Tag: facebook

A Low-Tech Solution to the Russian Hack Problem

So, here’s my non-technological, non-regulatory, short-term solution for what we’ll generally call the Russian hack problem:  Share less. A lot less.

If 100 million or so citizens shared just a little less noise, this would substantially mitigate the intended effects of Russian meddlers and other manipulators who stand to gain from Americans hating each other and, by extension, hating democratic principles. And just maybe such a dramatic shift in user behavior would also provide Facebook with useful information for redesigning the platform. Here’s a recent post a friend put up …

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/nras-dana-loesch-says-mlk-might-alive-today-carrying-concealed-weapon/

This a perfect example of a story that  I will not “Like” or share despite my gut instinct to believe that Dana Loesch might be crazy enough to say something that stupid. But here’s a rough calculus as to why I won’t promote this post:

Is it likely that the headline accurately reflects what she said? Maybe.

Is RawStory a serious, investigative news organization? No.

Is this story addressing the gun-control issue in a substantive way? No.

Is it satire (because satire has value)?  No.

Are my friends and I already broadly disgusted by Loesch and the NRA?  Yes.

Even if she said this, does it really change the broader narrative? No.

By sharing, would I add to the level of noise and outrage? Yes.

By sharing, would I feed the data-harvesting machine for no good reason?  Yes!

By sharing, would I be aiding the efforts of foreign manipulators?  Yes!!!!!

I’m not suggesting that my personal approach represents a universal rationale. But if a large percentage of users were to adopt some rationale for simply not promoting the least-substantive and most sensational posts (unless they’re legit funny), this would probably have a mitigating effect on the current problem before either Facebook or Congress does anything. At the very least, it would be interesting to see what happens.  Not that I’m holding my breath.

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, & Our Digital Dysfunction

In late November of 2011, one of the hottest-trending, internet-related topics was the campaign to stop the SOPA/PIPA bills. In early/mid 2017, the noisiest issue was “net neutrality,” as FCC Chairman Pai made good on his promise to reverse the 2015 Open Internet Order. In both cases, the public was served volumes of emotional hyperbole, created by vested interests, used to sell variations on the theme that democracy itself was under attack. Meanwhile, our democracy was under attack, just not in a way that anybody seemed to care about very much in contrast to issues that, ironically enough, only exacerbated the underlying problem.

At roughly the same time that “digital rights” organizations—EFF, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, et al—began amping up the anti-SOPA rhetoric, convincing Americans that Hollywood was determined to “break the internet and stifle free speech,” Facebook was signing a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission after the agency charged the company with deceiving “consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.”

As Wall Street eagerly anticipated the platform’s IPO, Facebook entered into the FTC agreement, which barred the company from certain privacy-breaching conduct and mandated a 20-year regime of third-party, privacy audits for compliance. But last weekend, The Guardian revealed whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, who says he helped build a “propaganda machine” based on the data of at least 50-million American Facebook users. In response, the FTC is now investigating whether the social media platform violated that 2011 consent decree. If so, the penalty—on paper anyway—would be $40,000 times 50 million.

While nobody expects a two-trillion-dollar fine at the end of this process, the social media giant has a lot of explaining to do, and Senator’s Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Kennedy (R-LA) have called for Mark Zuckerberg to personally testify before Congress. It’s going to be tense for whoever takes that seat, just based on the testimony of former Facebook operations manager Sandy Parakilas, who has spoken to The Guardian, NPR, and others. He describes an internal policy of Facebook executives choosing to not know how their data is used after being shared with developers. Parakilas even alleges the rationale that “Facebook [believed] it was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening.”

That’s a familiar refrain for anyone who’s been banging a head against this bulwark excuse for everything from copyright infringement to sex-trafficking—the holy trinity of internet platform defenses: We didn’t know. We can’t know. We shouldn’t know. Unfortunately for Facebook and other major platforms, what Parakilas alleges in the press is called willful blindness, which is the legal equivalent of knowing exactly what’s going on while pretending you don’t.

It is at least encouraging that the conversation is finally changing. Less than two years ago, it was tough to get much attention for a post describing how a statutory liability shield like Section 230 mutated into a presumed blanket immunity from responsibility for everything that happens on a platform. This morning, that exact narrative was a lead story on NPR in which Alina Selyukh steps listeners through the narrative, from the rationale for the statute in 1996, right up to the only amendment to the law (FOSTA), proposed in response to its misapplication as “a teflon shield” immunizing Backpage for its alleged role in promoting child sex-trafficking.

During the five years between the Facebook/FTC consent agreement and the election of 2016, the narrative persisted that an “open” internet was inherently a democracy-sustaining internet. The problem was that what “open” really meant to the major platform companies was permission to do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted. And they did.

The reason I bracketed the start of this post with the anti-SOPA campaign and the “net neturality” kerfuffle is to make the point that when it comes to cyber policy, we have consistently been instructed by the industry itself to look at the wrong issues. For instance, SOPA would have had zero negative effect on speech; and the “net neutrality” issue was entirely irrelevant to the Cambridge Analytica story, which represents a very real, cyber-age threat to the health of the Republic. If anything, these revelations demonstrate why the FTC’s authority over edge providers like Facebook and Google is far more urgent than the matter of placing ISPs under the regulatory framework of the FCC.

I’ve been strident, to say the least, in denouncing organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for presuming to rally the free speech right in defense of an almost-universal, zero-liability policy for internet companies. Off the top of my head, the internet would be destroyed and speech chilled, according to EFF and friends, if …we had passed SOPA/PIPA or ratified the TPP; if we allowed internet companies to take voluntary action to stop various crimes and abuses; if we allow Backpage to face litigation or pass FOSTA; if the 2015 FCC OIO is reversed; if copyrights are ever enforced by anybody for any reason; or if we should, heaven forbid, rethink the ultra-libertarian, disrupt-culture bullshit that led anyone to believe that social media was fundamentally good for American democracy in the first place!

We’ve been swallowing a lot of nonsense about the internet for a long time, and I like to think of this period as our peyote ritual—a time to finally vomit up all these demons before we can even attempt sober consideration of what, if any, mitigating action we take next. As Taylor Lorenz describes for The Daily Beast, simply leaving Facebook isn’t so easy (unless we all bail at the same time, I guess), and there should be no reason to abandon the positive attributes—namely, legit social connection—that draw us to these sites in the first place. It’s just that we have to reconcile the fact that the reasons we’re there for ourselves are not the same reasons the platform owners wanted us there. Coming to terms with that disconnect is probably where the next iteration of cyber-policy—whether statutory or voluntary—should probably begin.

Turns Out Money Talks in Silicon Valley

For years, producers of creative content—from individual artists to mass-media corporations—have tried to engage with internet companies (mainly Google) in an effort to stop the facilitation of rampant, unlicensed access to their material. Whether the complaint is millions of unlicensed works on YouTube, or search results leading users to pirate sites, copyright owners are all-too familiar with the dual response We can’t and We shouldn’t. This is shorthand for the internet industry’s standard claim that they can’t effectively police their platforms; and even if they could, they shouldn’t because freedom.

But as reported in January 2017, advertising giant Procter & Gamble issued a warning on behalf of global advertisers who spend a combined $70+ billion on digital, announcing that they were no longer willing to accept can’t and shouldn’t as answers to their key complaints. These were a lack of transparency (i.e. independent audit) in measuring the quality and effectiveness of digital advertising; and an inability to prevent brands from supporting intolerable content. So, terrorist recruiting videos on YouTube brought to you by Colgate just isn’t working for the brand managers anymore.  Yet, strangely, the internet companies and their bevy of think-tankers have not told these advertisers to stop hating the future and change their business models.  (Though I’d like to watch if they did.)

Fast-forward a year and the Wall Street Journal this week reports that Unilever is threatening to substantially reduce its ad buy on Facebook and YouTube if the companies do not more effectively weed out fake news and other divisive content like racism, sexism, and violence. What’s striking about this article is its concluding follow-up report that P&G’s brand officer Mark Pritchard — it was he in 2017, who charged the internet platforms to clean up their act — notes that “progress has been impressive” and that ninety-percent of his demands have been met.

It will come as no surprise to the creative community that, when revenue is at stake, the major internet companies suddenly discover that it is both technically possible and ideologically conceivable to police their platforms a bit more aggressively than they have to date. Artists and creators should follow these developments because the political, social, and financial pressure being exerted on the platform providers can make the companies more vulnerable to potential liability for infringing creative works; and this might make them a bit more cooperative about solving the “unsolvable” issue of mass infringement. By demonstrating a capacity for control (because now they have to), this underscores what should be obvious to most people — that the tradition of shrugging off the interests of rights holders has been a business decision. Period.

No doubt, many “digital rights” activists will prophesy the end of days for democracy in response to this trend toward platform responsibility; but they can take heart knowing that democracy hasn’t exactly thrived under the principles applied thus far. The assumption that all online interactions are protected speech, and that more speech is the only antidote to harmful speech, is still proving to be a destructive fallacy every second of every day. And it turns out the advertisers, whose money pays for these platforms of democracy, don’t accept that the answer to hate-speech and fake news is to just let it ride until our better angels eventually prevail. It turns out this is both bad for society and bad for business. It turns out money talks in Silicon Valley. And if that’s the only way to get internet companies to behave like citizens instead of bullies, then whatever works.