Category: Social Media

Deepfakes & The Choice to Be Deceived

Immediately after the 2016 election, many Americans discovered just how much fake news they were sharing via social media.  And for about ten minutes, the term fake news had a specific and literal meaning; it referred to fabricated stories made to look like news, and which serve either as clickbait to generate ad revenue or as mischief to fan the flames of political discord.  But then, the president co-opted the term as a way to dismiss any reportage that does not jibe with his myriad, fact-challenged narratives, and fake news no longer means anything at all. 

Now, the unreal is about to get a lot more real—and more dangerous.  The technology known as “deepfakes” enables fairly unsophisticated users to produce video evidence of events that never happened.  As highlighted in this CNN report on the subject, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) raises the very plausible fear that, in this next election cycle, we are going see video clips showing elected officials and candidates doing and saying things that are entirely fake, but which look absolutely real. “I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and western democracies,” Rubio stated in a hearing with the Director of National Intelligence.

And that’s not necessarily the worst effect of deep fakes, at least with regard to news and politics.  As, Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert interviewed in that CNN report, observes, an equal—if not worse—hazard confronts us when people inevitably cry “deepfake” on visual evidence that is indeed factual.  Think about how often President Trump changes his story on just about everything and is then checked against his own prior statements captured on video.  All he, or his spokes-minions, have to do is recite the incantation “deepfake,” and the record is expunged in the minds of millions.  Not that this same folly will not occur among other segments of the electorate, but Trump provides the most obvious, stark, and timely reference in this regard.

Naturally, the anticipation that deep fake technology will be used as a weapon of information warfare leads to the assumption that the remedies will also be technological.  The Pentagon has already called the potential abuse of deepfakes a threat to national security, and Farid makes the logical prediction that social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube will need to deploy deepfake detection software to warn viewers.  But it also stands to reason that faking software will only improve, quite possibly to the extent that it cannot be detected by counter-fake technology.  And even then, can any kind of technical metering overwhelm the psychological instinct to believe what we want to believe?

The truth about our fallibility, as filmmaker Errol Morris’s tells us, is that believing is seeing, and not the other way around.  While images can inform, they just as often lie like crazy, not only because we are hardwired to see what we want to see in recorded images but also because, as Susan Sontag writes,  “…the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.”

Consider the recent story that began with a viral video clip that appeared to show MAGA hat-wearing teenagers openly mocking a Native American at a rally in Washington D.C. Then, a second video capturing the same events revealed a much broader context that at least alters the original narrative about those kids’ behavior, and possibly undermines it altogether.  Either way, it is impossible to imagine how the addition of deepfakes into this already-volatile environment will not make matters worse.  So, what is the solution to this new form of sophisticated, weaponized information?  

No doubt, there is more than one answer to that question, but, as I’ve opined in the past, I think the only hope is a cultural shift in us as information consumers and not a technological fix on the part of the platform owners.  This might mean, as it did for me, abandoning social platforms as a primary source for “curated” information.  But no matter how we choose to filter information, we have to stop pouncing on every photograph and video clip as evidence to support our “deep stories.”  At the same time, professional journalists must stop trying to keep pace with the shrieking frenzy of social media.

For instance, I initially heard about that D.C. clash on CNN, when they cited the first viral video as evidence that a mob of teenagers had indeed assaulted a Native American elder.  The anchor reporting the story even editorialized with a scornful word or two about the kids’ conduct.  But then, CNN followed up, reporting that a second video shows a “different side of the encounter,” and they hosted an interview with Nathan Phillips (the Native American), which also skews the story considerably from the way it was originally reported.  But does CNN’s follow-up do enough to build any kind of consensus around the truth?

When I first started this blog, the trending videos at that time were coming from the cellphones of Occupy Wall Street attendees, usually depicting apparent acts of police brutality against allegedly peaceful protestors.  Clearly, such incidents did occur, but at the same time, the omnipresence of cameras—especially at a movement that quickly devolved to activist tourism—helped to foster an illusion that the people’s images are the “real” truth, even to the extent that citizen journalism has eroded trust in professional journalism.  

This is not to say that amateur video cannot tell us anything.  Surely it can.  But the inexorable deployment of deepfakes, which will probably be most effective when disguised as citizen journalism, will be all the more hazardous if we cannot trust real journalists to provide context, corroboration, or correction for what we think we’re seeing.  In this regard, CNN’s own deepfakes reporting might serve as a cautionary tale to its main news desk (and every other news organization) that the visual “evidence” they obtain via social media and other outside sources should be treated with a level of scrutiny as though it were mere rumor.  And, as consumers, we should begin to do the same.

Photo by kiosea39

Really, DON’T Believe Anything You See on the Internet

When that cliché first entered our consciousness, it wasn’t really fair. The internet between the mid-90s and the mid-aughts wasn’t what it is today. It actually was just a dumb pipe through which content could could be delivered from creator to consumer in a new way. It was silly to imply that one should not believe a news story published by the Washington Post just because it was on a screen instead of  paper — and that principle still holds true for most professional journalism.

But now, every legitimate news source swims in the same stream with all the garbage—from raw clickbait to lazy aggregators to hackers purposely trying to exploit underlying divisions in democracies—and the tools of manipulation are so sophisticated that many of the manipulators themselves don’t have to be. With a little practice using software that anybody can steal, a kid can create a video that makes it look like Hillary Clinton said that “all veterans are pussies,” and…well, here we are.

“One of the things I did not understand was that these systems can be used to manipulate public opinion in ways that are quite inconsistent with what we think of as democracy.”

That’s what Alphabet (Google parent company) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said, recently quoted in an article on FastCompany. And in keeping with the theme of this post, I don’t know what to believe. Were Schmidt and the rest of the leadership at Google honestly so drunk on their own utopian rhetoric about how wonderful their systems are that they failed to imagine—to say nothing of observe—how their products could be toxic for democracy? Or did they recognize it and not care until they were forced to care amid the fallout from the investigations into Russian meddling?

Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker—he was also the co-founder of Napster—told Mike Allen of AXIOS in a recent interview that Facebook was designed to “exploit a vulnerability in human psychology” in order to keep people on the site as much as possible. Parker told Allen that the creators of Facebook understood what they were doing and did it anyway, though perhaps did not quite imagine what the results would be when a billion people voluntarily spend hours in Zuckerberg’s ant farm. “…it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

How much has changed in such a very short time. It seems like only yesterday the cheerleaders of Silicon Valley, with all the confidence of Camel-smoking doctors, kept telling us just how good their products were for democracy and for society overall. All this goodness was packaged into a single generic word innovation, and anything that stood in the way of innovation—like maybe the rule of law—was bad. Now, all of a sudden, we hear a lot of “Wow, we had no idea our systems could be used to totally fuck up the world! We’ll get some people on that right away!”

Of course, these companies either will not or cannot fully address the underlying reasons why their systems can be so toxic; and Parker put his finger on it when he admitted that Facebook was designed to take advantage of human folly. Facebook may clean up its act in certain regards—I actually believe Zuckerberg wants to—and Congress may enforce some effective regulations upon these platforms; but none of this will address the flaw in human nature that makes us more susceptible to emotional triggers than we are to reason and information. That’s why the underlying promise of the information age—that information can only have a moderating effect on discourse and interaction—is proving to be untrue.

There’s something fundamentally harmful about taking complex topics and issues and transforming it all into advertising, but that’s essentially what a platform like Facebook or Twitter does. “The sad truth is that Facebook and Alphabet have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits,” writes Roger McNamee for The Guardian. “They have consciously combined persuasive techniques developed by propagandists and the gambling industry with technology in ways that threaten public health and democracy. The issue, however, is not social networking or search. It is advertising business models.”

McNamee, who is identified as an early investor in Google and Facebook, describes how the advertising revenue models of these platforms drive, for instance, Facebook to deliver content based on user preferences, creating feedback loops called “filter bubbles.” People have been writing about the filter-bubble problem for several years now, but I suspect the problem is far too subtle to expect that the platforms themselves, with or without legislative mandates, will solve it.

Amid the recent flurry of allegations of sexual assault, satirical posts have appeared on Facebook with photos of Tom Hanks and leads saying, “Dozens of women come forward to…” And then, you click on the story, and it completes, “…say that Tom Hanks is a really nice guy.” Variations on this gag appear all the time, like the reports that Keith Richards is still alive. But you can bet the beer money that any number of people just scrolling through a feed on their phone, perhaps waiting in the supermarket line right next the old-school tabloids, will come away with the impression that indeed Tom Hanks was implicated in some sexual abuse claim. Then, the rumor gets repeated to a friend, and that’s more or less the state of “information” in the digital age. It’s the National Enquirer at “Google scale.”

According David Roberts, writing for Vox, America is in the middle of an epistemic crisis, suggesting that at least many citizens are beyond the problem of separating fact from fiction and are instead living in a world in which facts simply don’t matter. It is a mindset he calls “tribal epistemology—the systemic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.”

For the time being, analysis of the online media universe reveals this problem is more prevalent on the political right (see support of Roy Moore even if he did assault a teenager), but the political left is hardly immune to this kind of tribalism. In fact, this blog was inspired five years ago when I witnessed this exact behavior among left-leaning friends, who were willing to share false information because it supported the outcome they believed to be right. So, although it is somewhat encouraging that this year marks the turning point when internet platforms will no longer be given a free pass — either by lawmakers or the public — to simply do what they want “for the greater good,” that hardly addresses how we individually and collectively will learn to cope with “God knows what’s happening to our brains,” as Parker puts it.

Understanding DMCA with help from Michelle Shocked

It is a chronically repeated theme—and therefore a widely held misconception—that the DMCA is solely a mechanism for rights holders to unilaterally and unequivocally remove content from the Web “without due process.” In fact, this belief is so deeply ingrained that just citing the acronym by some journalists and bloggers is sufficient to denote censorship for many readers. We encounter language like censored by DMCA, speech chilled by DMCA, threatened with DMCA, and so on.  Unfortunately, this shorthand only perpetuates a general misunderstanding of what the DMCA is and how it works with regard to the remedies and counter remedies for alleged copyright infringements. As a result, critics who repeat this one-sided narrative can actually wind up frightening some of the very users and creators whose interests they claim to represent.

For starters, it should be understood that the process of sending notices or counter notices under DMCA is not a casual transaction for either sender or receiver.  Senders of takedown notices must declare under penalty of perjury that they are providing accurate information; that they are legally authorized to “act on behalf of the owner…”; and that they have “…a good faith belief that the use of the material is not authorized ….” Likewise, senders of counter notices, which are used to restore or retain contested material online, also must declare under penalty of perjury that they have “a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as the result of a mistake or misidentification .…” This can all be rather intimidating for both rights holders and for users of copyrighted material who don’t have access to legal departments—and who might even get all manner of bad advice from colleagues making unqualified assumptions about copyright. While the largest senders of DMCA takedown notices are, naturally, the corporate owners of thousands of works, the reason these entities are able to send out tens of millions of notices with a very small margin of error is that they do have legal departments dedicated to oversight and enforcement of their rights, and they do know what they’re doing.

But when an individual creator—whether amateur or professional—makes use of a work belonging to another individual creator, the possibility always exists that neither party quite knows where they stand legally, which can make DMCA appear rather confusing and spooky, depending on which end of a notice one happens to be on. This is one reason why some of the headline abuses of takedown procedure—the ones typically highlighted by copyright critics—can foster a general worry that DMCA is just a mechanism for censorship. But even in public statements and court filings by internet industry representatives, DMCA takedown abuse cases are cited in the hundreds—sometimes on a worldwide scale—relative to the 100-millionth-takedown-notice milestone, which Google alone reached in 2014. A ratio of less than 1%.

Still, among individuals and small entities, either a takedown notice or a counter-notice can be sent in error, even if the sender states he/she has made a good faith effort to understand the validity of a claim.  But the point I want to emphasize is that the general perception that a DMCA takedown notice is the final word (i.e. lacks due process) is actually a reversal of how the process works.  In fact, as I’ll expand upon with the anecdote to follow, it is the counter notice that is technically the final word within DMCA’s limited mechanisms. After that, if the copyright holder wants a file removed, and the uploader will not cooperate, the copyright holder’s only recourse is a court order pending litigation for copyright infringement presented to the ISP within 10 days of the filing of a counter notice.  So, it is not remotely accurate to describe DMCA as a tool for takedown without due process.  For a more detailed explanation of DMCA mechanisms, read Stephen Carlisle’s article from 2014.

How artist Michelle Shocked’s generosity is being abused by DMCA provisions. And why it matters.

A common category of video on YouTube is the musical cover.  People share these all the time, especially when the video features some adorable kid who’s killing it with her rendition of a popular song.  That most of these videos, which make use of copyrighted works, are not removed from YouTube may be attributed to one of three common factors:  1) that in 2013, YouTube entered into blanket licensing agreements with the major publishers on a vast library of popular music; or 2) that many rights holders of these works are somewhat ambivalent about these incidental uses and/or find the process of takedown too burdensome; or 3) that many rights holders actually enjoy these covers very much and are generally happy to see their work shared in this manner. When conflicts do arise, they tend to be fairly specific, pertaining to some distinct concern on the part of the independent creator who owns his/her copyrights and would, therefore, not be bound or covered by the aforementioned blanket license agreements.

One such artist is the singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked, who has been an adamant crusader on behalf of artists’ rights and is a regular follower of this blog. As serious as she is about protecting copyrights, she also happens to be totally cool with unlicensed YouTube video covers of her songs, as long as the user respects two simple conditions.  The first is that the video not be monetized with advertising because Shocked doesn’t want Google to earn revenue from her work without an agreement. In fact, because of her views on artists’ rights, she works to keep her own live and recorded performances off YouTube even though she is happy to let others publicly perform her songs on the platform.  The second condition is that Shocked prefers that her name not appear in the video file title, but rather in the description crediting her as songwriter/composer. The reasons for this are myriad with regard to maintaining some control over search results (and even monetization) of her name, but suffice to say, it’s her prerogative and an easy enough condition to respect.

So, in the utopian narrative of sharing and remixing and diffusion of culture and ideas—and all that feel-good stuff—Shocked’s two minor conditions for performing her songs without a license in YouTube videos seem both reasonable and entirely consistent with those high-minded aspirations of creativity in the digital-age people keep talking about. Fundamentally, she’s not asking for much effort beyond a little common courtesy, which one would think is also consistent with sharing and caring and so on. In fact, Shocked has had numerous cordial exchanges with online performers of her songs, thanking them for the cover but asking them politely to remove her name from the title. And until recently, all have been happy to comply, grateful to have a friendly exchange with the songwriter.

But this was not the case for one YouTuber, Steve Pierce, who uploaded a video of himself playing Shocked’s song “Memories of East Texas” and used her name in the main title of the video file.  As usual, her first response was to write Pierce, thank him for his “beautiful cover” of her song, and to ask that he kindly remove her name from the title and instead use it in the description.  After some time without a response from him, and seeing no change to the file name, Shocked sent a takedown notice using DMCA procedures and subsequently received notice from YouTube that Pierce filed a counter notice in which he stated his opinion that his video cover performance constitutes a “fair use.”  Now, we have a ballgame, and here’s why:*

In a hypothetical lawsuit, a court would almost certainly deny a fair use defense for an individual’s unlicensed video recording and public distribution of a cover song, as this would appear to effectively throw out the purpose of both the mechanical and public performance rights altogether. My point is not, however, to play amateur legal soothsayer about a hypothetical case but rather to note that Pierce’s invocation of the words “fair use”—for a use otherwise covered by a specific type of compulsory license—seems to be a common habit among non-attorneys of late. But “fair use” is not a magical incantation that will automatically ward off all infringement claims.  In reality, Pierce’s use is not “fair” but instead has been made conditionally available to him by permission of the author. And because he chooses to not respect one of those conditions, the point I’m stressing here is that Shocked is actually quite limited by the mechanisms in DMCA.  Her only recourse is to litigate or let it go.

Because Michelle Shocked owns all her copyrights and has no agreements with YouTube—and because Pierce’s fair use defense would very likely be denied—her claim should theoretically be quite solid.  But the merits of a hypothetical case are secondary to the fact that she never wanted to sue anybody in the first place.  It’s a pain in the butt and very expensive to sue people in federal court. Plus, she has no problem with the content of the video itself, only with the use of her name in the title. So, maybe you’re thinking, “Big deal. So he used her name. Let it go.” In practical terms, perhaps, but in principle not necessarily.

Shocked’s story provides an instructive example of the functional weakness in DMCA for the individual rights holder. And this is why it’s infuriating to independent creators in particular to hear the repeated theme that DMCA is just a big, digital eraser used to summarily remove content from the Web without recourse.  Exactly the opposite is true; DMCA is largely a voluntary mechanism in which the individual creator asks, “Please remove this,” and a perfectly legal response may be, “No. And you can sue me if you don’t like it.”

Moreover, under these circumstances, what is really stopping this user, and therefore YouTube, from ignoring Shocked’s first condition that videos of her works not be monetized by advertising?  Certainly nothing within the scope of the DMCA.  In theory, this would mean that Google could get away with generating revenue from this use despite the artist’s desire to generously share her work with people in a non-commercial context. This is a hypothetical projection in this case, of course, but not if we look more broadly at the ebb and flow of infringements on the YouTube platform over time.  In fact, Google’s monetizing the infringing material its users upload and re-upload is the crux of rights holders’ conflicts with that company; and the neutrality it asserts while earning billions of ad-revenue dollars is one reason many see flaws in the safe harbor provisions of DMCA.

Understanding what DMCA is and how it really works is important, if people really want to claim that they care about the artist and culture more than the big corporation.  In the end, Steve Pierce’s cover song will probably not be heard by millions—or even likely thousands—of listeners; and the video itself will remain one relatively innocuous clip in a sea of billions.  But if we multiply Michelle Shocked’s experience by thousands of independent, fledgling new artists out there, it’s not difficult to see how perpetuating the myth that DMCA skews in favor of rights holders can result in one or two dominant Internet platforms dictating terms to creators in the long run.

*Mr. Pierce’s name was originally misidentified as Martin DX1KAE, which is the type of guitar he’s playing and not his YouTube handle.  See comments from Mr. Pierce in response to this article.