Tag: free speech

The Morning After or Social Media is a Humbug

Looking through window blinds, sun light coming inside.
Photo by photocreo.

Time for a hard look in the mirror?  We’ve been on a social media bender for years, and I’m thinking January 1, 2017 might be the day we begin to sober up and come to grips with its more negative effects.  When I began writing about all this stuff in 2011, it was partly in response to the fact that people seemed too eager to give the internet industry itself a free pass on the ill-effects of several major platforms because the internet writ large is perceived as so essential to democracy. And thanks to social media, the internet became an extension of our egos, in much the same way that liquor makes us all good looking and smart.

In January of 2012, a relatively small cadre of internet wonks rallied people to shout down SOPA—a bill almost nobody understood—and progressives in particular congratulated themselves for participating in “true democracy in action.” It scared the hell out of me because it was not democracy in action but industry-backed manipulation disguised as democracy.  Or as just one example of its insidious nature, the campaign was partly driven by the same anonymous denizens of a site called 4Chan, whence come many agitators of the alt-right that people now realize is a thing. My left-leaning friends who helped drive SOPA over the cliff failed to recognize the dark genie they’d let out of the bottle.  Forget that SOPA was not the toxic legislation everyone had been told it was; that’s just a minor, nagging detail. What matters is that the campaign against it was a blueprint for circumventing the democratic process itself.

The capacity to unleash thoughtless reaction in any number of directions is a power we have ceded to social media platforms.  If spurious Trump-tweets are disconcerting to you, I’d note that this was the same pavlovian mechanism at work in the anti-SOPA campaign and is more or less the manner in which we continue to dumb down the most complex issues into bites, memes, and zingers.  Kind of like those big ideas that seem really smart while under the influence, but are best left unfulfilled in the harsh reality of the ensuing hangover. So, here’s a question:  Is a platform like Twitter valuable because people get to respond to what a politician might say, or is it toxic because it gives a politician a round-the-clock platform for riling people up with some insipid one-liner in the first place?  Hint: Twitter is fine for sharing links but a stupid way to discuss real issues. The word twit is right there in the name.

With all the attention the election has focused on fake news and manipulation of information by a foreign power, it has been interesting to observe—at least anecdotally—a renewed sense of vigilance about the sources of information people choose to share or cite on Facebook.  It was not surprising, of course, that some folks wanted to blame the platform operators for failing to weed out fake news. And although it isn’t exactly Facebook’s fault that people are happy to believe nonsense in the first place, the medium is still the message; and it is a medium that instantly rewards what’s popular, not necessarily what is true, decent, thoughtful, or fair.  That was what frightened me about the anti-SOPA campaign—that suddenly being “right” en masse completely overwhelmed common sense, rational analysis, or the exchange of ideas.  The fact that nobody happened to be right was just bitter icing on the cake.

I’ve seen people respond to the fake news problem with the sentiment that they don’t want corporations like Facebook editing what we see online, but the fact is these entities already do edit what we see, but in a manner that serves their advertising and data-harvesting interests. So, while they’re at it, as long as people are going to use search engines and social media for acquiring news and information, the OSPs could be better corporate citizens and take a harder look at the negative effects that their anything-goes approach can have on business and consumers; on politics and journalism; on social behaviors and discourse; and even on the advertising that is their bread-and-butter.

One question I ask now is whether or not this sudden, wider realization that the internet may be chockfull of garbage—and is highly vulnerable to manipulation—will change the mood of the public with regard to giving OSPs quite so much latitude to sweep a million sins under the rug of the First Amendment. Invariably, whether we’re talking about copyright infringement, counterfeit operations, or predators, criminals, and terrorists using legal platforms for illegal purposes, the general response from Google & Friends has been that these problems cannot be addressed without harming otherwise protected speech.  It’s been an effective message but largely not a true one—especially when an OSP may earn revenue from the activities of bad actors and good actors at the same time.

In recent weeks, two stories trended about harassment of Muslims—one on the New York subway and one on a Delta flight—that proved to be false.  The second of these was perpetrated by a known prankster, who creates these spectacles for his YouTube channel. Historically, the progressive view would be to defend his free speech rights in defense of YouTube itself; but creating false claims of harassment is not only not protected speech, it is purposely throwing fuel on an already dangerous fire. Is YouTube required to support this guy’s channel because of the First Amendment?  Absolutely not. No more than they are required to support terrorist recruiting videos or videos demonstrating how to hack someone’s computer or videos that infringe the rights of musicians or other creators.

In reality, web platforms do not have the kind of constraints under the First Amendment that they often claim. The First Amendment protects American citizens and entities against censorship by state actors, while a privately-owned business like a social media site can adopt nearly any Terms of Service its operators choose.  Quite simply, YouTube could decide tomorrow to become a platform exclusively for videos featuring left-handed,  yodeling, Ukrainian, sword swallowers, and the creators of the millions of videos that would consequently be removed would not be able to make a First Amendment infringement claim against the company.  To the contrary, such a suit would be in conflict with the First Amendment rights of YouTube, which happen to be the same rights that allow a newspaper to employ editorial oversight of its content.

Getting Real About Free Speech

The big question is instantly tricky, of course, because the new president-elect is the first in living memory to voice such an openly hostile relationship with the free press and free speech; and we can, therefore, imagine real policy that could become legit First Amendment challenges. As such, it’s a good time to make more sober distinctions between actual First Amendment threats and perceived ones.  Because for the last several years, the internet industry has successfully labeled just about every effort to enforce reasonable, legal protections for consumers and businesses as a threat to free speech. But mitigating tangible harm in cyberspace is not in conflict with the First Amendment any more than it is in physical space.  In fact, it is often less of an issue because the harmful actors are neither located in the U.S. nor U.S. citizens, which means they do not technically enjoy—or even necessarily respect—First Amendment protections.

Of course, the conversation is probably going to get a lot dicier now. One major flaw of the Obama administration was that it gave way too much latitude to Google and other Silicon Valley firms to shape policy in a number of areas.  If the Trump administration and Congress take meaningful action to mitigate various types of harm online, the internet industry and the “digital rights” activists will likely amp up their free speech and “open internet” rhetoric, which will play even louder against the drumbeat of the Trump administration than it did during the Obama years.

Even trickier is the possibility that the new Executive really will advocate policies that run afoul of constitutional protections; and we don’t honestly know the extent to which Silicon Valley firms, to whom we’ve volunteered so much information, will cooperate.  One way or another, it’s going to be a bumpy damn ride, and a lot of crazy shit is going to fly around the web in the coming years—a lot of it disposable, trendy nonsense that will only further divide people who might otherwise find social and political common ground.

We’ve already seen attempts by the EFF, Techdirt, and the Press Freedom Foundation to conflate Trump’s press censorship rhetoric with the News Media Alliance’s interests in protecting its own copyrights online. And we can expect more of this kind of blurry messaging in the months and years to come. I believe these parties mean well, or want to mean well, but they’re still so drunk from the tech-utopian punchbowl that they don’t notice the bowl is full of all-sorts.*

With their over-broad invocations of the First Amendment, and their love of online anonymity, the tech-utopian observers fail to acknowledge the role major online platforms have played in making our political process uglier than it was 20 years ago. We’ve managed to recreate the outrageous theatrics of the turbulent 19th century rather than the more contemplative and moderated environment we had promised ourselves for the 21st.  Rational people are suddenly noticing that we’ve entered what they’re calling a post-truth era, which sounds to my ear like the queen mother of unintended consequences for what was billed as the “information age.”

In a recent video, Robert Reich recommended that people find opportunities to talk to one another in real life, especially if they are on opposite sides of the Trump divide.  Personally, I think he has the right idea.  After five years working on a non-partisan issue like copyright, I have become friends with some extraordinarily brilliant, generous, and empathetic individuals who are traditionally conservative and whom I certainly trust to uphold the core principles of the Republic, even as we discuss different views on a wide variety of issues.

Traditionally, in physical space, people are human beings whose personal narratives  and opinions remain invisible to one another.  On social media platforms, it’s the opposite; everyone’s narrative is on display while their basic humanity remains invisible. In this sense, social media’s promise to “connect” us is a bit of a humbug. Not that I would advocate outright abstention any more than I intend to give up scotch; but the start of 2017 is probably a good time for a reality check and a freshly moderated approach to the pros and cons of these platforms.

*All-sorts was a cask full of the combined dregs from drinks left on tables in a tavern, including God-knows how much backwash. A cup of all-sorts was the cheapest drink available, and for good reason.

Backpage Execs Arrested Because Pimping Isn’t Speech

arrested-1

On October 6, the CEO of Backpage.com Carl Ferrer, along with former executives Michael Lacy and James Larkin, were arrested in California on charges alleging involvement in prostitution, including conspiracy to commit pimping of a minor.  The classified ad site had been under investigation by the California DOJ for three years and on the radar of anti-human-trafficking advocates for at least a decade.  Citing the importance of these arrests, Polaris has recorded nearly 2,000 incidents of sex trafficking that involved Backpage and further states that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told a Senate subcommittee “that 71 percent of all suspected child sex trafficking reports that it receives have a link to Backpage.”

Despite numerous claims—including by prominent digital rights activists—that Backpage has exclusively operated as a neutral site hosting user-generated classified ads in both “adult” and non-“adult” categories, the arrest warrant highlights include the following:

  • that well over 90% of Backpages’s tens of millions of dollars in revenue came from the “Adult” ads, which have clear links to both consensual and forced prostitution.
  • that Backpage became known by those in the commercial sex trade to be the “online brothel.”
  • that Ferrer and his associates purposely grew the “Adult” ad trade both domestically and abroad.

Perhaps the most damming evidence is that Ferrer and his associates allegedly used Backpage data to create what the warrant calls “escort directories,” sites that are in no way user-generated, but which are designed solely to drive customers for commercial sex to Backpage ads. Additionally, 7 of the 8 witnesses interviewed about their use of Backpage ads were identified in the warrant as “victims of trafficking,” some forced into prostitution before the age of 14.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

Section 230 of CDA, which was passed in 1996, is the legal statute which states that online service providers shall not be treated as “publishers.” Site operators acting in good faith, and which are driven in part or in whole by user-generated content, are shielded from litigation stemming from material posted by a third party that might otherwise be actionable. In a nutshell, what the DMCA “safe harbor” does for OSPs and copyright infringement, CDA 230 does for just about every other kind of content.

In regard to a 2015 civil litigation filed against Backpage by three women—all allegedly victims of trafficking—the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that CDA 230 required the dismissal of their claim against the site. As stated by Sophia Cope on September 8, 2015, “Where a website clearly participated directly in developing the alleged illegal content, immunity from suit is properly lost. But in cases like this, where the provider has allegedly colluded by the apparent implications of website design and content policies, Section 230 requires that the complaint be dismissed.”

Although this was not the EFF’s only statement on the matter, it was the crux of that organization’s defense of 230 in regard to the Backpage litigation.  This view was upheld in Massachusetts District Court and in the First Circuit Court of Appeals but was rejected by the Washington State Supreme Court, which allowed the civil suit to proceed.

When the EFF argued that CDA 230 was grounds for dismissal of the plaintiffs’ civil suit against Backpage this a) was within the purview of that organization’s mission; and b) stopped well short of defending Backpage itself when there was a reasonable probability that the ongoing criminal investigation could reveal that the owners were implicated in illegal activity.

Taking the Free Speech Thing Too Far

Where the EFF crossed that line, it appears, was on July 6, 2015, when director of activism Rainey Reitman strayed far beyond the scope of judicial application of CDA 230 and engaged in speculation to defend Backpage on free speech grounds. This was in response to a decision by major payment processors—Visa, Master Card, & Amex—deciding in that month to cease processing transactions for Backpage.  Reitman called this “caving to government pressure,” accusing the processors and law enforcement of stifling free speech.  She wrote …

“We don’t need Visa and MasterCard to play nanny for online speech. Payment processors and banks shouldn’t be in the position of deciding what type of online content is criminal or enforcing morality for the rest of society. For one thing, their businesses haven’t been designed to analyze the legal and societal issues at play in various forms of online expression.”

She further states (and this is the paragraph that gets me):

“Backpage.com can be used to sell an old refrigerator, find a new apartment, post about new community workshops, find a job, and offer many other services and goods. It also hosts an “adult” section of the site, where some people advertise escort services or try to connect with people who have similar sexual interests. This “adult” section requires visitors to confirm they are at least 18 years of age and allows users to get resources for reporting cases of suspected sexual exploitation with one click.”

Not only does Reitman engage in unfounded speculation about Backpage’s innocence—which seems like an unnecessarily dumb move for the EFF to make—but she actually implied that the site was helping to curb exploitation.  This particular rhetoric will sound familiar to copyright interests who’ve been listening to the Holy Trinity of infringement defenses for years.  1) We don’t know what’s happening on our site. 2) We host material that isn’t infringing.  3) Anyway, we’re helping you.

As the arrest warrant states, the non-“Adult” section of Backpage—the part innocently selling refrigerators and such—is mostly supported by free ads while the “Adult” section is supported by paid ads.  The warrant further states that from January 2013 to March 2015, 99% of the site’s revenue (which is in the tens of millions) came from the “Adult” section but that this ratio dropped to 90% in May of 2015, apparently after the major payment processors pulled their accounts.

Any reasonable person could deduce that the paid part of Backpage’s business was worth money while the free part was not; any reasonable person could observe that Backpage hosted a very large volume of ads for the commercial sex trade; any reasonable person could know that at least a portion of the commercial sex trade involves trafficked victims, including minors; and any reasonable person could know that the company was under investigation.  Given these plainly observable data, it’s hard to fathom that the EFF would allow Ms. Reitman to publicly assume Backpage’s fundamental innocence in the service of its chronic argument that everything online is protected speech. But it isn’t that hard to fathom.

Going back to the topic of “cultural capture” for a moment, I’ll stop short of accusing the EFF of knowingly defending alleged human traffickers, but I won’t stop short of accusing them of being so neck deep in their own PR bullshit, that they ended up defending alleged human traffickers for no reason.

Where Reitman really went too far down this road was when she described the “Adult” section as a place where users “try to connect with people who have similar sexual interests.”  As if Backpage were more like Tinder than the “online brothel” that everyone in the commercial sex trade seems to know that it is.  Those tech-utopian words connect and interest are just so friendly and Googley and social, one would never think to associate them with 13-year-olds forced by violence and threats of violence into the commercial sex trade.

Even if the folks at EFF could have reasonably convinced themselves that the owners of Backpage were not knowingly profiting from the commercial sex trade—and by extension trafficking—I think they were foolish to stray beyond commenting on anything other than the relevance of CDA 230 in a civil lawsuit.  To declare, as Reitman did, that, “Backpage, however, is not engaged in human trafficking. It shouldn’t be treated as if it were,” was an assumption that not only stepped outside the EFF’s wheelhouse, but it was also an absurd logical leap that appears to have been entirely wrong.

The point, of course, is not really the EFF itself but the message they promote, which assumes that all site owners naturally maintain a veil of ignorance about the content of their sites and that all online activity is protected speech.  Neither is true.  At the very least, site owners can certainly know where their money is coming from, and protected speech largely pertains to state action, not private enterprise.  I get why it’s easy to play this PR game with copyright infringement—because it seems like a victimless crime and because there is an amount of infringement in the digital age that rights holders are going to have to accept as unstoppable.  But I should hope that there is no percentage of for-profit, violent, human exploitation that we are willing to tolerate because we’ve lost perspective on what free speech is and why it is protected.

EFF says Section 1201 of the DMCA is Unconstitutional?

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against the federal government, naming the DOJ and the Copyright Office as defendants.  The EFF filed on behalf of plaintiffs Dr. Mitchell Green, a computer scientist and researcher at Johns Hopkins; Andrew Huang, an engineer and inventor; and Huang’s company Alphamax LLC.  The crux of the suit argues that Section 1201 of the DMCA, which prohibits circumventing technical protection measures (TPM), or trafficking in devices used for circumventing these measures that are designed to protect copyrighted works violates the First Amendment and is, therefore, unconstitutional.

The most common type of TPM consumers tend to be aware of are applications like the software on a DVD that prevents or mitigates illegal copying of the contents; but TPM are increasingly used in a broad range of devices and products because, of course, computers and software increasingly run everything we touch. For this reason, 1201 applies to a wide range of classes of copyrightable works, including software itself, and so the debate over the law invariably conflates movies and medical devices or cellphones and tractors, which means the public dialogue can be rather confusing for most of us.

We read a brief assertion in an article by Cory Doctorow—or even an opposing view—and the nitty-gritty may be ten pages of complex analysis by the Copyright Office that few people will read let alone fully understand.  Meanwhile, consumers should keep in mind that absent the provisions in 1201, products like DVDs, iPods, and Kindles would simply not exist because rights holders would not have licensed their works for distribution on these platforms. And it is characteristic of the EFF and its colleagues to focus on the restrictive aspects of a legal framework while ignoring the productive ones.

In simple terms, it is illegal to circumvent TPM, whether the copyrighted material being protected is entertainment media like an eBook or it’s the software that runs a medical device or the systems in your car. The EFF’s criticism weighs heavily on the fact that it is a violation of 1201 to circumvent TPM even if the intent is not to infringe copyright, but there are also permanent and termporary exemptions in force, recommended by the Register of Copyrights, that allow for circumvention in a number of circumstances. Every three years, the Copyright Office reviews applications for exemptions, though this process itself has been called “onerous” by the EFF and others and is likewise implicated in the question of constitutionality of the 1201 statute.

As mentioned, there are three named plaintiffs in this suit, though one can think of Andrew Huang and his company Alphamax as representing the same interests.  But in an effort to keep this post under 2,000 words, I’ll focus on the complaint regarding Dr. Green and EFF’s broad complaint that the Copyright Office triennial review process is itself stifling free speech.

That Dr. Matthew Green’s Security Research is Being Stifled

Likely, the most compelling and easiest to understand complainant is that of Dr. Green, who conducts important research into, among other things, the security systems of automobiles. This was the focus of his application for an exemption to 1201 during the last triennial session.

Dr. Green explains on his blog that because the Copyright Office failed to grant the exemptions he applied for, that a project underway in the Fall of 2015 had to be conducted in a manner less efficacious and less thorough than the best method available. He also implies that the opposition to his application from the Business Software Association might have carried undue, industry weight in the decision-making process.  But a review of the Register of Copyright’s analysis and conclusions regarding the relevant class of exemptions reveals that the Copyright Office was substantially more sympathetic to the testimony of Dr. Green and his co-applicants than it was to the opposition arguments of either the software or automotive industries.

In fact, the Copyright Office, in its Final Rule issued on October 28, 2015, recommended a broad exemption for “good faith” research like the work being conducted by Dr. Green, but it also recommended a 12-month waiting period to implement this exemption.  Although this delay may be a source of frustration for researchers and the EFF, it was not proposed due to industry opposition to the exemptions. Instead, the Copyright Office recommended the one-year delay in deference to various federal agencies that had weighed in with concerns regarding some of the proposed exemptions.

For instance, the EPA stated that certain aspects of the work to be conducted could “slow or reverse gains made under the Clean Air Act.”  How?  I have no idea.  But neither does the Copyright Office because they’re not authorized to have an opinion about the environment. So because some of the concerns raised are outside copyright’s purview, the Register proposed  the delay in order to give other federal agencies time to review. That’s what they’re supposed to do, and neither Dr. Green nor the EFF appear to acknowledge that there is an extent to which this research is being slowed by federal agencies which have nothing to do with copyright or Section 1201.

Moreover, the timing of EFF’s big play to argue the unconstitutionality of the entire law is odd in light of the fact that the Copyright Office is largely in agreement with applicants like Dr. Green. In fact, the Copyright Office could not have been more clear in its agreement that the current permanent exemptions for security research are not sufficient to protect Dr. Green and his colleagues from liability.  But when the office called for recommendations to 1201 in the beginning of this year, neither the EFF nor any of its sister organizations filed comments with a view toward amending these permanent exemptions.

So, one question worth asking is why the EFF does not use its considerable resources to seek amendment(s) to the permanent exemptions rather than work toward the less likely outcome that the entire statute will be declared unconstitutional?  After all, as a practical matter, if the real interest is enabling people like Dr. Green to work at his best as soon as possible, fixing the permanent exemptions is a far more practical enterprise than the prospect of having the Supreme Court vitiating all of 1201 several years from now. This seems especially true when the Register already agrees that the current statutes are inadequate.

That the Triennial Review Process is Stifling Speech

Roughly one-third of the EFF’s complaint focuses on the alleged inadequacy of the triennial review process itself. Their contention is that the process is so cumbersome and slow that it fails to fulfill its purpose to provide an adequate counter-balance to 1201’s restrictions and also constitutes a prior restraint on speech by delaying applicants’ ability to engage in otherwise legal, non-infringing research or publication.

Two things seem odd about this section of the complaint.  The first is that it focuses on 1201’s alleged, broad infringement of the speech of filmmakers* and teachers despite the fact that the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit applied for exemptions having nothing to do with filmmaking or teaching.  The second is that the Copyright Office actually did recommend exemptions for a large number of requests pertaining to filmmakers and teachers, though, apparently these did not go far enough for the EFF, which scorns rejections—like an exemption for “narrative filmmakers”—as evidence that 1201 is stifling speech.  Of course, considering this particular class of filmmaker begs detailed analysis because the majority of narrative film uses are not generally fair uses. So, this part of the complaint begins to sound like EFF may be making its usual free speech mountain out of a copyright molehill.

Also, with regard to the alleged onerousness of the review process, the public should note that the process is a rather large task resulting in decisions that have far-reaching implications throughout the market.  Exemptions apply to everyone, not just the applicants.  So, when the CO said that it’s cool for a K-12 teacher to “rip” film clips from his DVD collection to bring into class to teach film or cultural studies, that circumvention is now kosher for all teachers doing the same thing across the country. So, because these rulings are not narrow decisions (like fair use judgments), it seems reasonable that reviews happen triennially and that applicants bear some substantial burden to argue their cases for various exemptions.  The CO’s complete review of the last round of applications is over 400 pages long.  How frequently should the agency engage in that level of detailed analysis and make recommendations that have considerable effect in the market, and which must conform to existing laws beyond the scope of copyright?

And once again, the timing of this complaint is curious because the Register earlier this year recommended that, going forward, all successful petitions not opposed in the next review cycle need not be re-litigated.  This is relevant because the EFF specifically cites the need to re-apply for exemptions every three years as evidence of undue burden, but it ignores the fact that the Copyright Office acknowledges the issue and is making recommendations to mitigate the problem.  So, the big question reprises:  Why is EFF more eager to try to strike down the entire law than it is to work with the Copyright Office to address some of the very flaws the Register agrees exist?

Based on just the complexities I have tried to articulate here—and which only scratch the surface—it seems unlikely the First Amendment complaint will make as much progress as it will make noise. Yes, we want to protect fair use for expression and the ability of researchers to ensure our safety and security while living with our computerized products. But the record indicates that the Copyright Office is in synch with these views.  We’ll see what the courts say.