Tag: fake news

Fool me once, shame on Facebook …

In several posts on the subject of Facebook and fake news, I have opined that if we users are going to believe and disseminate bogus information, that’s mostly an us problem, one which Facebook likely cannot solve. In that spirit, there is an extent to which I agree with Mike Masnick’s Techdirt post on May 2 calling Facebook’s plans to rank news sources according to trustworthiness a “bad idea.” At least I agree with Masnick that a human flaw like confirmation bias is a “hell of a drug,” which cannot be counteracted by whatever algorithmic wizardry Zuckerberg & Team may devise.

But other than conceding that people are imperfect, subjective beings, and therefore susceptible to false information, I disagree with the rationale Masnick seems to apply in his critique of Facebook’s plans. He writes, “…as with the lack of an objective definition of ‘bad,’ you’ve got the same problem with ‘trust.’ For example, I sure don’t trust ‘the system’ that Zuckerberg mentions…to do a particularly good job of determining which news sources are trustworthy.”

Perhaps that’s just wordplay, but I find Masnick’s allusion to the subjectivity of trust to be symptomatic of the same populist affliction that precipitated the post-truth world in which we now live. I had hoped that the moment we elected a president who openly lies on Twitter, that this might at least serve as a clear and profound rebuttal to the cyber-utopian mantra that everything—including journalism—needed disrupting. Because if trustworthiness in news is not, on some level, objectively quantifiable, then all journalism must devolve to the exigencies of confirmation bias.

A functioning and humane democratic society depends on limits to democracy itself—on deference to expertise based on certain objective criteria to decide when that deference has been earned. It is essential that a reporter write, This Thing Happened—or even Here’s Why This Matters—and that a plurality of reasonable people accept the report as reliable based on objective (if subtle) metrics. Years of experience, background, track record, tone and style, and, yes, the organization a reporter works for should all factor into this assessment. So, I reject the proposal that “trust” is nearly so subjective as “bad” in this context. The integrity of a news report is not a matter of taste. Yet, Masnick writes …

“Facebook should never be the arbiter of truth, no matter how much people push it to be. Instead, it can and should be providing tools for its users to have more control. Let them create better filters. Let them apply their own “trust” metrics, or share trust metrics that others create.”

Call me a curmudgeon, but how is “applying one’s own trust metrics” any different from the same confirmation bias problem that social media tends to exacerbate in the first place? Masnick’s solution appears to be more confirmation bias, resembling the cliché that insists “more speech is the only solution to bad speech.” If that premise was ever true (and I have my doubts), it has been obliterated by the phenomenon of social media where more is often the enemy of reason.

Masnick is right, of course, that users who like Infowars are going to respond negatively if Facebook ranks that platform as less trustworthy than The New York Times or Wall Street Journal; but that’s a business problem for Facebook—one I could care less about because Infowars IS objectively less trustworthy than those news sources. And lest anyone think that’s liberal bias talking, I’ll say the same thing about Occupy Democrats or any of the other non-news sources my friends link to all the time.

These platforms don’t deserve equal footing with actual journalism, and if Facebook wants to rank news sources, fine. Whatever. I’m probably as skeptical as Masnick that it will do much good in the grand scheme of public discourse, but I think he exaggerates when he calls Facebook an “arbiter of truth.” This sounds more like the blogger who tends to oppose platform responsibility full stop than a complaint about what Facebook is doing wrong in grappling with its role as a conduit of news. In fact, it’s hard to fathom exactly what Masnick proposes as a solution when he writes, “The answer isn’t to force Facebook to police all bad stuff, it should be to move back towards a system where information is more distributed, and we’re not pressured into certain content because that same Facebook thinks it will lead to the most ‘engagement.’”

That reads like the suggestion is Facebook should not be Facebook, which is probably a non-starter as far as the shareholders are concerned. Instead, I tend to think that Facebook should be recognized for the flawed, highly-manipulated, walled-garden it is and placed in its proper context—as an activity to be moderated like video gaming or junk food. Because with or without rankings, we really have no idea what the psychological effect is of just scrolling past images and headlines that trigger dozens of subconscious emotional responses in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, to the extent that Facebook remains a source of news and information, if ranking means I’ll encounter The Daily Beast more often than The Daily Democrat, I’ll count that as a win.

Time for a Fresh Conversation About Privacy and Publicity

“Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual … the right ‘to be let alone.’ Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’”

Those words could be describing the pervasive—and invasive—digital age, but they’re not. They are in fact excerpted from a paper published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, written by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, nearly 30 years before the Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court. Considered a seminal work articulating a right to privacy in the U.S., Warren and Brandeis examine the subject by first theorizing the right as implicated by the fact that unpublished works like personal letters enjoyed a perpetual common-law copyright.

In essence, if the private thoughts, images, or other embodied works are published against the will of the author, this amounts to coerced speech in violation of the First Amendment; and Warren and Brandeis begin with a premise that this principle is coextensive with a right of privacy. They state:

“The principle which protects personal writings and any other productions of the intellect of or the emotions, is the right to privacy, and the law has no new principle to formulate when it extends this protection to the personal appearance, sayings, acts, and to personal relation, domestic or otherwise.”

And in a distinctly victorian observation that seems to anticipate the most exploitative, nip-slip paparazzi out there, they write:

“If you may not reproduce a woman’s face photographically without her consent, how much less should be tolerated the reproduction of her face, her form, and her actions, by graphic descriptions colored to suit a gross and depraved imagination.”

Although the contemporary right of publicity, shaped in the 1950s, owes much to the Warren/Brandeis paper, the pair might be disappointed to see that their sense of “depraved imagination” is amply protected by the right of the free press today. The newsworthiness of public persons is interpreted broadly enough in the U.S. that if Lupita Nyong’o is photographed choosing a brand of toothpaste, the public that would be interested in such minutia has a “right to know.” Ditto anything that might be personally embarrassing, from tripping on the sidewalk, to an argument with a friend, to a wardrobe malfunction. It’s all news. And it has to be said that plenty of serendipitous, photographic works have earned distinction as art (see career of Harry Benson).

On the other hand, if Johnson & Johnson were to seize the opportunity to create an unlicensed print ad with the hypothetical toothpaste photo, this would violate Ms. Nyong’o’s right of publicity, which generally draws the line at commercial exploitation of a person’s name or likeness, and this can include promoting an agenda by a non-profit organization. Again, the First Amendment holds sway. Capture a public person doing almost anything and it’s likely to be protected by free press; but use that public person’s likeness to endorse a product or message, and it’s a First Amendment infringement as coerced speech.

Although Warren and Brandeis look to the copyright protection of unpublished works as a starting point, they further assert that privacy is unavoidably intertwined with the rationale for the protection of intimate “thoughts, emotions, and sensations.” In fact, about a hundred years later, in J.D. Salinger v. Random House (1987), when the Second Circuit held that a biography on Salinger had relied too heavily on the author’s unpublished letters, the court also cited deference to his right of privacy.  And I think we all know how Salinger felt about his privacy.

Your Face Here (whether you like it or not)

Now, we enter a new technological paradigm—privacy and publicity invasions in which a subject (or victim) need not even accidentally participate. As my colleague Sarah Howes, counsel at SAG/AFTRA, describes in her blog on Medium, “There are technologies out there that can insert female actors’ faces into nonconsensual fake porn, and manipulate video and radio content to literally put words in the mouths of anyone, including actors, news broadcasters, and politicians.”

For performers like those represented by SAG/AFTRA, the effectiveness of this technology has led to an effort by these professionals to extend the publicity right beyond their own lifetimes. It was widely reported as technologically cool in 2016 when the late Peter Cushing was resurrected and seamlessly cast in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but the capacity to accomplish this also suggests that perhaps a deceased performer’s heirs or trusted assigns should have the right to decide under what conditions the actor or actress returns to the screen.

As Howes points out, people can cause a lot of trouble with very dire consequences as these applications become easier to use. Casting movie stars in pornographic films without their consent is one example; but the implications for a society already draining truth like a Sweeny Todd bloodbath are quite staggering. The axiom was  inverted years ago: seeing is no longer believing. But now malicious parties—be they Russian agents with an agenda or internet trolls amusing themselves—will soon add video “evidence” to their arsenal of weaponized bullshit.

When I first looked at the board site 4Chan several years ago, there was one channel where it seemed fairly common for members to upload innocuous snapshots of girls with an open request to the group to make them naked (ah, crowd-sourcing). A few posts down the thread, the request would be fulfilled by someone with Photoshop skills. And while it’s easy to write that off as the pastime of basement-dwelling losers, it’s worth remembering that, as Chris Ruen pointed out in his section about the anti-SOPA campaign in his book Freeloading, the line between basement-dwelling losers and sober internet activists is not exactly a wall of separation.

In fact, more acutely and more recently, The Washington Post reported last week that the chat board 8Chan (essentially 4Chan 2.0) was a major source—if not the source—of false narratives about the Stoneman Douglas shooting, including rumors that the student activists were hired shills of the DNC et al. “The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity,” write Craig Timberg and Drew Harwell for the Post.

So apropos Sarah Howes’s observations, we will soon see bogus video “evidence” in the narrative of otherwise serious policy debate, and these assets will be as easily produced by some basement-dwelling loser as the aforementioned fake nudes. If we are not already too far down this rabbit hole, we are certainly still digging in the wrong direction. And among the remedies to protect both the dignity of individuals and the public’s right to know the truth, it may be time to reconsider both privacy and publicity protections in context to technologies that are as new to us as “instantaneous photographs” were to Warren and Brandeis at the turn of the century.

In conclusion, the two attorneys rather remarkably predicted the negative effects of democratizing and mass-producing information without regard to value or editorial scrutiny. I mean they could hardly have imagined Boing Boing when they wrote the following:

“Each crop of unseemly gossip, thus harvested, becomes the seed of more, and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in the lowering of social standards and of morality. Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts. It belittles by inverting the relative importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of a people. When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community, what wonder that the ignorant and thoughtless mistake its relative importance. Easy of comprehension, appealing to that weak side of human nature which is never wholly cast down by the misfortunes and frailties of our neighbors, no one can be surprised that it usurps the place of interest in brains capable of other things.”

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.