Category: Culture

Fake News Tops Results After Las Vegas Shooting

On Monday, I was up early and first heard about the Las Vegas shooting on the radio in the car. It was still dark, and the winding road thick with fog, lending an eerie mood to the sound of Scott Simon’s voice on NPR reporting what little was known about this latest incident in what is now an epidemic of mass-killings. I had yet to look at any social media, to read anyone else’s opinion or to have the raw facts of the tragedy synthesized through the narrative of gun control, mental illness, terrorism, or any other matter of public policy. There was just the horrible truth of what had happened without theory or explanation. This is how we used to digest the news: Here’s what we know so far. Stay tuned.

Social media abhors a vacuum. And in the hazy interval between breaking reports of an event like the Las Vegas spree-shooting and the revelation of salient, credible details, the pranksters, trolls, and professional liars come out to play. Brianna Provenzano, writing for Mic.com, states that for several hours, “Facebook and Google’s algorithms prioritized fake news” about the Las Vegas shooting. As she puts it “conservative conspiracy sites like the Gateway Pundit lit up with misinformation about the shooter’s identity.” Her article shows one example of a headline naming some poort guy who had nothing to do with the shooting, calling him a “Democrat Who Likes Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org, and Associated with Anti-Trump Army.”

According to Provenzano, the Gateway Pundit story was among the top results on Facebook before it was removed, but also that once the innocent man’s name was out there, Google searches for it led readers to a 4Chan thread “labeling him a dangerous leftist,” Provenzano writes. She also reports that Google eventually made algorithmic adjustments to replace the 4Chan story with relevant results and stated it will continue to be vigilant in this regard.

It’s right that Google and Facebook took action to quash, or at least mitigate, misleading “news” about such a gravely serious incident, especially bogus reports naming an innocent man as the perpetrator. But for those of us regularly following the policy positions of the internet industry, the hypocrisy here is not missed. For instance, Google can clearly take remediating steps where to no do so would look bad for them; but in other contexts in which search results may facilitate harm, they will expound ad nauseam upon the sanctity of free speech as a universal rationale to leave all data exactly where it is.

For instance, regarding the Equustek case and the Canadian court order to remove links, I fail to see a substantive distinction, in a speech context, between a counterfeiter using search to hijack customers from a legitimate product-maker and a counterfeit news-maker using search to hijack readers from legitimate reporting. In fact, ironically enough, a bogus news story, harmful and revolting as it may be in the wake of a tragedy like Las Vegas, has a better claim to speech rights than a hyperlink which leads consumers to a product or service that is breaking the law.

So, it’s not that I think Google et al shouldn’t make decisions to remove or demote “news” emanating from the adolescent babooneries of places like 4Chan. They absolutely should. Fake news is toxic, and we have enough problems with grim reality without people inventing and believing bogus narratives. But as I’ve argued more times than I can count, speech cannot be the default rationale for a universal laissez-faire policy in cyberspace. And as this story demonstrates, it’s a lie anyway. The major web platforms can and will manipulate, delete, or demote content, or links to content, when they are motivated to do so. Whether these internal decisions are driven by revenue, public relations, or even altruism, speech-maximalism does not seem to factor into their thinking, so there’s no reason why it should necessarily factor into external motivations like a court order.

Meanwhile, we can’t expect Google and Facebook to stop people from being idiots. Readers may remember that after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, netizens took it upon themselves to play law enforcement. Not only did they vilify an innocent man whose whereabouts were unknown, but the cyber-mob soon harassed the man’s family, who would then discover that they young man was missing because he had committed suicide.

In the early days of Web 1.0, I rejected the old cliché Don’t believe anything you read on the internet because, of course, the internet really was just a conduit, and a credible source is a credible source. But now that there’s such a bounty of absolute garbage that can either be designed to look legit or can be algorithmically elevated to undeserved prominence, that I think skepticism should be the default approach to nearly every headline. So far, the “information revolution” is at least half oxymoronic. And part of the problem is that it can be very hard to know which half.

Google Supports Child Slavery with Anti-SESTA Campaign?

That would be an incendiary claim, wouldn’t it?

But let’s be honest. If a different industry (say the motion picture industry) were opposing the anti-trafficking bill called SESTA, then the EFF, Fight for the Future, PublicKnowledge, Techdirt, and about 30 other Google-backed organizations would surely not hesitate to righteously declare from their laptops that “Hollywood Loves Child Sex Slaves.”  There would be a flood of editorials, graphics, memes, tweets, rumors, and maybe even some skywriting, all hammering away at the industry they love to hate.  No analysis of the bill. No nuance. It’s what they did with SOPA, and it worked.

Conversely, we have not seen a coordinated campaign to portray the internet industry and its syndicate of sycophants as a bunch of rich, white, ivory-tower, dilettantes indifferent to the plight of child sex-slaves.  Perhaps this is because it would be in bad taste to do so; perhaps it’s because no other industry finances quite so vast a network of opinion-makers as Google does all by itself; perhaps it’s because the people who believe that reasonable law-enforcement can and must apply in cyberspace are reasonable people still committed to arguing the merits of a policy proposal rather than jumping into the mud-fight that passes for political activism on the internet.  Perhaps calling someone a supporter of child slavery is a bridge too far.  But like I say, if the situation were reversed, they’d do it in heartbeat.

I’ve tried not to go there.  In the posts I’ve written about Backpage or the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA), I’ve stated that I don’t believe the folks at EFF or its sister organizations are so morally corrupt that they simply do not care about the victims of human trafficking.  But it is admittedly hard to give them the benefit of that doubt under the circumstances.  Because the bottom line, as I read it, is that these groups are just completely full of crap about the threats SESTA poses to internet users; and it’s hard to remain polite in response to their rolling out the standard hyperbole when the subject is so grave.

To my reading, SESTA proposes a very modest and narrow change to Section 230 of the CDA. It adds language pertaining to sex-trafficking that would be constructed in the statute as equal to the existing language about hosting child pornography online. It does not change the core mechanism of Section 230, namely the underlying rationale or function of the liability shield. The proposed change to the law is short and simple. Anyone can read it for themselves. Basically, if you’ve been using the internet and have thus far managed to avoid being accused of hosting child pornography (because you don’t), that’s about how vulnerable you would be to an accusation of supporting sex-trafficking after passage of SESTA.

The major internet interests are probably less concerned about possible litigation from victims of trafficking than they are with insisting that the CDA should remain calcified in its form as ratified in 1996.  Assuming this is true, the concern on their part would be that a change in the CDA creates a precedent for other changes in cyber-law, for instance in the DMCA, that might limit the manner in which many of the major platforms have profited from infringement since their inception.  But tough noogies. These are the wealthiest and most powerful corporations on the planet. They can behave like citizens.

Surely, we should be able to set aside the underlying debate over the DMCA just long enough to show some solidarity on the far more serious matter of trafficking minors in the sex trade. I’d like to believe that we all agree this is a criminal enterprise depraved enough, and deserving of enough empathy for its victims, that even Google and its network of activist carny barkers would mute their scare-mongering “censorship” rhetoric for a change.  But apparently, there is no criminal conduct deserving of such deference.

Can SESTA impose new liabilities on sites the scale of YouTube? Probably.  But so what?  Google has the the money and the resources to figure it out. Meanwhile, children are being kidnapped, abused, and raped for profit; and if Congress cannot even take this tiny step toward mitigating the role the internet plays in fostering that crime, then shame on us.  Or as a colleague of mine said to me yesterday, “Are we really saying that filming and distributing images of child abuse is illegal, but committing the act itself is okay?” We cannot possibly have our heads that far up Google’s ass, can we?

The Campaign for Accountability states in a recent post, “At least 34 groups that receive Google funding have opposed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), according to research from the Google Transparency Project.”  These include many of the usual suspects like EFF, R Street Institute, and Mike Masnick’s Copia Institute, but also lists the ACLU and PEN America, whose voices on such matters tend to be more sober.  As stated in other posts, funding source alone is not an indictment of a policy position; but Google’s now widely-reported scope of influence through academia and activist groups, combined with messaging that sounds more like PR than debate, paints a picture that is hard to take at face value. For instance, the following paragraph appears to be the meat of the letter sent to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation by the ACLU:

“Online providers cannot and should not suffer criminal liability merely for facilitating the speech of others even if elements those communications are distasteful or even unlawful.  To do so would discourage online hosts from making responsible efforts to police their sites, and that in turn would make it more difficult to expose those actually engaged in criminal behavior.  Just as Internet commerce and speech would not have grown exponentially without the protections of section 230, so penalizing service providers now will discourage online entrepreneurs from moving the miracle of modern Internet communications into its next magical phase.” [Emphasis added]

So, cutting through the fog of language alluding to miracles and magic, the sentence in bold is the alleged problem with SESTA.  But as noted above, it is very hard to see how the proposed amendment to the statute substantially alters the liability implications from the status quo for the vast majority of internet users and entrepreneurs.  And because every complaint I have read so far, like the ACLU letter, spends more energy praising the broad virtues of Section 230 than making a clear case for why SESTA would be hazardous, I will continue to believe there is no there there.  Or to put it another way, to be potentially liable under SESTA, it seems your site would basically have to be Backpage.  And as there is one Backpage out of about a billion websites, I think these organizations are protesting a bit much.

Everything Online Cannot Be Speech:  The Equustek Story

Suppose you invent something.  A box that makes bitter vegetables taste like candy so kids will eat them. You call it KandyKale.  Then, along comes an imposter, who steals your tech and infringes your intellectual property, and then sets up a bunch of websites that hijack the customers looking for your product in order to sell them the KandeeKale knock-off, which they produced by stealing from you in the first place. Not only would you sue the KandeeKale operators, but you might ask the court to order a search giant like Google to delist the websites while your litigation ensues.

That pretty much sums up the nature of the complaint by Canadian tech manufacturer Equustek against Datalink, which allegedly stole Equustek’s trade secrets then took the counterfeit business “virtual” after a Vancouver court ordered Datalink to stop operating in the province.  As a normal matter of procedure in its fight against the alleged counterfeiters, Equustek sought, and was granted, injunctive relief by a British Columbia court in June of 2015. This included an order that Google de-index, on a worldwide basis, the sites dedicated to selling the counterfeit products.  The decision was upheld by the Canadian Supreme Court.

Google has asked a California district court to enjoin the enforcement of the Canadian order in the U.S., principally on the grounds that the Canadian court “offends” the First Amendment and the Communications Decency Act under U.S. law.  According to the motion filed by Google, Equustek states that it cannot afford to fight the search giant’s appeal in U.S. court, which is both credible and notable. Google rejects Equustek’s assertion that it operates “above the law,” noting that it is in compliance with the order while appealing enforcement. But in regard to this story, is worth considering how any independent business might hope to litigate in a similar dispute with the one company that owns nearly all search and online advertising worldwide.

Why does it matter?  Because at some point, we’re going have to reckon with the fact that every transaction that occurs online cannot be treated as speech.  To conclude otherwise is to sublimate the rights of individuals and small businesses to the whims of corporations that are simply too big to fight.  Although it is true that a Google search result is information and that Google is not breaking any laws by providing that information, this cannot be where the law and policy conversation ends.  When the information provided—perhaps it is even paid for—materially supports criminal conduct, are we truly so confounded by the murkiness of cyberspace that we can only conclude that no legal remedies apply because it’s all speech?

That’s certainly what Wikimedia would have us believe based on the brief it filed on September 15 in support of Google’s position in the Equustek case.  Long on hyperbole and short on substance, most of the brief’s eleven pages are dedicated to extolling the virtues of free speech as a human right, which I imagine the California court already understands.  But on the subject of comity (i.e. the need for the courts of one nation to respect the laws of other nations), Wikimedia employs what reads to me like a lot of misdirection with variations on the following theme:

“Global orders for the removal of content impose one country’s idea of freedom of expression on citizens of the rest of the world. Some countries have high bars for protecting free speech and the right to receive information. And some countries do not share the values expressed in the United States Constitution or international human rights law. If United States courts enforce removal orders from nations like Canada, Germany, and France, perhaps they will also remove content when ordered by Turkey, Russia, or China.”

Essentially, Wikimedia asserts (as does Google) that if global takedown orders like the one in Equustek become common practice, we run the risk that nations which do not respect rights like free speech and free press will dictate terms to those that do. If this seems hyperbolic, it is.  Because the argument assumes that U.S. jurisprudence is ill-equipped to distinguish between information that is exclusively speech and information that materially supports conduct that Americans agree is criminal.  This despite the fact that the U.S. maintains one of the most liberal free speech doctrines in the world, and our courts have been weighing exactly these matters longer than any other nation in existence.

It is fundamental to the principle of comity in this case that a U.S. court would likewise consider this type of injunction in Equustek a reasonable remedy because Datalink’s activities allegedly violate intellectual property laws that we likewise support in this country.  Conversely, by the same principles of comity, there is no reason whatsoever to jump to the conclusion that a U.S. court would capriciously offend our most sacred laws, namely the First Amendment, in order to enforce a ruling made by a nation whose sense of law is radically divergent from our own.

Wikimedia is guilty of overstating its own importance in the world and that of the internet in general as a conduit of information.  If the current political climate has not sobered many citizens to the reality that “information” can be a siren call to smash on the rocks of ignorance, I’m not sure what it will take.  Meanwhile, as real life is now unavoidably transacted in the the global market of cyberspace, the assumption that the internet must remain a universe beyond legal boundaries will continue to fail ordinary citizens and entrepreneurs in the interest of securing legal immunities for some of the world’s richest corporations.

The ineffably twisted logic still plaguing policy in cyberspace is represented by the very first sentence of the Introduction to the Wikimedia brief.  “This case involves an order issued by a Canadian court to compel Google to remove truthful information from its search results—not just in Canada, but around the globe,” it says.  Indeed.  “Truthful information” that just happens to link consumers to a company that is allegedly selling counterfeit goods. A fairly young child, still refusing to eat his kale, can make the distinction. So, it is reasonable to hope that U.S. courts can do the same.