Category: Digital Culture

Senate Hearings:  A Sea Change for Social Media Companies & Users

Yesterday afternoon the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled:  “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online:  Working with Tech to Find Solutions.” Representing the social media companies were Colin Stretch, General Counsel at Facebook; Sean Edgett, Acting General Counsel at Twitter; and Richard Salgado, Director of Law Enforcement And Information Security at Google.

The news to come out of this hearing will not compete with the blockbuster revelations produced the day before by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller; but in the long run, it may prove to be more important.  Because regardless of who in the current administration may yet be implicated in Russia’s disinformation campaign aimed at the United States, the matters of greatest significance are that it happened, the ways in which it happened, and that is still happening.  And it’s not all about Russia.

Some Background

Shorthand terms like “Russian hacking” do not properly describe the nature of what’s going on; and the significance of what’s going on should be understood as separate from any collusion that may or may not have existed between Russia’s agents and the Trump campaign.  In a nutshell, what the Russian-based Internet Research Agency engaged in had less to do with backing a particular candidate and far more to do with spreading mass dis-information to exacerbate divisiveness among the American electorate.  And there is no better way to achieve this disruption than by using social media platforms.

The estimates reported state that 126 million Americans were exposed to paid, targeted messaging used to spread false and emotionally-charged rumors, some of which favored one candidate or another, but all of which was designed to foment political discord and volatility. As the opening testimony of Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute stated in Part II of these Committee hearings, “Terrorists’ social media use has been acute and violent, but now authoritarians have taken it to the next level using social media more subtly to do something far more dangerous – destroy our democracy from the inside out through information campaigns designed to pit Americans against each other.”

That theme—pitting Americans against each other—cannot be overstated in this story, and I’ll return to it shortly.

A Taste of the Hearing

Coming to terms with the negative effects the “information age” can have on democracy is a reckoning long overdue, and yesterday was the first time in my experience that representatives of Silicon Valley were compelled to stifle their utopian rhetoric and admit that their products yield unintended and poisonous consequences.  In fact, early in the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) directly asked the three witnesses if they were going drop the “we’re just a neutral platform” posturing and accept that they have an active role to play in addressing the matters before the Committee.  All three answered the senator in the affirmative.

That in itself is big news.  The Committee’s unwillingness to accept the shrug of “neutrality” from these companies has implications for cyberlaw that go beyond addressing the immediate issue of foreign powers meddling in US elections.  For instance, it is worth remembering that while Mr. Salgado was promising that Google will take affirmative action and not hide behind a veil of neutrality regarding issues addressed in this hearing, parent company Alphabet’s juggernaut of lobbyists and PR outlets are presently trying to kill the anti-sex-trafficking bill SESTA on the grounds that it would weaken the neutral position of their platform.

There were a few awkward moments between the Committee and the witnesses regarding broader questions about the capabilities of the platforms.  Those of us who advocate certain legal boundaries online (like copyright enforcement) are used to the shell game in which the platforms boast about their capabilities to advertisers one moment (e.g. the ability to perform granular-level, targeted marketing) and in the next moment, state contradictorily that they cannot weed out toxic or illegal content because they “can’t police the internet.”

Among the highlights on this theme was Senator Al Franken’s (D-MN) entertaining inquiry directed at Facebook’s Mr. Stretch in which he asked how, with the company’s extraordinary computing capacity, it failed to “connect two dots” and consider that “American” political ads paid for with rubles might be a reason to doubt the nature of the advertiser.  In a related exchange with Mr. Salgado on the subject of Google’s capacity to weed out foreign-based political ads, Sen. Franken felt the response was too internal-policy focused and reminded the witness, “You know it’s illegal for any foreign money to be spent in our election process, right?”

These hearings mark the first time that I can remember any representative of the major platforms stating with so little equivocation that they can, will, and should implement steps to mitigate harmful content on their platforms.  Doubts were raised, however, by some members. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) told Mr. Strech pointedly that he simply doesn’t believe Facebook can effectively vet over five million ads per month; and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) accused all three platforms of responding too slowly, of missing opportunities and warning sings, and of hosting toxic content that is still online right now.

Although some Committee members raised concerns about First Amendment protections—in fact, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) cited incidents of alleged censorship of conservative views by the platforms themselves—neither any Committee Member of either party, nor any of the three witnesses, reiterated the generalization that removing illegal or harmful content from the platforms was fundamentally incompatible with the protection of free speech.  To the contrary, there seemed to be a very clear consensus that the manner in which these tools have been—and may continue to be—manipulated by bad actors is so harmful to democracy itself that, in context, free speech becomes a weapon of self-destruction. And that brings us back to that underlying theme and the real significance of what the Russian “hackers” did:  pit Americans against each other.

A New Kind of Literacy

I opined in a recent post that a new kind of media literacy is needed for the digital age.  Because no matter what Congress can legislate, and no matter what actions the platforms may take, people themselves are going to have to be more vigilant about the content they believe to be true, let alone share.  The mistaken expectation that the internet would be a kind of turbo-booster for democratic values comes from a reasonable, if somewhat elitist, assumption.  The theory was that if people have access to information, unfiltered by the influence of manipulators and monied gatekeepers, the collective wisdom of a fundamentally benevolent society would galvanize core democratic principles.  The manipulators would be powerless in such a fact-rich environment.

These assumptions completely overlooked some fundamental realities:  1) the platforms themselves can be used by a wide range of manipulators to manufacture false information; 2) false information that jibes with pre-conceived bias is almost impossible to recognize as false because; 3) people are driven more by emotion than by information.  The fault of the technologists, whose expertise is data, was to assume that information builds community—or at least to sell that idea.  But the truth is almost always just the opposite, even without propagandists hijacking reality.

The Opposite of Social Media

As an example of the limits of social media, I think about the story of Daryl Davis, who was featured by several news organizations shortly after the riots in Charlottesville.  Davis, a black blues musician, is responsible for over 200 men quitting the Ku Klux Klan—a journey that began, humorously enough, when a white man in a bar complimented him by saying he’d never heard “a black guy who could play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.”  Davis’s explanation that Lewis learned everything he knew from black musicians led to a cordial conversation and the discovery that the white guy was a member of the KKK.  Thus began Davis’s decision to travel the country, meet other Klan members, and write a book about his experiences.  Along the way, many of the friends he made abandoned the organization and gave Davis their robes as penitential offerings.

Now, imagine if Davis’s first encounter with that first Klan member had been through the cold portals of social media rather than in person and through the shared experience of quintessentially American music. Add to that the trove of “information” the white guy could link to “proving” the genetic inferiority of Davis’s race. Can anyone doubt that the most likely outcome of this online exchange would be a hardening of the white guy’s racism (and perhaps a hardening of Davis’s feelings as well)?

Nothing in such and exchange would have to qualify as hate speech or any other content that would even get on the radar of the issues discussed in yesterday’s Senate hearing. It’s the kind of exchange that happens all the time—just two Americans being driven further apart by the mechanisms of a platform whose corporate mission is to “build community.”  That paradox is something the folks at Facebook et al—and those of us who use these platforms—are going to have to reconcile no matter what Congress does.

Image by alexlmx

YouTubers losing viewers. What gives?

For years, “old model” artists have been told to quit whining.  Every time some well-known and well-established creator has spoken out about the issue of mass copyright infringement online, or the hazards that monopsonies like YouTube pose for all creators, the response from the “new model” gurus has always been nauseatingly repetitive.  These legacy artists should stop clinging to old models; they should get with the program, stop thinking about selling their works and protecting their copyrights because the internet has rendered such notions obsolete.  Plus, if creators would just wake up to the new realities, they would see a whole world of opportunity to make a living from their work without the evil gatekeepers.

I and others have tried to warn new creators that the “evil gatekeepers” have not been bypassed in the new model, but have instead been replaced by one or two gatekeepers that are at liberty to change the terms and conditions for use of their platforms without any obligation to the creators who helped grow the platforms. The above video by Glove and Boots does a good job (and an amusing one) of describing a phenomenon that apparently a lot of YouTubers are experiencing lately–lost viewers, allegedly due to algorithmic changes on the platform.

I haven’t dug into the details of this story but have heard similar complaints for at least several months now and can’t say that I’m surprised to see cracks in the YouTube model.  It will be interesting to see where things go from here. Presumably, YouTube needs to serve the creators whose works draw viewers to the platform, but I’m going out on a limb to predict that changes at YouTube will make the company look even more like a traditional gatekeeper than it already does.  Correspondingly, I will predict that the new creators will discover that they have something to learn from the old creators.  In particular, if artists like YouTubers are ever going to be in a position to negotiate terms for their work, they will realize that their power to do so is based on this old model called copyright.

NOTE:  I’ve shared this video because it does a good job of explaining what they and other creators believe is happening on the platform.  As for their use of clips from the film Thelma & Louise, I believe it would stand a decent chance of being held a fair use in an analysis, but that should not distract from the intent of this post.

Photo by manae.

Sucking Faster:  Is the Tech Backlash Happening or Not?

At the launch of this blog in the Summer of 2012, in the intro to a podcast interview with journalist Christopher Dickey, I cited a print ad from the 1990s for a video post-production facility. In the center of the ad was an old vacuum cleaner, and the headline read:  Without the right talent, high technology just helps bad creative suck faster.  It was a damn good ad that continues to resonate with me in considering the many challenges imposed by the effects of the digital age.  Especially its effects on democratic principles.

While everybody was being self-congratulatory over the “direct-democracy-in-action” defeat of SOPA in 2012, I argued that this alleged triumph was folly in disguise.  The same tools and methodologies employed to deceive the public in that campaign, I asserted, could easily be used by another manipulator to a more deleterious effect on the true foundations of American democracy. I even suggested that Citizens United was child’s-play compared to what that campaign had revealed was possible.  Then in September, Mark Zuckerberg had to issue a mea culpa in response to mounting evidence that Russian agents used Facebook to manipulate the American political process. “We will work to do better,” he said.  Though I wonder if they can.

In the wake of the 2016 election and the sudden discovery of fake news, the mainstream media finally showed up and started criticizing Big Tech.  Most recent examples include articles like “Silicon Valley is Not Your Friend” by Noam Cohen for The New York Times and “Is the Sun Really Setting on Silicon Valley?” by Maya Kosoff for Vanity Fair.  On a range of subjects, from foreign infiltration to advertising integrity to anti-trust and even the election of Donald Trump, numerous reporters have written about, or contributed to, what is broadly being called the “tech backlash” against the industry.

While there may be specific areas in which these platforms are being made out as scapegoats—and it’s me saying that—it is at least encouraging to hope that the public may finally begin to see these corporations as entities deserving scrutiny like any other industrial giant—and not viewed as the front-line defenders of democracy itself.  Just a couple years ago, no matter what underlying issue warranted criticism—copyright infringement, harassment, privacy invasions, etc.—the response was generally the same:  that these platforms are too essential for democratic progress (namely, free speech) to mess with.

I’ve always thought this premise was utter bullshit and still do, but inasmuch as I broadly disagree with this defense of Silicon Valley by Matt Rosoff for CNBC.com, there’s an instructive element of truth in one thing he says.  Rosoff points to polling data, which allegedly reveals that Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al still enjoy high favorability with the American public (i.e. that there is no tech backlash).  These data may be accurate, but they do not justify Rosoff’s generalization that “These companies’ products have helped society more than hurting it.”

Here, Rosoff addresses the topic of fake news, about which he writes, “Facebook was built to make the spread of ideas as frictionless as possible. If those ideas are angry, polarizing, ill-informed, ignorant (call them whatever you want) it reflects the people who are spreading them, not the platform on which they’re spread.” In other words, social media doesn’t make people idiots, people make themselves idiots.  True. But not entirely.

Rosoff is wrong to suggest that a platform like Facebook is an extension of the norm—that the medium itself does not substantially alter the manner in which we consume and relate to news, information, politics, and one another. And just because Mark Zuckerberg did not set out to upend the role of quality journalism in American democracy—he never intended to become a “news” site—that does not mean his platform has not had this effect on society. So, I would make a distinction between blaming Facebook per se and recognizing any number of its unintended consequences.

It is certainly well past time for the major platform owners to put away their childish mantras of disruption and behave like citizens.  They’ve moved fast enough and broken enough things.  Ironically, though, this vogue drumbeat of anti-tech reporting seems overly focused on areas where the major platforms are actually justified in saying there’s only so much they can do.  For instance, Cohen writes, “Facebook has endured a drip, drip of revelations concerning Russian operatives who used its platform to influence the 2016 presidential election by stirring up racist anger. Google had a similar role in carrying targeted, inflammatory messages during the election ….”

Recognizing that social media can be a centrifugal force is a step in the right direction, but we also cannot blame Facebook, or the Russians, for racism in America. That’s a cop out.  At best, we can recognize the ways in which these technologies help racism and other forms of hate and ignorance suck faster.  At the same time, it is insufficient to end the discussion, as Rossoff seems prepared to do, with the tired cliché that these platforms are neutral—that they’re only as good or bad as the people using them.

It isn’t quite that simple because in one way or another we’re all idiots—all ignorant about something and all capable of bias and anger, and certainly not all skilled in expressing ourselves through writing.  So, if the axiom remains true that medium is message, it should be little wonder that Facebook or Twitter is always one comment away from making enemies out of neighbors.  Then add the bots, the trolls, the manipulators, criminals, and the bonafide haters, and of course these platforms are the ideal fora for undermining the principles on which a democracy like ours is founded.

This doesn’t mean we should necessarily turn away from these platforms.  They can fulfill promises like connecting people and provide peer curation of useful news and information.  But it does mean that a new, digital-age literacy is required—one that remains vigilant to the manipulative nature of these platforms and, yes, one which holds the platform owners responsible to the extent that this is possible and effective.  To achieve that, however, requires taking them down off the pedestals of innovation and freedom and treating them like what they are—businesses.

In this regard, the concern should be that while the press has a good time plucking low-hanging fruit (like this story about Google serving fake news to fact-checking sites), the larger policy narrative may remain unchanged—the one which has thus far insisted that internet companies can and should operate outside the normal boundaries of law.  Whether the issue is online support of human trafficking, counterfeiting, fake news, harassment, revenge porn, or mass copyright infringement, the major internet companies continue to insist that their statutory liability shields (written when Zuckerberg was a pre-teen) are essential to our enjoyment of the many benefits their platforms provide.

What each of these individual stories in the “tech-backlash” narrative add up to, though, is the observable truth that these platforms yield plenty of results that are quite hazardous—even to the democratic values they claim to foster.  And as the rule of logic goes, if a premise is false, the conclusion doesn’t follow.  The premise that these platforms produce a net positive for democracy is, so far, proving to be false. Therefore, the conclusion that they must remain eternally shielded from legal liability and social responsibility does not follow.