Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.
Facebook needs to be investigated, broken up, and its executives prosecuted. I don’t care who does it – the United States, the European Union – but it’s clear this company is one of the very worst excesses of the tech industry’s arrogance and dominance, and it needs to be held accountable.
Unfortunately, in the U.S. Facebook has the CDA 230 to cover their asse(t)s with. Until that is either dissolved or heavily reformed, there’s no way it can be broken up. And the Democrats unfortunately don’t want to reform it. I wONdeR wHy…
CDA 230 is the only thing that is preventing supreme holy grand magnificent awesome leaders such as the one we have in Turkey from effectively doing away with any open forum on the internet. Sure, he can get a law banning any platform criticizing him in Turkey, but given the open nature of the Internet, the availability of such platforms in the US will still provide the citizens of authoritarian countries venues to raise their voices.
And also, holding platforms (like facebook) or ISPs liable for the comments made by any nutjob using their services will be the end of the internet, and we will return to good old 1980s.
CDA 230 is not an obstacle to antitrust regulation. If you want facebook or google or whatever to be broken up or heavily reformed, use the existing tools you had for more than a century, instead of jumping in the bandwagon to suppress free speech.
That’s not entirely true. Prior to the passage of the CDA, immunity for forum providers was available if they kept a strict unmoderated hands-off approach. CDA 230 allowed more moderation while retaining the immunities.
Repealing it would simply revert to the earlier standard of editorial interference resulting in liability.
I’d appreciate more details about that prior regime. The wiki page and the first page of google results did not provide much information on that one. If you have a link to readily available reading on the matter, it would save me a lot of time.
Case law is involved there and I don’t remember the exact cases right now, but prior to CDA being made, there were two cases – one (I think) against Compuserve which was unmoderated, with Compuserve winning based on that fact and one against a heavily moderated “family forum” which lost because of the moderation. Maybe this is enough to jog some people’s memories and bring these cases forward. Also Wikipedia tends to be heavily biased on any political topics, wouldn’t use it as a source for such.
The rules that govern Facebook also governs sites like OSAlert and other smaller outlets. Yes there are advantages to being of a larger size, but there are disadvantages, too.
When you allow free forums, and that eventually leads to things like “flat earth societies”.
What could actually beat these is two things:
– Common sense
– Actually applying laws
When you hear someone using a pizza parlor as a child trafficking front, you should be a bit skeptical. You should not go there gun blazing to “rescue” the children:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689/pizzagate-gunman-sentenced-to-4-years-in-prison
And in the US political fallout, the response to Cambridge Analytica was much softer than Facebook’s. Even though the actual deeds were done by CA, and they would still gather such data even without FB on other platforms, FB was a convenient scapegoat.
I am not saying FB has nothing to blame, but we blame the platform, instead of the bad actors more.
Oh no, not leading to things like “flat Earth societies”, the horrors. The full weight of the law ought to be brought to bear on these cursed affronts to polite society. Their very existence in a stain on the collective conscious of humanity and they need to be …. what? What is the problem, what needs to be done? What is the horror unleased if they’re allowed to continute?
TheCovvboyOnline,
Well, they produce a lot of funny youtube videos, haha. On a serious note, I think suppressing free speech would do far more damage, so I’d rather people are allowed to say what they have to say. But at the same time the increasing spread of ignorance has become a real issue on social media. I think education is key.
I think the main problem is that social media encourages the formation of “echo chambers”, where the free speech of critics and educators simply doesn’t penetrate the chamber.
Brendan,
Fixing echo chambers is a “good problem”, I mean it is challenging.
If you do what I would call “first level” ML, and focus on increasing user engagement then you get echo chambers. Just showing people what they want to see is very powerful, and brings in clicks.
However adding contrasting views does not bring clicks. If you are on a BMW forum, and get an ad for an Audi, for example, you might not like it. So advertisers will not pay for having their promos on competitors (most of the time, there are exceptions).
If you really want to have people better informed content, things become much more difficult. It is not that many companies are not trying, but that effort is harder to measure.
It’s all about getting people hooked, and the echo chamber is the feature. These companies aren’t here to educate or inform; they want to push ads. Just like any other ad supported media company.
Fox News isn’t interested in educating or informing people. They want to capture an audience, and then sell ad space to other companies.
CBS has the nightly news, for the same reason.
PBS’s and NPR’s funding has constantly been cut because at one time it could operate without corporate sponsorship, and as such, it was outside the corporate sphere of influence.
All true, but what is the solution? Public television & radio fundraisers? Those are boring and I’m not sure how well they really work with more and more ads polluting independent public radio. The BBC model based on taxation? It’s come to harassing people at their homes…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXcLqvFjMhE
I don’t like advertising, but I can’t deny the truth that it has been one of the most reliable ways to fund things over the decades whether it’s TV, radio, web, etc. The expectation today is “free”, and if you try charging people you’ll loose most of the audience. Independent journalism is practically dead. Even on youtube, not only is content payed for by google advertising but increasingly over the last few years we see that channels are being paid to generate content around corporate products. On tech channels like LTT, Linus has gotten very proficient at selling out at the expense of corporate independence. Can I blame him for taking the money? I don’t know, it’s one of those things where it’s very difficult to be profitable while maintaining independence. And with all the economic consolidation happening, I think it’s going to get harder to survive without taking corporate ad dollars and those that do will outlast those that do not.
Just to make it interesting: what if an advertiser came to osnews with a million dollars but it required compromising some objectivity? Osnews could put the money to good use and hire tech writers to produce really good original content, is it better to sell out or not? Sure, a person of principals may say “no because my principals don’t allow it”, but does that always mean a person of principals will be less profitable for having principals? Can a person of principals say “I know selling out to corporate interests is hypocritical, but I’m doing it for the better good”?
These are all questions that I struggle with, haha.
It’s a shame that micro-transactions weren’t built into HTTP to begin with (so fees for content are passed to ISP to add to the consumer’s regular Internet bill, avoiding the “100 credit card transactions per month for 100 different web sites” disaster that prevents any sane person from bothering with subscriptions).
For the current situation; everyone has to pay more for everything to cover the cost each company pays to advertising companies, and then everyone runs ad-blockers to avoid the spam and the adverts are mostly only clicked on by “fake click” bots (used to poison the data advertisers use for targeted advertising and protect users’ privacy). The only people that actually gain anything from this system are the scummy spammers (e,g, Google).
@Alfman “I don’t like advertising, but I can’t deny the truth that it has been one of the most reliable ways to fund things over the decades whether it’s TV, radio, web, etc. The expectation today is “free”, and if you try charging people you’ll loose most of the audience. Independent journalism is practically dead.”
prices of online advertising haven’t been great, which is why things like Patreon are used so much. And results of online advertising are actually not that great and for some stupid reason harder to track than TV, The old TV model actually had a lot of infrastructure in place to know what is going on. So ironically I don’t know how much future online advertising has.
@Brendan
“”It’s a shame that micro-transactions weren’t built into HTTP to begin with (so fees for content are passed to ISP to add to the consumer’s regular Internet bill, avoiding the “100 credit card transactions per month for 100 different web sites” disaster that prevents any sane person from bothering with subscriptions).””
Even with cryptocurrencies getting the price of transactions down a lot we still suck at the at the promise of doing micro-transactions.
I’m more surprised we still don’t have widespread adoption of some Web Payment API.
Al though it does exist now, since last year and supported in browsers:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API
https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
@Alfman PrincipLES! Principal is someone you get sent to in school for bad behavior.
darkhog,
Most of my posts have errors. I’m not so pedantic about it though.
Lennie,
You’re right and I see a lot of channels pushing that, I guess we’ll see how well it works out in a couple years.
I think one reason content creators are struggling is the asymmetric imbalance between google and creators. The rates have gone down because there’s nearly an unlimited supply of content that google has little incentive to pay creators for, so long as they continue getting eyeballs, which they do. It just isn’t what it used to be for content creators. However for google, while there’s some concern over other streaming competitors, they’re still sitting comfortably on the lion’s share of advertising dollars and IMHO there’s little risk of that collapsing any time soon.
The uncomfortable truth for creators is that they’re mostly disposable to google. The creator base could be decimated and google would still not want for content, they’d just direct the eyeballs and ad dollars to other content and even old content.
I wouldn’t go that far, the tracking is there even if you and I don’t have access to it.
Alfman, and Brendan,
While the overall Internet usage is going up, the average ad revenue is going down. It is just simple math.
Think about the “attention” in sports. If you want to watch something, you probably will watch NBA. And if you want to watch NBA, you’ll want to watch LeBron James, there is little incentive to watch an junior league in a random sport, except if you are really interested in it.
Same with the Internet. It is more likely to watch PewPewDie or Ninja than a random influencer. Yes, the long tail will have half of the view, but any individual contribute there will have a decreasing chance. There would be such leaders in each topic (games, economics, computers), and there will also be a popularity difference in topics. (not many people will watch a lecture on Machine Learning, even if it is from a top professor).
So as more people get onto content generation, the total goes up, and average goes down.
Also having more viewers has an effect. As people spend more time at home, they might spend say 8 hours on the internet than 4 hours that was before (completely made up numbers). However their spending will not increase 2x as their view time. Hence the average return on ads will decrease.
Remember early iOS days? A single developer could release an app and make real money. The user base was smaller then, but so were the app providers. Now top developers make multi-billion dollars, but any single developer is now unlikely to make a living by themselves, unless they are very lucky and very talented. Same effect.
(Note I work for Google, but not in ads, or finance. Just an engineer who loves the Web).
@Alfman
“The uncomfortable truth for creators is that they’re mostly disposable to google. The creator base could be decimated and google would still not want for content, they’d just direct the eyeballs and ad dollars to other content and even old content.”
You know what might be worse ? I see a lot of people on Youtube complain they are recommended by Youtube the corporate TV Youtube channel even when they try to avoid watching it.
Which sounds to me like: one of two things: the mainstream public is clicking on them and thus Youtube is suggesting it… Or and this is the worse part: the TV networks are paying Youtube to favor them.
We’ve definitely seen videos with much higher view counts on the same subject not being recommended, but the mainstream channels are.
I hope people are just seeing things and it’s just because of the higher subscriber numbers on those channels that they get recommended or similar metrics.
Some content smaller channels are flagged for certain content, but the mainstream media channels similar content, etc. don’t. My guess is because it was already FCC approved content so no Youtube checks ?
Anyway… it looks like corporate TV has taken to Youtube in a big way and is preventing a lot of smaller Youtube channels from growing that would grow in the past. Their growth has stalled.
Lennie,
This has been a huge gripe of mine on youtube for a long time. I regularly clear my cookies, so I don’t expect them to be able to track my preferences. However with that said, I’m always shown the exact same channels. The majority of results don’t interest me at all, I never watch PewDiePie and friends and he keeps showing up. I can’t knock youtube for that because I clear my cookies, but I do knock them for only showing popular channels. I’m scrolling down youtube right now and every single result is “popular”. I am not exposed to a single new channel that I haven’t seen, and for a service that has millions of channels that’s ludicrous.
I realize google will start recommending more related channels as you build a tracking history, but even then it recommends popular videos there too. I notice that google loves showing videos I’ve already seen, and it’s not like there’s tons of other related videos to show. So is this outcome promoting only popular channels intentional? Or is it a side effect of google’s profit seeking algorithm? I don’t really know, but either way it’s sad that of the millions of channels on the platform youtube only promotes those at the top and those in the long tail have virtually no exposure unless they’re specifically searched for. It leads me to suspect that many of the videos have 10M+ views only have them because google consistently ranks them at the top and not because they’re otherwise terribly unique. Please mix it up so it isn’t so repetitive! I can’t even fathom how many videos are on youtube, and yet their ranking algorithm acts as though they’re staved for fresh material. Google absolutely deserves an F score at exposure to new content.
@Alfman “Google absolutely deserves an F score at exposure to new content.”
More like 20 Fs.
I know with less popular content I’ve watched before, If I get it recommended a couple of times and don’t click on it I’ll never see it again. It will probably be gone from the feed for 6 months or so.
F-ing ridiculous.
sukru,
I think most people would agree that evils of speech suppression are worse than the evils of free speech.
Someone also made the case that as startups these companies would not have been viable in the first place if they were legally obligated to take responsibility for their user’s posts. If we were to change that policy today, it would harm new smaller startups disproportionately because companies like facebook already have billions and can defend themselves in court regardless. It’s the little guys who don’t have massive legal resources who may face the brunt of it.
It comes down to education, which is sadly lacking. Unfortunately I think it goes hand in hand with people who are willing to be sheep and believe anything their told. My philosophy has always been to openly question everything, authority be damned. Ironically this feature alone kind of puts me in the same bag as some flat earthers, However a big difference between myself and flat earthers generally is that I had a good stem education and am able to make far better scientific judgement calls, whereas they fail hard to understand basic stuff. To top it off, a lot of them are sheep who just attach themselves to counter-culture and cannot articulate why they believe anything other than the lazy argument of institutional conspiracies.
If someone is the questioning type like me, it helps to be educated. Also, it is crucial that they question everyone including the self proclaimed authorities on the counter culture side, otherwise it’s just being a sheep for the other side. Thinking for onseself doesn’t automatically mean one can denounce popular opinion because there are times when the popular consensus is right.
Alfman,
You are right. Big companies can shrug off, and send their lobbyists to Washington. Then they get to actually write the rules that will govern them. This has not happened in software so far, but for example, the healthcare plan (Affordable Care Act) was designed to keep insurance company profits in place.
I think the flat-earthers, as well as other similar cults, have been studied, and it’s mostly a sense of belonging that keeps them there. It’s not so much education as much as it is kinship and being a part of something bigger then themselves. It’s their identity, and it’s replaced religion in many people’s lives, for good and bad.
The flat-earthers were started as a joke to foster scientific debate, but then dude got a little bit of fame which went to his head. It’s kind of the burden of parody. Something can be a funny joke, but then it slowly attracts people who take it seriously causing things to devolve into a cesspool. Dave Chapelle famously burned out because people were missing the point and taking his black klansmen jokes seriously.
Anti-vaxxers and essential oils people are absolute idiots though.
People are idiots. Everyone. I include myself.
It’s kind of our superpower.
The myth that people were smarter at some point in the past is incorrect. People have always been dumb. Who can forget the greatest hit of putting lead in gasoline which lowered everyone’s IQ by double digit points, and the people who did this knew what they were doing.
The only things which are common sense are the things hardcoded into our reptilian brain stem which we do involuntarily. Everything else is socital norms.
There aren’t many laws to apply. Social media doesn’t have laws specifically related to it, and many laws governing media have been repealed. This also kind of leads into censorship debates.
When the idea isn’t harmful or dangerous, why does it need to be censored? Especially when it’s in conversations between individuals? There are absolutely dangerous ideas which need to get burned and forgotten, but somethings, like the flat-earthers, are just head scratching.
– White supremacy
– Homosexuality
– Dogs and cats living together
– Organized religion
– Communism
– Flying spaghetti monsters
– Linux user groups
That’s a fun madlib.
FB are enablers though. This is their entire model, and they are the principal mover enabling the bad actors.
Contrast FB with Google who has built a similar business model around surveiling people.
Funnily, there is no crime here. There isn’t a law against being a scummy human being working for a scummy company to destroy civilization. For some, that’s a perk.