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      Republicans use congressional hearing to berate tech CEOs and claim Trump is 'censored'

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      Republican lawmakers berated the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google in a hearing that was ostensibly about a federal law protecting internet companies but mostly focused on how those companies deal with disinformation from Donald Trump and other conservatives.Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai testified before Congress on Wednesday about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law underpinning US internet regulation that exempts platforms from legal liability for content generated by its users.The hearing was meant to investigate “how best to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse”, according to the Senate judiciary committee, but came largely in response to allegations from Republicans and the president of anti-conservative bias in the tech world. Those accusations are unsubstantiated. In fact, a recent report alleged that Facebook had suppressed progressive content to appease Republican lawmakers.Still, Republicans on the committee accused the CEOs of “censoring” the president, and questioned them about their decision-making around labeling some of the president’s social media posts as misinformation. The Republican chair of the committee, Roger Wicker, opened the hearing criticizing Twitter and Facebook’s decision to limit sharing of an unverified political story by the New York Post about the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and Twitter’s labeling of a Trump tweet casting doubt on mail-in ballots as potential misinformation.Republican after Republican accused Twitter of mishandling Trump’s tweets, with the Senator Marsha Blackburn claiming the company had “censored” Trump 65 times and Biden “zero” times.Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, responded Trump has not been “censored”.“To be clear, we have not censored the president,” he said. “We have not taken the tweets down that you are referencing, we added additional context as we do with any world leader.” More

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      Section 230: tech CEOs to defend key internet law before Congress

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      [embedded content]
      The CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google are expected to tell lawmakers in a rare appearance before Congress that a federal law protecting internet companies is crucial to free expression online.
      Wednesday’s hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai will take place less than a week before election day and was convened to address section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law underpinning US internet regulation that exempts platforms from legal liability for content generated by its users.
      The hearing will investigate “how best to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse”, according to the Senate judiciary committee, and it comes largely in response to allegations of anti-conservative bias in the tech world.
      Senate Republicans indicated they wanted to question Pichai and Zuckerberg in October to discuss issues related to section 230. Dorsey was added to the mix after Twitter restricted the circulation of a controversial New York Post article that featured potentially hacked materials relating to Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
      In prepared testimony for Wednesday’s hearing, Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, said eroding the foundation of section 230 “could collapse how we communicate on the internet, leaving only a small number of giant and well-funded technology companies”.
      Facebook’s Zuckerberg warned that tech companies were likely to censor more content to avoid legal risks if section 230 were repealed. “Without section 230, platforms could potentially be held liable for everything people say,” he said.
      The Facebook executive also argued that without the law, tech companies could face liability for doing even basic moderation, such as removing hate speech and harassment. He said he supported “updating” the rules for the internet if it were done with the potential consequences in mind.
      Pichai said Google approached its work without political bias and was able to offer the information it did because of existing legal frameworks such as section 230. “I would urge the committee to be very thoughtful about any changes to section 230 and to be very aware of the consequences those changes might have on businesses and consumers,” Pichai’s written testimony said.
      Republicans’ allegations that tech companies unfairly silence conservative voices is unsubstantiated. In fact, a recent report alleged that Facebook had suppressed progressive content to appease Republican lawmakers.
      Still, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused Twitter and Facebook of censoring him and has zeroed in on section 230 as one of the culprits. Trump has stepped up his criticism since the companies began to label or even remove posts by the president or his campaign that spread misinformation or call for violence.
      “Repeal section 230!!!” Trump tweeted on 6 October, after Twitter added a misinformation warning label to one of his tweets claiming the flu is more deadly than Covid-19.
      Ironically, the repeal of section 230 protections would probably lead social media platforms to take more, not less, action over Trump’s posts, as it would hold them legally liable for any falsehoods he posts. Experts say the effects would be comparable to what was seen with the passage of Fosta/Sesta, legislation that held platforms responsible for sexual service advertisements posted on their sites. The passage of those bills led to the removal of Craigslist personal ads and upended content policies on sites like Tumblr.
      Privacy advocates have long called for the protection of section 230, saying it is integral to internet freedom. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group, called section 230 “the most important law protecting internet speech”.
      The Internet Society, another non-profit organization advocating for internet access, warned that poorly informed policy decisions on section 230 could bring “dire consequences” for what we are able to do online.
      That is because the law applies not only to platforms like Facebook and Twitter but to other internet infrastructure like domain name registries and internet service providers. Without section 230, these entities may have to approve content prior to posting or take other action that would significantly slow the flow of the internet as we know it.
      Despite the warnings, the modification of existing regulations has become a major point of contention in the run-up to the election, with both presidential candidates proposing section 230’s repeal. There have been an additional 20 attempts to amend or revoke the law in the past two years.
      In addition to discussions on reforming the law, the hearing will bring up issues about consumer privacy and media consolidation. On Tuesday, Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate commerce panel, released a report on how big tech platforms have decimated the local news industry, including newspapers and broadcasters.
      The tech executives will begin their testimony at 10am ET and all three will appear remotely.
      Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Film-maker Alexandra Pelosi: ‘I think phones are more dangerous than guns’

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      The documentarian and daughter of the House speaker discusses her new film that looks at an angry and divided AmericaAmerica is, as the refrain goes, divided. This has been demonstrated empirically, with evidence on America’s increasing political polarization, and anecdotally, if you’ve lived in America for the past decade, and especially the last four years. Easily legible examples of a country fraying at the seams abound; American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself, a new documentary from Showtime, serializes some of the most prominent ones of the last year, with a retrospective of such indelible yet quickly faded images as crematory trucks in the height of pandemic New York, the Trump motorcycle rally in pandemic summer South Dakota, and a fraught border checkpoint in El Paso, Texas. Related: ‘There’s a whole war going on’: the film tracing a decade of cyber-attacks Continue reading… More

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      AOC played Among Us and achieved what most politicians fail at: acting normal

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      On Tuesday night, US members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar held what is perhaps the most unusual voter outreach event in recent memory. They signed on to play a livestreamed video game on Twitch, and joined a crew of online strangers to build a spaceship and try to get away with murder – literally.They were playing the incredibly popular Among Us – a 2018 game currently in the middle of a revival in interest, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and its faddish attraction to influencers. To play the game, crewmates complete mundane tasks on a spaceship while an impostor tries to kill members of the crew without getting caught. In the first round, Ocasio-Cortez – a complete newbie to the game – was picked as the impostor, while Omar, her confidante on Capitol Hill was none the wiser, so the live stream was set to be fun from the start.And it was, by every metric we have for this kind of event, an incredible success. Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch channel garnered a staggering audience of 439,000 viewers, all watching her in real time (the record for a Twitch stream is about 628,000 concurrent viewers) with approximately 5.2 million viewers watching the stream in aggregate. Meme-makers extended the conversation well into the week. Politicians do not draw this large of an online audience so quickly on these platforms: when Donald Trump and Joe Biden stream on Twitch for campaign events, total views peak at around 6,000 and 17,000, respectively.The success of Ocasio-Cortez and Omar’s stream extends beyond their already-established popularity among young progressives. The game itself is great sport. Much like the party game you may know as Werewolf, or Mafia, Among Us casts suspicion from the start, because although players know that there is an impostor “among us” (perhaps two), they don’t know who the impostor is.AOC’s stream was as good a sale as any: she fretted over the anxiety of having to play the role of the impostor, nearly giving herself away and saying “nooooo” out loud when she realized she would be the first person evading suspicion. In later games, where she was just a crewmate, she lamented to viewers about how she was “running so behind” on her tasks, and was shocked when an impostor found and killed her little pink avatar.When another player’s body was found, viewers could speculate with her: who’s the most suspicious player? (“I’m voting early,” she would say when casting her lot against a suspect, using every opportunity to stay on-message). You don’t really have to know a thing about video games to get drawn into the suspense of the game.But Ocasio-Cortez and Omar aren’t just famous people playing an unusually popular video game; they’re members of Congress trying to get out the vote. And in this, they achieved something most politicians attempt and fail at daily: they looked like completely normal people. They were having fun, accusing each other of being the impostor, cheering when they won, shouting about how they knew all along when an impostor was finally revealed.Credibility goes a long way here: AOC, in particular, has an established online presence, and engages with the public online in an almost-collegial manner. This, like the notion of playing a video game when she and Omar ostensibly have “more important” things to do, has earned her the scorn of others in Congress, but consider the things other candidates do to get out the vote: fish fries, baby kissing and benefit concerts. You go where people are, and in 2020, young people are watching video games played on Twitch.In internet culture, there’s nothing more vulgar than a tourist, someone with a purely transactional interest in a scene. And no matter how earnest Joe Biden is, or how cynically exploitative Trump is, in certain online circles, they will always be tourists simply because they’re too far removed from what young people are doing online to do what Ocasio-Cortez did: notice that there was a game people loved to watch on Twitch, asking if anyone wanted to play with her, and sitting down for a few hours to do it with nearly half a million people watching. And in the end, that’s the secret to Ocasio-Cortez and Omar’s success: that, for a little while, they weren’t opportunistic politicians, but motivated fellow citizens, just a couple of Twitch streamers among us. More

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      Facebook says it rejected 2.2m ads seeking to obstruct voting in US election

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      A total of 2.2m ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120,000 posts withdrawn for attempting to “obstruct voting” in the upcoming US presidential election, Facebook’s vice president Nick Clegg has said.In addition, warnings were posted on 150m examples of false information posted online, the former British deputy prime minister told French weekly Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.Facebook has been increasing its efforts to avoid a repeat of events leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, won by Donald Trump, when its network was used for attempts at voter manipulation, carried out from Russia.There were similar problems ahead of Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union.“Thirty-five thousand employees take care of the security of our platforms and contribute for elections,” said Clegg, who is vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook.“We have established partnerships with 70 specialised media, including five in France, on the verification of information”, he added. AFP is one of those partners.Clegg added that the company also uses artificial intelligence that has “made it possible to delete billions of posts and fake accounts, even before they are reported by users”.Facebook also stores all advertisements and information on their funding and provenance for seven years “to ensure transparency,” he said.In 2016, while he was still deputy prime minister, Clegg complained to the Journal du Dimanche that Facebook had not identified or suppressed a single foreign network interfering in the US election.On Wednesday, Trump rebuked Facebook and Twitter for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose corrupt dealings by election rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.A day earlier Facebook announced a ban on ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated, in light of the coronavirus pandemic which the social media giant said has “highlighted the importance of preventive health behaviours”. More

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      Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden

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      Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election.In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the “link may be unsafe”.Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.The company further explained the decision in a series of tweets on Wednesday, saying some of the images in the article contained personal and private information. Twitter’s policy against posting hacked material was established in 2018. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, said the company’s communication about the decision to limit the article’s spread was “not great”, saying the team should have shared more context publicly.Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
      Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.The move marks the first time Twitter has directly limited the spread of information from a news website, as it continues to implement stricter rules around misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. On Wednesday evening Twitter also reportedly locked the personal account of the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the article.In recent weeks Twitter announced it would warn users who attempt to retweet a link without first clicking on it for more context. It has also started to take action against misinformation and calls to violence posted by Donald Trump and other public figures.Wednesday’s actions around the New York Post article drew swift backlash from figures on the political right, who accused Facebook and Twitter of protecting Biden, who is leading Trump in national polls. The New York Post blasted the companies, saying they were trying to help Biden’s election campaign and falsely claiming no one had disputed the story’s veracity. “Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines,” it wrote in an editorial.Meanwhile, the Republican senator Ted Cruz wrote a letter to Dorsey, saying: “Twitter’s censorship of this story is quite hypocritical, given its willingness to allow users to share less-well-sourced reporting critical of other candidates.”Trump’s campaign director, Jake Schneider, called the blocking of McEnany “absolutely unacceptable” and McEnany herself tweeted: “Censorship should be condemned.”Trump tweeted that it was “terrible” that the social media companies “took down” the article – in fact, it was restricted, not removed – and renewed his calls to “repeal section 230”, a measure that keeps website hosts from being held responsible for content posted. Ironically, repealing section 230 would require Twitter to take down more content, including many of Trump’s tweets.Even non-conservatives criticized the choice to limit the spread of the article as one that will play into the rightwing narrative that big tech firms censor conservative views. The decision was indeed quickly politicized – with House Republicans publishing the text of the story on their website in order to share the link without censorship.The article implicates the former vice-president in connection with his son Hunter’s Ukraine business and was headlined: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”The unnamed owner of the computer repair shop told the newspaper he passed a copy of the hard drive on the seemingly abandoned computer to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.The story focused on one email from April 2015, in which a Burisma board adviser thanked Hunter for inviting him to a Washington meeting with his father. But there was no indication of when the meeting was scheduled or whether it ever happened.“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”The campaign said it was not told by Facebook or Twitter that any action would be taken regarding the article.“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” the Biden campaign added.Others cast also doubt on the report, citing Giuliani’s record of producing disinformation and making bogus claims about both Bidens and Ukraine.AFP contributed reporting More

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      Twitter suspends accounts for posing as Black Trump supporters

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      Twitter has suspended a network of accounts claiming to be owned by Black supporters of Donald Trump and his re-election campaign due to spam and platform manipulation, it said Tuesday.The company is investigating the activity and may suspend additional similar accounts if they are found to be violating its policies, a spokesperson said.The Washington Post first reported on the investigation, citing more than a dozen accounts using identical, inauthentic language including the phrase: “YES IM BLACK AND IM VOTING FOR TRUMP!!!”A review of some of the suspended accounts shows they often used stolen images to appear real. The accounts sometimes claimed to be owned by military veterans or members of law enforcement.This is not the first time Twitter has had to address a spam operation claiming to be led by Black voters. NBC News also reported spam operations from fake accounts posing as Black Trump supporters in August.Some accounts were able to attract thousands of followers before they were suspended. One tweet, for example, amassed more than 10,000 retweets before it was removed, NBC News found. Another account allegedly used a photo of a veteran who died last month to pose as a Trump supporter.Polls show about 10% of Black voters in the US support Trump. These accounts raised suspicion for their identical language and stock image avatars.Meanwhile, research shows Black Americans have been negatively impacted by misinformation campaigns online in recent months, particularly those focused on spreading misinformation about Covid-19.“Black lives are consistently put in danger, and it is incumbent upon community actors, media, government, and tech companies alike to do their part to ensure that timely, local, relevant and redundant public health messages are served to all communities,” a study from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found.Twitter rules prohibit using the platform “in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter”, a Twitter spokesman told the Guardian.The company reports campaigns discovered to be state-backed in its public archive. This month it revealed it had suspended more than 1,500 accounts affiliated with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Thailand and Russia that had sought to spread misinformation. It did not say where it believed the network of people posing as Black Trump supporters originated or whether it was state-backed.Reuters contributed reporting More