Tag: politics

The Precarious Politics of Reigning in Silicon Valley

As our attention turned to concerns about disinformation, hate speech, and data security after the 2016 election, it became clear that the big cyber policy on deck was going to be a fight about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996).  For some detailed discussion about this legislation, see posts here, here, and here; but in nutshell, Section 230 shields online platforms against liability for potential harm that may result from the conduct of its users.  It is occasionally and improperly associated with copyright infringement, from which platforms are largely shielded by Section 512 of the DMCA (1998). 

Although 230 was never intended to provide blanket immunity for all sites hosting any kind of user-generated content, most courts over the 24 years since the law was adopted have interpreted it as a blanket immunity for all sites hosting any kind of user-generated content.  This includes content that may be posted for the express purpose of causing harm like harassment, defamation, revenge porn, fraud, or disinformation.  230 is the statutory reason why site owners respond with a shrug or, at best, a feeble explanation for hosting material that goes beyond mere offense, as we have seen its power to alter truth itself.  If you were mystified, for instance, by Zuckerberg’s sphinx-like reasoning that Facebook would maintain Holocaust denial pages because they are merely “misinformation and opinion” rather than “hate speech,” that was just one manifestation of the ideological flaw, which helped write Section 230 two decades ago.   

“We were naïve. We were naïve in a way that is even hard to recapture. We all thought that for people to be able to publish what they want would so enhance democracy and so inspire humanity, that it would lead to kind of flowering of creativity and emergence of a kind of a collective discovery of truth.”

Those are the words of former FCC Chairman Reed Hunt lately expressing regret for the adoption of Section 230, clearly identifying the erroneous underlying premise, which many critics now refer to as tech-utopianism.  And while it is somewhat encouraging to finally see a greater appetite for holding platforms accountable for some of their ill-effects, this mood change is anything but clearly definable.  Instead, we hear cacophony of disparate—even competing—rationales for reigning in Big Tech, and if this chaos cannot manifest as rational policy, Big Tech may win the status quo, which they spare no expense trying to maintain.   

For example, voices as incompatible as Vice-President Joe Biden and Senator Ted Cruz have both raised the specter of abolishing Section 230, but for very different reasons.  Biden and others see the liability shield as encouraging a platform like Facebook to continue hosting false information (e.g. Holocaust denial), while Cruz and other Republicans complain that social platforms are biased against conservatives.  But good luck trying to reckon with the devil in those details.

Would Biden include headlines or stories from left-leaning organizations that are inaccurate?  Would Cruz consider social media platforms removing Alex Jones, or the hosting providers dropping The Daily Stormer as examples of anti-conservative bias these days?  It becomes easy to imagine how a pragmatic and sober debate about Section 230 can get lost amid the inherent tribalism implied by just those two voices alone.

From a very different sector, David McCabe reports for the New York Times that a “motley” group of corporations, including Disney, IBM, and Marriott, are gunning for Section 230. “The companies’ motivations vary somewhat,” writes McCabe.  “Hollywood is concerned about copyright abuse, especially abroad, while Marriott would like to make it harder for Airbnb to fight local hotel laws. IBM wants consumer online services to be more responsible for the content on their sites.”

As prefaced above, note that even The New York Times will erroneously include copyright in a conversation about Section 230, though in fairness, the underlying principle—namely that no platform should ever be responsible for material published by users—is fundamentally the same in 230 as the DMCA’s 512.  Still, let us assume that especially because the Times used “Mickey Mouse” in the headline, this story will be interpreted by many as “Copyright maximalist Walt Disney Company wants to break the internet again,” or something to that effect.  And viola!  We are no longer having a conversation about platform responsibility. 

In a similar vein, the Center for Democracy and Technology published an article on its site criticizing a proposal introduced by Sen. Graham to combat child sexually abusive material online; and the article and associated tweet exploits distrust for both Graham and Attorney General Barr as reasons to fear the proposal itself.  Sure, I personally think Sen. Graham is the most prominent wuss in America today; and Bill Barr is batshit crazy, spluttering his views that people without religion lack moral judgment, but …

I don’t trust the folks at CDT either because they are ideologues too—OG tech-utopians who just happen to receive significant funding from Google.  (That, and I am very much opposed to child sexually abusive material.) So, whether the harm that needs addressing is child exploitation, revenge porn, online harassment, or mass disinformation campaigns, if we want to cope with any of these still somewhat novel challenges, we just might have to entertain the possibility that a sound policy proposal will come from some party we do not like in a different political context.

The subtle irony in this last example, of course, is that the folks at CDT would probably never entertain the notion that blanket platform immunity has been a major catalyst to creating the alternate realities that people like Graham and Barr now occupy.  That’s not a partisan view—Senator Wyden is probably Big Tech’s greatest ally in Congress, and I unequivocally called him a liar with regard to the CASE Act—it’s the view of someone who, like many Americans, is weary of policy discussions in which outright bullshit is given equal weight to evidence-based theory and practice.  And with respect to Reed Hunt’s observation, this was an inevitable consequence of giving every citizen a megaphone; but platform immunity like Section 230 is the reason Zuckerberg will call outright bullshit like Holocaust denial an “opinion.”  

Big Data in politics. Maybe we should break the internet.

Photo by LisaD

If it feels just a little bit like the world is careening toward the edge of a cliff with a madman at the wheel, maybe it’s because that’s what’s happening. Except the madman isn’t just some garden-variety berserker.  It’s not President Trump with his incoherent tweets and unabashed lies. In fact, according to this in-depth story by Carole Cadwalldr, writing for The Guardian, those antics are calculated theater being fed to the press as just one component of a much larger, more insidious process by which money and computing power are undermining democracy itself.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the madman at the wheel is us.  All of us. Voluntarily feeding the database via social media, teaching the system exactly how to tell us what to think. “There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together,” Cadwalldr writes.

Focusing primarily on billionaire/computer-scientist Robert Mercer, his relationship to Stephen Bannon and the development of the Breitbart network, Cadwalldr details the process by which wealthy, mostly right-wing, individuals are using computing power not to understand the electorate (that would be old-school) but to manipulate the electorate into reshaping the world as these individuals believe it ought to be shaped. Cadwalldr’s is one of several articles to appear in recent weeks about the role of Big Data in global politics, and just one to mention the company Cambridge Analytica. She writes…

“On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a ‘propaganda machine’.”

Cadwalldr cites several scientists who voice deep concern about the capacity of the AI to learn about us through interactions as apparently innocuous as Facebook Likes.  With the input of 300 Likes, Cambridge Analytica claims that the computer can understand us “better than we understand ourselves.”  And because the computer never stops learning, never stops adapting, this provides the opportunity for political operatives to steer the electorate toward targeted conclusions about issues or candidates.

The irony, of course, is that this is all based on the illusion that digital technology provides us with more choices to get “better” information, which is why discrediting the “mainstream media” is a key component of the strategy. But lest we believe press-bashing is exclusively a Trumpian phenomenon of the moment, we should not forget that the “mainstream” has previously been dismissed by the left and libertarian-leaning, techno-utopians of Silicon Valley as well—all singing from the hymnal that the internet is the greatest tool for democracy ever invented.

Regular readers know that I am more than a little cynical about this generalization and that this is one reason I remain critical of “digital rights” groups fearful of any form of regulation in cyberspace—particularly regulation meant to protect or restore the rights of individuals. It’s not that I find fault with the premise that the goals of openness and free speech should be protected online so much as I balk at the assumption that an absolutist approach (i.e. law has no place on the internet) can only have salubrious results for democratic values.  I believe this sensibility is a holdover from Silicon Valley’s more hippie-like early days but is a vibe that no longer has any relationship to the advertising and data-mining systems the major companies have built.

But now that we’ve mostly “left the internet alone,” allowing these companies to collect and sell information about us without any kind of rules—allowing these same companies to monetize works of authorship and social interactions without restraint—all in the name of “freedom,” we are apparently teaching the machine to effectively democratize democracy out of existence. Cadwalldr quotes Jonathan Rust of the Cambridge University Psychometric Centre thus:

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.”

The manipulation skews right. For now.

Take a subject like immigration policy and the fact that many of us who live or work in diversely populated urban centers (traditionally liberal) can’t understand why Americans who live in more homogenous, rural communities (traditionally conservative) are so concerned that Muslim refugees pose a substantial threat to security despite a lack of evidence to support this fear.

It’s not because citizens are uninformed, it’s because they are purposely misinformed by a very sophisticated network of well-crafted, smartly-written articles that contain elements of truth glued together by rhetorical paranoia.  This is in fact the structure of the average Breitbart article on immigration; and these articles become the foundation of a million ways to automate the spread and repetition of an anti-immigrant message until it morphs in the minds of readers from emotional xenophobia to what is perceived as rational security policy. This is why labeling support for an EO immigration ban as “racist” sounds absurd to many and why their response will be, “It’s not racist. It’s just common sense. Look at the mountain of evidence! The mountain of evidence the MSM isn’t reporting!”  (Never mind that the mountain is a hologram.)

This phenomenon is hardly restricted to the political right, though Cadwalldr observes that the money and institutions behind this level of big-data manipulation is largely a right-leaning agenda at the moment. My own concern has always been that these manipulation tools, neatly disguised as “democratized” information, can be wielded by any entity with the resources.  If the pendulum were to swing from Breitbart to Google or to some left-leaning billionaire’s project, that still wouldn’t be democracy.

The ability to create the appearance of consensus through rapid replication, a network of “alternative news” sites, and bot-swarms, all emanating from a single source is exactly the concern that launched this blog in 2012. The illusion that hundreds of articles or millions of people all “agree” on a given topic can be conjured by a relatively small and nimble group of people with the money and computing power to do the job.  I alluded to this concern in this post in 2012, suggesting that Citizens United was child’s play compared to the capacity for manipulation of the political process on a one-to-one basis via social media.

In 2011/12, this sophisticated kind of disinformation was what I believed was happening with a bill like SOPA.  Now, it’s the same scenario on a much larger scale, influencing the governments of the world. The implication is the destruction of democracy by means of the very tools that were supposed to improve democracy. And the irony is that it’s all voluntary.  Every day, we get up and feed the beast. We teach the machine how to manipulate us.  So, is the only solution to abandon Facebook et al — to stop feeding ourselves as data to the machine?  Can we even afford to unplug given that these platforms are now almost indispensable for access to information and to substantive interaction with people?  A Columbia Journalism Review study on the effects of the Breitbart media ecosystem, offers these words of wisdom and hope:

“Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy, and the most important task confronting the press going forward. Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.” 

So, maybe we don’t have to break the internet so much as break a lot of really bad habits the internet keeps trying to teach us.

Also read:  The Rise of Weaponized AI here.

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.