Category: Social Media

In hearing with Big Tech, senators make headlines, but can they make headway?

On Wednesday, January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee presided over a dramatic hearing titled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. The gallery was filled with family members representing young victims of sexual exploitation, drug-related deaths, and adverse mental health effects of social media that can lead to chronic illness and suicide. The witnesses who provided testimony and faced often tense grilling by senators included Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta; Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X Corp; Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok; Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc.; and Jason Citron, CEO of Discord Inc.

By now, many highlights have been published in the press and on social media, including Senator Graham’s opening salvo telling the witnesses they “have blood on their hands.” There was also Sen. Hawley’s rhetorical grilling of Zuckerberg, asking whether he had personally created a fund out of his billions to compensate any families. And then, there was Sen. Whitehouse, who stated quite simply, “We’re here because your platforms really suck at policing themselves,” thereby summarizing a bipartisan sentiment that has produced five bills passed by this committee alone.

Dramatic moments aside, though, what, if anything, will get done this year? As committee members themselves noted throughout the hearing, this is a road much travelled, and little has been accomplished, either through legislation or as voluntary measures by the platforms, to address the kind of harms at issue. Big Tech’s “tobacco moment” was supposed to be in 2021 when key witnesses and whistleblowers testified that, yes, social media platforms can cause harm to users, are designed to be addictive, and that industry executives put revenue ahead of safety.

Notwithstanding Senator Cruz and other Republicans blasting Mr. Chew over the valid but separate matter of TikTok’s alleged obligations to censor and/or provide information to the Chinese Communist Party, nearly every senator reiterated a theme of rare unanimity on the central issues before the committee. There is, of course, no political downside for either party when the issues involve children, sexual exploitation, suicide, and fentanyl, and the target is Big Tech. There should be no doubt that the intent to legislate is real, but several senators alluded to the platforms’ lack of cooperation and their lobbying power to avoid federal intervention.

For instance, among the bills cited and not wholly supported by online platforms, the SHIELD Act would criminalize the nonconsensual distribution of intimate visual depictions of persons—a subject that has been on the Hill since Rep. Speier first introduced a bill in 2015. Now, with advancements in AI tools that can be used to generate synthetic sexual material using the likeness of a real person (e.g., what happened to Taylor Swift), the issue is more complicated. And by my count, there are at least two House bills responding to AI as a method to achieve potentially more harmful results than the distribution of existing recorded material.[1]

Presumably, Congress will need to harmonize legislative efforts where there appears to be some redundancy in the intent to mitigate harm based on the nature of certain material and/or the means of production and distribution of that material. Moreover, the various issues raised in the hearing imply distinct forms of accountability (e.g., the design of a platform potentially harming mental health; the handling of material uploaded by users; or platforms being more transparent about negative effects).

In a future post, I will try to summarize all the proposed legislation designed to address specific harms caused or exacerbated by social media platforms. But one subject raised on Wednesday, and which must come first, is revision of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As discussed here many times, Section 230 has been improperly read by the courts as a blanket immunity from civil litigation for online service providers, regardless of how irresponsibly the operators may address harmful material uploaded by a user of the platform.

Section 230 Front and Center

Sen. Graham declared that it’s time to repeal Section 230, while other senators were more moderated, alluding to revision of the law. Regardless, there should be little doubt that Congress supports the premise that online platforms must be subject to litigation to incentivize more effective cooperation in addressing various harms. Most immediately, revision of 230 must make clear that platforms are not exempt from court orders to remove material that is harmful to the aggrieved party.

One of the most infuriating aspects of misapplication of 230 to date is not simply that the platform is never liable for the harm (because it may not be), but that a platform can avoid complying with injunctive relief—often little more than having the basic decency to remove material that is shown to be harmful. As Sen. Whitehouse made clear, the court is the venue for determining liability and remedies, and several of his colleagues noted that it is simply absurd that one multi-billion-dollar industry is automatically excused from those procedures.

Thus, as a foundational matter, it seems essential that Section 230 is substantially revised to ensure that people, like the families represented at the hearing, can pursue legal action without having the court automatically dismiss the claim. Of course, sound reform of 230 must reject the rhetoric of some lawmakers, including Sen. Cruz, who have muddied the waters with unfounded and unhelpful allegations of platform political bias. If nothing else, alleged viewpoint bias is not a subject of Section 230, and if lawmakers really want to help the kids, they must remain focused on ensuring that a family can have its day in court.

So, as stated, we’ve been here before. Wednesday’s hearing provided a pretty good highlights reel, but let’s see if this year, it can finally lead to any tangible solutions.

[1] Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, and the No AI FRAUD Act.

Bittertweet Symphony

One of my first mantras when I started this blog was I hate Twitter, but that was shorthand for the broader view that social media is a trainwreck. Of course, the existential difficulty presented by these platforms is that while they can be highly toxic, as long as the market remains, one must have a presence if one has a business or anything else to promote. Leaving Twitter or the Meta or Google properties is not an option unless they dwindle to ghost towns. And people keep predicting Twitter is about to do just that, but is it?

Unlike the typically reclusive tech bosses, Elon Musk is all over Twitter all day long. It’s hard to miss his tweets, many of which proclaim to be defending the speech right, including on behalf of the former president, who attempted to overthrow the constitutional order of the Republic. Whether Musk even contemplates that paradox is unknown just as it is unclear whether he believes his own bullshit about the speech right or simply thinks the rhetoric will be good for business. When he complains that an advertiser exercising its speech right is anti-speech, is he really that obtuse, or is he using “speech” as a lever, hoping the market will pressure the advertiser to re-invest in Twitter?

On the other hand, if Zeeshan Aleem writing for MSNBC is correct, Musk is actively willing to lose one market in favor of another. On the subject of reinstating Trump’s account following a poll conducted by Twitter, Aleem writes, “In his presentation of his faux referendum as a win for ‘the people,’ Musk appears to be trying on right-wing populism for size. And it’s only the latest sign that he views Twitter as a platform for advancing his political agenda as he develops increasingly pronounced far-right views.”

If Musk is a right-wing populist in the mode of Trump, then his free speech rhetoric is on target—courting a base that has swapped all comprehension of American civics for a politics of fear, victimhood, and conspiracy mongering. It takes a practiced ignorance to kowtow to a putative authoritarian while arguing that he deserves a platform under the principles of the First Amendment; and I would say that one must be Trump-drunk to so thoroughly misunderstand the speech right, except that isn’t true, is it?

Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter is the logical extension of tech-utopianism just as Trump was a natural biproduct of it—because the erroneous defense that everything is free speech fosters that populist fallacy which alleges there are always two or more sides to every story. Not always. Not every story. For instance, Twitter will no longer enforce its COVID misinformation policy. So, when the market or a news editor or a platform rejects or ignores speech that is objectively false, grotesquely insane, or merely offensive, the speaker naturally colors himself a victim of censorship or “cancel culture.”

But as the new CEO of Twitter, Musk appears as a golem made from the dust and mud slung by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, Facebook, Fight for the Future, PublicKnowledge, Techdirt, Reddit, Wikimedia Foundation, and every other organization or Big Tech business who preached the gospel that every tittle and jot posted online is fundamentally speech worthy of protection. Yes, Musk is a particular kind of asshole, but the speech nonsense he coughs up today is indistinguishable from anything the tech-utopian/Silicon Valley crowd have been spewing for twenty years.

From the anti-SOPA campaign to the TPP to the incoherent battle over net neutrality to SESTA/FOSTA to the bananas narrative about Section 230 during the Trump administration, the underlying false premise has been the same—that because social platforms are clearly forums for speech, we cannot distinguish, let alone moderate, speech that is harmful or even illegal in this brave new world. But even though that view waned significantly—and deservedly—after 2016, Musk thinks he’s being clever here:

In 2022, that headline is not remotely controversial. The evidence is in and overwhelming. By first allowing every syllable or image to flow freely and then treating it all as protected speech, internet platforms fueled mobs that bullied speakers—very often women with something to say—into silence. Cyber civil rights experts Danielle Citron and Hany Farid wrote earlier this month in Slate:

In 2009, Twitter banned only spam, impersonation, and copyright violations. Then, the lone safety employee, Del Harvey, recruited one of us (Citron) to write a memo about threats, cyberstalking, and harms suffered by people under assault. Harvey wanted to tackle those harms, but the C-suite resisted in the name of being the ‘free speech wing of the free speech party.’

It took many years and multiple shocks to the political system before certain individuals in Big Tech finally admitted that they had helped build insidious machines while platform operators with the help of “digital rights” groups swept every sin under the rug of free speech. Many of the individuals who finally spoke out were whistleblowers and defectors from Facebook, but Jack Dorsey actively sought to change Twitter. Again, Citron and Farid write:

[In 2015], Jack Dorsey returned as CEO and made trust and safety a priority. This was especially evident after the 2016 election. In response to the disinformation and hate speech that plagued the platform during the election season, Dorsey and Gadde gathered a small kitchen cabinet … to map a path forward to ensure that the platform would enhance public discourse rather than destroy it.

It is no longer news that Musk fired the trust and safety folks at the company and has allegedly reversed about a decade’s worth of initiatives designed to make Twitter safer and more accountable. And it is clear from his tweets that he is doubling down on an experiment in laissez-faire speech absolutism that has already failed. In fact, he wrote this spit-take inducing tweet just a few days ago:

Is he really that naïve? Just a tech bro Ozymandias presiding over a village about to become a wasteland? Or is he an ideologue weaponizing the rhetoric of democracy to soften the ground for another run at authoritarianism? Or maybe he’s just a guy with typically inconsistent views filtered through a billionaire’s ego? Whatever Musk envisions for Twitter—a return to the free-for-all that Dorsey et al started to clean up, or a competitor to Parler—for sure he does not have to lose the whole market in order to lose the whole business.

Hazmat suit photo by: Harbucks

Facebook for Business:  Use at Your Own Risk?

COVID-19 shutdowns naturally affected some businesses more acutely than others, and many who felt the sting turned to entrepreneurism. Some saw new ventures as their only options, while others viewed the crisis as a forced opportunity to try something they had long dreamed of pursuing. No matter what motivates people to take that career leap, it’s a safe bet that nearly every entrepreneur will make more extensive use of internet platforms like Facebook to promote and/or directly sell their products or services.

The opportunity for low-cost, DIY entrepreneurism has always been one of Big Tech’s most effusive promises. And in fairness, many self-starters, from jewelry designers to storytellers, do successfully use free platforms to attract fans and customers without the need for intermediaries or costly infrastructure—or even a unique website in many cases. But what the major Silicon Valley companies failed to mention, of course, is that the ways in which they built their platforms and their business models on a laissez-faire approach to online moderation also created new opportunities for entrepreneurs in hacking, identity theft, piracy, and scams.

In a recent example, I know of one an old school friend (we’ll call her Sally) whose storefront business was critically affected by COVID shutdowns, and among the choices she made in response was to launch a podcast series. Whether she expects the podcast itself to eventually generate revenue, or simply to be a vehicle that will keep her in touch with the market while she rebuilds the original business does not really matter. It was a new venture, and people started tuning in, and like any self-starter, she would see where the podcast might lead.

But a few weeks ago, Sally announced that both the Facebook page she had created for the podcast and the page for the original business were hijacked, apparently by foreign actors. The hackers took over the admin for Sally’s pages, renamed them, and (it appears) began promoting a completely unrelated line of products to a foreign market. Why the hackers slaved her pages, which did not have thousands of followers, rather than create their own Facebook presence is unclear, but what is clear is the remedy Facebook was willing to offer when Sally contacted them for help:  not a damn thing.

To put it bluntly, Facebook told Sally she wasn’t a big enough deal for them to do anything for her, and the implications of this Emperor’s New Tech Support should be chilling to every entrepreneur on the platform, whether they’re small retailers or artists. Facebook informed Sally that they could have helped her if her page were “verified,” which does not seem to mean much because bullet point Four under the requirements to receive a “verified” badge is that the user must be “Notable: Represent a well-known, often searched person, brand or entity.” So, a big deal then.

Facebook makes a fortune from the commercial uses of its platform, and it promotes those features to everyone, but apparently without any obligation to support everyone. Why the hell not? A company with the computing power and influence of Facebook ought to be able to at least shut down a hacked page, if not fully restore it to its rightful administrator. And if this really cannot be done, the company should be required to post a warning label for less “notable” users informing them that they’re basically on their own when it comes to security.

Meanwhile, I have seen friends put in “Facebook jail” for making jokes its moderators (or algorithms) don’t understand. In fact, my colleague David Lowery made a Bugs Bunny reference about “Killing the Wabbit” in one of his posts, and some Magoo flagged it for inciting violence and gave David a time out to think about his behavior. It seems to me that if Facebook can screw up so exquisitely and with such granularity that it homes in on a single Looney Tunes reference, the company has the ability and obligation to help the Sallys of the world recover their pages from hackers.

In no other context would consumers tolerate a company declaring that it has built a system too big to manage. Nowhere in Facebook’s promotion of its commercial services do we see bold, red warning signs that say Use at Own Risk. The reasonable expectation in the market remains that when a company sells something, it bears certain obligations to its customers. My bank has tens of millions of customers worldwide, and I am by no means a “notable” customer. But if a fraudulent use of my card were to occur, it will be immediately and effectively addressed, and the bank will even eat the fraudulent charges. So, really? Facebook can’t help victims of hackers get their pages back? Really?

Illustration by: VIGE