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      in Elections

      'Four years of propaganda': Trump social media bans come too late, experts say

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      In the 24 hours since the US Capitol in Washington was seized by a Trump-supporting mob disputing the results of the 2020 election, American social media companies have barred the president from their platforms for spreading falsehoods and inciting the crowd.Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch suspended Donald Trump indefinitely. Twitter locked his account temporarily. Multiple platforms removed his messages.Those actions, coming just days before the end of Trump’s presidency, are too little, too late, according to misinformation experts and civil rights experts who have long warned about the rise of misinformation and violent rightwing rhetoric on social media sites and Trump’s role in fueling it.“This was exactly what we expected,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who studies the rise of movements like QAnon. “It is very consistent with how the coalescing of different factions responsible for what happened yesterday have been operating online, and how platforms’ previous attempts to deal with them have fallen short.”Over the past decade, tech platforms have been reluctant to moderate Trump’s posts, even as he repeatedly violated hate speech regulations. Before winning the presidency, Trump used Twitter to amplify his racist campaign asserting, falsely, that Barack Obama was not born in the US. As president, he shared racist videos targeting Muslims on Twitter and posted on Facebook in favor of banning Muslims from entering the US, a clear violation of the platform’s policies against hate speech. He retweeted to his tens of millions of followers a video of one of his supporters shouting “white power!” in 2020 June. He appeared to encourage violence against Black Lives Matter protests in a message shared to multiple platforms that included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.Trump’s lies and rhetoric found an eager audience online – one that won’t disappear when his administration ends. Experts warn the platforms will continue to be used to organize and perpetuate violence. They point, for example, to Facebook and YouTube’s failure to curb the proliferation of dangerous conspiracy theory movements like QAnon, a baseless belief that a secret cabal is controlling the government and trafficking children and that Trump is heroically stopping it. Parts of the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to bar the certification of Trump’s election defeat donned QAnon-related merchandise, including hats and T-shirts, and the action was discussed weeks in advance on many QAnon-related groups and forums.QAnon theories and communities have flourished on Facebook this year. By the time the company banned QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in October, hundreds of related pages and groups had amassed more than 3 million followers and members.YouTube removed “tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and terminated hundreds of channels” around the time of Facebook’s measures. It also updated its policy to target more conspiracy theory videos that promote real-world violence, but it still stopped short of banning QAnon content outright. A spokesman from YouTube noted the company had taken a number of other actions to address QAnon content, including adding information panels sharing facts about QAnon on videos as early as 2018.Trump’s leverage of social media to spread propaganda has gone largely unchecked amid a vacuum of laws regulating government speech on social media, said Jennifer M Grygiel, assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and expert on social media.Grygiel cited the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which regulates the distribution of government propaganda, as an example of one law that limits the government’s communication. But such regulation does not exist for the president’s Twitter account, Grygiel said. Instead we have relied on the assumption the president would not use his social media account to incite an insurrection.“What happened this week is the product of four years of systematic propaganda from the presidency,” Grygiel said.In the absence of any meaningful regulation, tech companies have had little incentive to regulate their massively profitable platforms, curb the spread of falsehoods that produce engagement and moderate the president.That’s why experts say things have to change. In 2020, Republicans and Democrats amplified calls to regulate big tech. The events this week underscore that the reckoning over big tech must include measures aimed at addressing the risks posed by leaders lying and promoting violence on their platforms, some argue.“The violence that we witnessed today in our nation’s capital is a direct response to the misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech that have been allowed to spread on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc,” said Jim Steyer, who runs the non-profit children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media and helped organize the Stop Hate for Profit campaign (with the ADL and a number of civil rights organizations), which called on advertisers to boycott Facebook over hate speech concerns and cost Facebook millions.“Social media platforms must be held accountable for their complicity in the destruction of our democracy,” he added, arguing that in absence of meaningful enforcement from social media, Congress must pass better legislation to address hate speech on these platforms.Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.Grygiel said it was time to move away from the idea that a president should be tweeting at all. Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s subsidiary Instagram, said on Twitter on Thursday evening that Facebook has long said it believes “regulation around harmful content would be a good thing”. He acknowledged that Facebook “cannot tackle harmful content without considering those in power as a potential source”.Grygiel said: “We need non-partisan work here. We need legislation that ensures no future president can ever propagandize the American people in this way again.” More

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      in US Politics

      Twitter and Facebook lock Donald Trump’s accounts after video address

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      [embedded content]
      Twitter and Facebook took unprecedented actions to address the spread of misinformation and the incitement of violence by Donald Trump on their platforms on Wednesday, after supporters of the president stormed the US Capitol.
      Both companies locked Trump’s accounts and removed several posts from the president that cast doubt on the election results and praised his supporters, who forcibly took to the government building as lawmakers attempted to tally votes for the election.
      Facebook has suspended Trump from posting to his account for 24 hours. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, also locked Trump’s account. Twitter locked Trump out of his account for 12 hours and is requiring him to delete three tweets the company says violates its policies. If he does not delete them, his account will remain suspended indefinitely, the company said in a public statement. If Trump again violates the policies, his account will be permanently suspended from Twitter.
      The action is the most aggressive yet from Twitter and it comes after it joined Facebook and YouTube in removing a video post from Trump’s account in which the president praised the protestors. More

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      in Elections

      Facebook restarts political ad ban in Georgia following runoff votes

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      Facebook has announced it will again ban political advertising targeting users in the state of Georgia, following the election there on Tuesday.The social media company said that, starting on Wednesday, Georgia users would again be subject to the US-wide political ad ban instated following the 3 November presidential vote. Facebook had temporarily lifted the ban in Georgia ahead of the runoff elections to allow political messaging to reach more voters.“Following the Georgia runoff elections, Georgia will re-join the existing nationwide pause on social issue, elections and political ads,” Facebook said in a blogpost.“This is part of our ongoing efforts to reduce the potential for confusion or abuse,” the company told advertisers in an email reviewed by Reuters.Facebook and Google had introduced pauses on political ads after the November presidential election as part of measures to combat misinformation and other abuses on the platforms. Google lifted its pause in December, saying it no longer considered the post-election period to be a “sensitive event”.Facebook lifted its own ad ban on 15 December exclusively for the state of Georgia, due to “feedback from experts and advertisers across the political spectrum about the importance of expressing voice” and using Facebook to reach voters ahead of Georgia’s runoff elections. For the rest of the country, the ban remained.The change announced on Tuesday means any ads about the Georgia runoff elections would be paused and any advertisers who were previously allowed to run ads about the Georgia runoff elections would not be able to create new political ads.It comes after it was discovered that Republican politicians and other operatives were using advertising on Facebook to target Georgia voters with misinformation in the final days ahead of the vote.A report from the global human rights group Avaaz found a number of ads on Facebook sponsored by Republicans that featured misinformation or falsehoods meant to sway voter opinion. One sponsored by the Senate Leadership Fund claims the Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is “threatening to defund the police”, which he is not. Another from the Republican party run in December accused the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, of scheming to replace the president-elect, Joe Biden, with the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris.Nearly half of these false ads were shared by political candidates in the race, who are exempt from Facebook’s fact checking rules. Facebook has come under fire for the broad exemptions it grants politicians who advertise on its platform. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has defended the policy, saying Facebook should not be the arbiter of truth in political scenarios.Critics of Facebook say the spread of lies ahead of the Georgia election underscore how ineffective the company’s measures to address these issues have been. The company’s oversight board, introduced in late 2020, was meant to adjudicate disputes regarding content. But the group is not able to take down content quickly, limiting its effectiveness in breaking news situations. A group of academics and civil rights leaders critical of Facebook, calling themselves the Real Facebook Oversight Board, say the misinformation exposed in Georgia this week is proof there is more to be done.“The Facebook Oversight Board is complicit in a misinformation campaign in Georgia,” the group said in a statement. “They must do better, and Facebook needs to be held accountable for their failure to protect voters from disinformation.”Reuters contributed to this report More

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      in US Politics

      All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court | John Naughton

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      It’s always risky making predictions about the tech industry, but this year looks like being different, at least in the sense that there are two safe bets. One is that the attempts to regulate the tech giants that began last year will intensify; the second that we will be increasingly deluged by sanctimonious cant from Facebook & co as they seek to avoid democratic curbing of their unaccountable power.On the regulation front, last year in the US, Alphabet, Google’s corporate owner, found itself facing major antitrust suits from 38 states as well as from the Department of Justice. On this side of the pond, there are preparations for a Digital Markets Unit with statutory powers that will be able to neatly sidestep the tricky definitional questions of what constitutes a monopoly in a digital age. Instead, the unit will decide on a case-by-case basis whether a particular tech company has “strategic market status” if it possesses “substantial, entrenched market power in at least one digital activity” or if it acts as an online “gateway” for other businesses. And if a company is judged to have this status, then penalties and regulations will be imposed on it.Over in Brussels, the European Union has come up with a new two-pronged legal framework for curbing digital power – the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. The Digital Markets Act is aimed at curbing anti-competitive practices in the tech industry (like buying up potential competitors before they can scale up) and will include fines of 10% of global revenues for infringers. The Digital Services Act, for its part, will oblige social media platforms to take more responsibility for illegal content on their platforms – scams, terrorist content, images of abuse, etc – for which they could face fines of up to 6% of global revenue if they fail to police content adequately. So the US and UK approach focuses on corporate behaviour; the EU approach focuses on defining what is allowed legally.All of this action has been a long time coming and while it’s difficult to say exactly how it will play out, the bottom line is that the tech industry is – finally – going to become a regulated one. Its law-free bonanza is going to come to an end.Joe Biden’s choices for top staff in his administration include a depressing proportion of former tech company stalwartsThe big question, though, is: when? Antitrust actions proceed at a glacial pace because of the complexity of the issues and the bottomless legal budgets of the companies involved. The judge in one of the big American antitrust cases against Google has said that he expects the case to get to court only in late 2023 and then it could run for several years (as the Microsoft case did in the 1990s).The problem with that, as the veteran anti-monopoly campaigner Matt Stoller has pointed out, is that the longer monopolistic behaviour goes on, the more damage (eg, to advertisers whose revenue is being stolen and other businesses whose property is being appropriated) is being done. Google had $170bn in revenue last year and is growing on average at 10-20% a year. On a conservative estimate of 10% growth, the company will add another $100bn to its revenue by 2025, when the case will still be in the court. Facebook, says Stoller, “is at $80bn of revenue this year, but it is growing faster, so the net increase of revenue is a roughly similar amount. In other words, if the claims of the government are credible, then the lengthy case, while perhaps necessary, is also enabling these monopolists to steal an additional $100bn apiece.”What could speed up bringing these monopolists to account? A key factor is the vigour with which the US Department of Justice prosecutes its case(s). In the run-up to the 2020 election, the Democrats in Congress displayed an encouraging enthusiasm for tackling tech monopolies, but Joe Biden’s choices for top staff in his administration include a depressing proportion of former tech company stalwarts. And his vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, consistently turned a blind eye to the anti-competitive acquisitions of the Silicon Valley giants throughout her time as California’s attorney general. So if people are hoping for antitrust zeal from the new US government, they may be in for disappointment.Interestingly, Stoller suggests that another approach (inspired by the way trust-busters in the US acted in the 1930s) could have useful leverage on corporate behaviour from now on. Monopolisation isn’t just illegal, he points out, “it is in fact a crime, an appropriation of the rights and property of others by a dominant actor. The lengthy trial is essentially akin to saying that bank robbers getting to keep robbing banks until they are convicted and can probably keep the additional loot.”Since a basic principle of the rule of law is that crime shouldn’t pay, an addition of the possibility of criminal charges to the antitrust actions might, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning (pace Dr Johnson), concentrate minds in Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. As an eternal optimist, I cannot think of a nicer prospect for 2021 than the sight of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai in the dock – with Nick Clegg in attendance, taking notes. Happy new year!What I’ve been readingWho knew?What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy is a great Bloomberg column by Noah Smith.Far outIntriguing piece on how investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales (Stock Picks From Space), by Frank Partnoy on the Atlantic website.An American dream Lovely meditation on Nora Ephron’s New York, by Carrie Courogen on the Bright Wall/Dark Room website. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook faces antitrust allegations over deals for Instagram and WhatsApp

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      Facebook is expecting significant new legal challenges, as the US Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of attorney generals from up to 40 states are preparing antitrust suits.
      [embedded content]
      Although the specific charges in both cases remain unclear, the antitrust allegations are expected to center on the tech giant’s acquisition of two big apps: a $1bn deal to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012, and the $19bn purchase of the global messaging service WhatsApp in 2014. Together, the buys brought the top four social media companies worldwide under Facebook’s control. The purchases would constitute antitrust violations if Facebook believed the companies were viable competitors.
      At the time of its acquisition, Instagram had 30 million users, and, even though it was growing rapidly, it wasn’t yet making money. WhatsApp boasted more than 450 million monthly active users when it was acquired. “WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people,” Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time.
      The FTC cleared Facebook for the acquisitions when they occurred, and the company is hoping to leverage those approvals in mounting a defense. Facebook executives have also argued their company has helped the apps grow.
      But Facebook has come under greater scrutiny since the deals were done, and the FTC launched a new investigation into the potential antitrust violations in 2019.
      The FTC probe will build on findings from a separate inquiry conducted by the US House Judiciary subcommittee, which released millions of documents that appeared to show that Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were concerned the apps could become competition, before aggressively pursuing them.
      In one 2012 email, made public through the House investigation, Zuckerberg highlighted how Instagram had an edge on mobile, an area where Facebook was falling behind. In another, the CEO said Instagram could hurt Facebook even if it doesn’t become huge. “The businesses are nascent but the networks are established, the brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be disruptive to us,” Zuckerberg wrote. Instagram’s co-founder also fretted that his company might be targeted for destruction by Zuckerberg if he refused the deal.
      The FTC is expected to vote on a possible suit this week. Three of the five-member commission are believed to be in favor of the move, including chair Joseph Simons, who is expected to leave the agency before the new Biden administration is sworn in, Politico reported.
      Commissioners also have to decide where to file the suit: in federal court, which would leave the outcome to a judge; or in the FTC, where the commission could ultimately decide.
      The suit expected from the bipartisan coalition of states is headed by New York attorney general Letitia James. While details of their complaint are also scant, several states’ top law enforcement offices launched probes into Facebook’s acquisitions last year, adding to the pressure put on the company by federal regulators.
      Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
      Facebook’s possible legal challenges come as a growing number of US lawmakers are arguing that companies including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have amassed too much power and should be reined in.
      These companies “wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press”, the House judiciary committee concluded in its nearly 500-page report.
      “The result is less innovation, fewer choices for consumers, and a weakened democracy.”
      President-elect Joe Biden, too, has been critical of the tech companies. “Many technology giants and their executives have not only abused their power, but misled the American people, damaged our democracy and evaded any form of responsibility,” said Biden spokesperson Matt Hill to the New York Times. “That ends with a President Biden.”
      In May, Facebook took over Giphy, a hugely popular moving-image app, with plans to integrate it with Instagram. Late last month, the company also announced plans to acquire Kustomer, an e-commerce app.
      “This deal is about providing more choices and better products for consumers,” a company spokesman said in a statement to the New York Times. “The key to Facebook’s success has always been innovation, with M&A being just a part of our overall business strategy, and we will continue to demonstrate to regulators that competition in the technology sector is vibrant.” More

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      in US Politics

      If you think Biden's administration would rein in big tech, think again | John Naughton

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      Before the US presidential election I wondered aloud if Mark Zuckerberg had concluded that the re-election of Trump might be better for Facebook than a Biden victory. There were several reasons for thinking this. One was the strange way Zuckerberg appeared to be sucking up to Trump: at least one private dinner in the White House; the way he jumped on to Fox News when Twitter first placed a warning on a Trump tweet to say that Facebook would not be doing stuff like that; and the majority report of the House subcommittee on tech monopolies, in which it was clear that the Democrats had it in for the companies.But the most significant piece of evidence for the belief that a Biden administration would finally tackle the tech giants, and Facebook in particular, came in the long interview Biden gave last January to the New York Times, in which he was highly critical of the company.“I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan,” Biden said. “I think he’s a real problem … I’ve been in the view that not only should we be worrying about the concentration of power, we should be worried about the lack of privacy and them being exempt, which you’re not exempt. [The New York Times] can’t write something you know to be false and be exempt from being sued. But he can. The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms.” As readers of this column know only too well, section 230 of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act is the clause that exempts tech platforms from legal liability for anything that users post on their platforms. It’s the nearest thing social media has to a kill switch. Pull it and their business models evaporate. Trump had been threatening to pull it before the election, but he lacked the attention span to be able to do anything about it. Biden, on the other hand, had already talked about it in January and would have people around him who knew what they were doing. So maybe we were going to get some real progress in getting tech giants under control.And then he gets elected and what do we find? Biden’s transition eam is packed with tech industry insiders. Tom Sullivan, from Amazon, is earmarked for the Department of State. Mark Schwartz, also from Amazon, is heading for the Office of Management and Budget, as are Divya Kumaraiah from Airbnb and Brandon Belford from Lyft, the ride-hailing company. The US Treasury gets Nicole Isaac from LinkedIn, Microsoft’s department of spam, and Will Fields, who was Sidewalk Labs’ senior development associate. (Sidewalk Labs was the organiser of Google’s attempt – eventually cancelled – to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a data-geyser for surveillance capitalism.) The Environmental Protection Agency, a body that Trump looted and sidelined, gets Ann Dunkin, who is Dell’s chief technology officer. And so on.Well, I thought, perusing this sordid list, at least there’s nobody from Facebook on it. How innocent can you be? Politico reveals that the joint chair of Biden’s transition team, Jeff Zients, is a former Facebook board member. Another former board member is an adviser. And two others, one who was a Facebook director and another who was a company lobbyist, have, according to Politico “taken leadership roles”. And then, to cap it all, it turns out that Biden himself has a friendly relationship with a guy called Nick Clegg, who was once a serious politician and now doubles as Mark Zuckerberg’s bagman and representative on Earth.Truly, you couldn’t make this up. And just to add a touch of satire to it, the woman who is now a heartbeat away from the presidency, Kamala Harris, has a career-long record of cosying up to Silicon Valley. She participated, for example, in the marketing campaign for Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s anthem of capitalist feminism, even though at the time Harris was California’s law enforcement official most responsible for overseeing Facebook. As the state’s attorney general, she took a semi-comatose view of the way the big tech companies were allowed to gobble up potential rivals and bulldoze their way into new industries. Facebook’s controversial acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, perhaps the most obvious anti-competitive mergers in the short history of the tech industry, happened on her watch and triggered no regulatory reflex. If Silicon Valley could be said to have a darling, then Ms Harris is it. And all those campaign donations from tech companies and moguls may turn out to have been a shrewd investment after all.Given these sobering circumstances, how should we calculate the odds of a Biden administration taking on the power of the tech giants? The answer: slightly better than those of a snowball staying cool in hell. But only slightly.What I’ve been readingIs 2020 just a taster?Graeme Wood has written a riveting essay, titled The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse, on the work of Peter Turchin, a quantitative historian who believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies.Birth of an iNationWhat if we viewed tech giants as countries? A thoughtful essay in Tortoise Media considers Apple as a one-party state as secretive as China. But more liberal. Phew!Is less Moore?I enjoyed a lovely post by Venkatesh Rao on the Ribbonfarm blog, about the mindset induced by living in a world governed by Moore’s Law. More

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      in US Politics

      Is the internet breaking our grasp on reality? The 11 November Guardian Weekly

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      One of the many worrying aspects of 2020 has been a rise in online conspiracy theories, with supporters of some of the wildest – such as QAnon – even rising to elected office. Others have documented losing their loved ones down the conspiracy rabbit hole. In the first of a new Guardian series on how big tech has thrived during the pandemic, Alex Hern investigates why people are losing their grip on reality online and what Facebook, and others, are doing to stem the flow.The spread of online disinformation may even be influencing the man still sitting in the Oval Office in his refusal to concede. More than two weeks after election day in the US, Donald Trump has continued to proclaim his “victory” on social media and to delay the transition to the incoming Biden administration. As Simon Tisdall writes, this mess doesn’t just have implications for Americans but is giving cover to enemies of democracy elsewhere to play out their worst impulses while Trump causes a distraction. Also in the US, we look at what a mixed performance in the elections means for the Democrats – can Joe Biden keep his own party united, let alone a whole nation? We also look at the five intrinsic flaws that are causing democracy in the US to wobble.Britain is about to enter an absolutely vital few weeks when it comes to finalising post-Brexit trade terms – not to mention its Covid response. So it’s perhaps not surprising that last week No 10 was preoccupied by a toxic war between staff that culminated in the dramatic departure of Boris Johnson’s top aide, Dominic Cummings, and the PM finding himself back in Covid self-isolation … We look back at a wild week. What does it mean for the future of the government?Get the magazine delivered to your home More

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      in Elections

      Facebook and Twitter CEOs face Senate hearing over handling of 2020 US election – video

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      The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook appear before a US Senate hearing to testify about allegations of anti-conservative bias and their handling of the 2020 election. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg face questioning for the second time in as many months, with Republican lawmakers alleging – without evidence – censorship of conservative views
      Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias More