expresses that aspiration toward an American greatness that could one day be a nation strong enough to indulge in creativity and invention. Yorktown was still a year and half into the war’s uncertain future when Adams wrote those words to his wife. Thirty-four years later, during the war that some historians call the “second American revolution,” an adversary occupied a congressional chamber in the U.S. Capitol, which was still newly under construction. On August 24, 1814, Admiral Cockburn of the Royal Navy sat down in the Speaker’s chair and in a mocking, parliamentary tone asked his troops, “Gentlemen, the question is, Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All in favor of burning it will say Aye!”

This anecdote appears in the Handbook of the New Library of Congress, published in 1897 to commemorate the grand opening of the beautiful Beaux Arts building—today the Jefferson Building—situated just east of the Capitol with its copper dome topped by the flame of liberty. Although the story has a whiff of mythologizing in it, the account of Cockburn’s farcical, legislative theater as a prelude to lighting up the Capitol is at least a metaphorically fair reflection of England’s disdain for the American experiment when they burned down icons that they noted had been so hypocritically built with slave labor.

The reason that story was published in the Handbook of the New Library is that the precursor to the Library of Congress was burned by the British as the library within Congress—a narrow skylit atrium of hardwood and wrought iron, originally located along the west wall we see behind the stage where presidents are inaugurated. The new library, as envisioned by Lincoln’s appointed Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford, was not only meant to be a house for the people, but a repository for the latent genius of the people by collecting copies of works deposited for copyright registration. As cited in the book I published in November:

Immediately following passage of the 1870 Copyright Act, the library received just over 5,700 deposits, or roughly one work for every 6,600 citizens; by the peak year (for the century) of 1893, the library received just over 48,000 deposits, or roughly one work for every 1,360 citizens. So while the population nearly doubled in this same period (from about 38 million to about 75 million), creative output increased roughly fivefold.

To put it mildly, the goons who ransacked the Capitol have no better understanding of what the leaders of the Revolution hoped for America than they were clear about what they might ultimately achieve with their grotesque misadventure on the Mall. By the end of the nation’s first century, Adams’s modest hope that the United States would be strong enough to be creative was beginning to be realized. And one terrible irony of the present is that in so many areas, real American greatness—its capacity to invent, to create, and to reinvent itself—was alive and well the day Donald Trump told the nation that all he could see was “carnage.”   

It is no coincidence that the corporations most responsible for the aggressive assault on creators’ rights are the same companies now finally understood to have played a substantial role in cultivating that alternate reality in which too many citizens now operate. Mischaracterizing copyrights as barriers to access has been a key ingredient in Silicon Valley’s magic elixir they sold to the world as the “free flow of information.” And for years, they simply refused to acknowledge that truly dangerous disinformation flows just as freely and twice as quickly.

I jumped into this debate almost a decade ago because I believe that an empowered population of authors and creators is essential for a thriving democracy. In 2013, I wrote, “To put it whimsically, a great bulwark against tyranny would be a class of unusually wealthy poets.” Having now witnessed a closer brush with tyranny than many would have thought possible in the United States, I am more committed than ever to that particular kind of whimsy.