Category: Culture

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have tried to warn new creators that the “evil gatekeepers” have not been bypassed in the new model, but have instead been replaced by one or two gatekeepers that are at liberty to change the terms and conditions for use of their platforms without any obligation to the creators who helped grow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.

Speech Maximalism on SESTA is Madness

This refrain keeps playing over in my head lately:  The EFF and its sister organizations are to cyberlaw as the NRA is to rational gun policy in America.  That seems like a pretty harsh thing to say about a bunch of progressives (and one must even include the ACLU in this discussion), but in the context of policy debate, the maximalism with which these organizations continue to defend the liability shield (Sec. 230) of the Communications Decency Act (1996) on behalf of a single multi-billion-dollar industry is logically comparable to the maximalism with which the NRA has marketed so much ahistorical nonsense about the Second Amendment on behalf of gun manufacturers.

While it’s hard to look away from the circus playing round-the-clock at the White House, it is certainly necessary to look beyond it.  The story of where American democracy is heading is not Donald Trump, though it may be (metaphorically speaking) Elon Musk.  The fact that Musk announced he could power Puerto Rico in response to official U.S. dithering is both intriguing and generous, but it is also a frightening commentary on the condition of the American state.  Even as an idea, Musk’s offer is a subtle harbinger of the tipping point I fear we may be approaching—that the state becomes so dysfunctional, the people turn to the oligarchy of technologists and say, “save us” from ourselves. At that point, American democracy will come to an end. Cue 21st-century American feudalism.

Before we head quite that far into a sci-fi thriller, though, we are truly at an inflection point when the fate of a couple of bills in Congress will say a lot about how much power and influence Google and the other major internet players have in Washington.  H.R. 1865 and S. 1693 (SESTA) would amend Section 230 of the CDA to explicitly prohibit online support of trafficking minors in the sex trade and thus open pathways to both civil and criminal prosecution.  These bills are largely a response to allegations stemming from investigations into Backpage, which the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates is how 73% of all children trafficked in prostitution are bought and sold.

I am told by various contacts in D.C. that Google’s lobbyists—parent company Alphabet now ranks among the top five spenders in the country—have been out in force to kill these anti-trafficking bills in committee. Meanwhile, the EFF and other Google-funded organizations have the unenviable task of telling the American people—once again—that free speech on the web will suffer if we pass legislation designed to help protect children from sex-trafficking.  As explained in a previous post, SESTA proposes a change in the Section 230 statute that is so narrow it could never affect the vast majority of internet users.

Your site would have to be a lot like Backpage, or would have to be as big as Google or Facebook just to be in the orbit of potential liability under SESTA.  Even a pornography site that might inadvertently host video depicting sex acts with trafficked minors (and that’s a big hypothetical) would not necessarily be liable under SESTA because, depending on what actions the site owners were to take, they could still qualify for the safe harbor provisions of Section 230.  Any implication that the vast majority of us who do not run globally substantial sites, or who do not use the web to conduct transactions in the sex trade, will somehow feel a tremor in the force of free speech is rank hysteria.

But Google, with all its wealth and influence, would rather not have so much as a pinhole of liability pierced into the CDA shield—even if it means providing a modicum of legal remedy for victims of sex-trafficking by prosecuting individuals who have nothing whatsoever to do with Google. I can only imagine there must be a few members of the EFF who are either experiencing moral crises over this issue, or downing 10 a.m. shots just to quiet the cognitive dissonance because they’ve got to know their free speech arguments against SESTA are complete hogwash.

Overcoming Free Speech Maximalism

In the same way that the NRA markets a message that guns create freedom, the internet industry has sold a very similar maximalist view that the First Amendment is perpetually strengthened by the immeasurable volume of interactions on the internet.  Just as the American who owns ten guns is not ten times freer than the American who owns one gun, the American who tweets a hundred times a day is not freer than the American who doesn’t have a Twitter account at all.  Nevertheless, when one reads the declarations insisting that every peep uttered in cyberspace is sacred, it is hard to miss the rhetorical similarities between the NRA and the internet activist organizations.

Like anyone with a maximalist view—or a financial stake in espousing one—both the NRA and the EFF reveal a callous disregard for the harm being done by the policies they endorse.  The EFF hasn’t explicitly said “child sex-trafficking is the price we pay for freedom,” but that’s effectively the argument they’re making with their overplayed appeals to the First Amendment in context to SESTA.  Adding further to this irony is a complete disregard for the fact that the internet as we know it is actually making quite a hash of the democratic principles which the protection of speech is meant to serve.

In almost the same manner in which Citizens United undermines the intent of speech by giving a louder voice to financially empowered corporations, the economics of the web do the same thing more broadly and more insidiously.  If it is fundamental to American democracy that the population has access to relevant and accurate information, it is no surprise that the economics of attracting and monetizing web traffic fails to serve this purpose. (Or have I missed something and American democracy is healthier than ever?)  Journalism (i.e. information) is supposed to be the practice of telling people what they need to know while the design of the web we have is fundamentally built to tell people what they want to hear.

Adaptive algorithms that anticipate our interests, biases, and desires are relatively innocuous, perhaps even beneficial, if we’re shopping for toasters; but these designs can be toxic to democracy when we’re “shopping” for news.  In a solid, concise OpEd for Forbes about the folly of current support for Obama-era net-neutrality policies, Fred Campbell calls the internet as we know it “a mess.” “Policies that net neutrality advocates are clamoring to preserve have facilitated the internet’s roles in undermining fair elections, providing a safe haven for sex traffickers, destroying privacy, nurturing the world’s largest information monopolies (e.g., Google, Amazon), subverting free speech, and devastating publishing industries,” Campbell writes, suggesting that we should let the internet be overhauled because it’s hardly living up to the vision of its founders in the 1960s.

Campbell cites a paper by Professor Shoshana Zuboff of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Harvard Business School (an organization typically aligned with internet industry views), who calls the current economics of the web surveillance capitalism.  “This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control,” Zuboff writes.  That description certainly rings true with experience and hardly seems to jibe with the foundational assumption that the internet is “the greatest tool for democracy ever created.”

In 1783, in the uncertain period between the end of the American revolution and the establishment of the United States, Alexander Hamilton wrote to John Jay, “It is hoped when prejudice and folly have run themselves out of breath, we may embrace reason and correct our errors.”  He was referring to the many competing forces driving people away from the establishment of a unified nation.  Today, Hamilton could easily be talking about Facebook and Twitter because it would be hard to make the case that the internet is not, on balance, having a centrifugal effect on the electorate.  As such, free speech maximalism is  not only specifically immoral as a response to a bill like SESTA, but it is also generally untenable as a premise for broader debates about cyberlaw.

Image by stawy13