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July 13 · Issue #164 · View online |
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As Facebook worked to quell unrest around its decision to offer Infowars a platform for its toxic conspiracy theories, it fell back on a familiar argument: both sides do it. “We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis — but others call fake news,” the company tweeted at CNN’s Oliver Darcy. “We believe banning these Pages would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech.” But does it? Megha Rajagopalan, BuzzFeed’s China bureau chief, offered some useful historical context. “Facebook actually has banned pages belonging to extremists who are egregious purveyors of hate speech & conspiracy theories in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, especially certain ethnonationalist groups and personalities,” she writes. In Myanmar, it banned the hateful monk Wirayu, who inspired targeted harassment at the Rohingya Muslims as part of an ethnic cleaning campaign that caused 700,000 people to flee to Bangladesh. “They are not allowed a presence on Facebook, and we will remove any accounts and content which support, praise or represent these individuals or organizations,” content policy manager David Caragliano said at the time.
In Sri Lanka, amid widespread ethnic violence, Facebook temporarily shut down all service in March. Pages from groups such as groups such as Bodu Bala Sena and Sinhala Ravaya pushed conspiracy theories that “accuse Muslims of high birth rates and forcing people to convert to Islam in order to reduce Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist majority,” according to Al Jazeera. Facebook banned those pages in the aftermath of the violence. So indeed Facebook bans pages for what might charitably be called “opinions.” Returning the subject to Infowars, Rajagopalan asks the obvious question: So a central question here is about transparency – who makes decisions about what pages are banned and what pages stay on the platform? What’s the rubric for determining this? What separates a publication like InfoWars from a Facebook page that is also publishing harmful conspiracy theories, but is not styling itself as a news outlet? One clear dividing line appears to be whether the page inspires its followers to commit violence. In 2016, Infowars reader Edgar Maddison Welch stepped into Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and shot the lock off a door with an AR-15 rifle. He told police, according to Mother Jones, that “he was there to rescue children from a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief, John Podesta.” The existence of the pizzeria-based sex ring, a conspiracy known as Pizzagate, was promoted relentlessly by Infowars’ Alex Jones, whose Facebook page Welch liked and whose radio show he listened to. Mother Jones found six other instances of Infowars commenters and Jones enthusiasts committing violent crimes, including Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev; Gabby Giffords shooter Jared Loughner, and a man who fired a semiautomatic weapon at the White House during the Obama presidency. More recently, a man named Brennan Gilmore posted video of the attacks that killed one and wounded at least 19 more in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally. Infowars accused Gilmore of being an operative of the “deep state” and said he was trying to bring down President Trump. “After the conspiracy theories about me spread online, my family and I were subject to harassment, threats, hate mail and hacking attempts,” Gilmore, who is suing Jones for defamation, later wrote in the Post. “Someone mailed an envelope containing a suspicious white powder residue and a four-page diatribe describing how I would burn in hell. I’ve been accosted on the street in Charlottesville and the harassment continues to this day.” It’s for this reason that I take exception to the idea that Infowars exists on the familiar left-to-right spectrum of political commentary, and must be protected in the name of free speech. Most of us take no issue with the ban on falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater; Jones’ false yelling has proven to be just as deadly. The academic Zeynep Tufecki spoke to this issue today in the context of Jones’ repeated promotion of the idea that the Sandy Hook massacre never took place. “‘Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax to take away your guns’ [is] not just something ‘debunked by fact-checkers.’ It’s high-profile incitement to violence and harassment against bereaved parents who just lost their little children to murder. As is ‘this pizza shop is a pedophile ring.’” She goes on: “I’m wary of banning pages. Facebook cannot cure all societal ills. It’s good if they finally stop amplifying the worst via algorithms / business model. But there’s a line. Inciting violence/harassment against people, let alone recently bereaved parents, is on far side of that line.” Indeed. For now, Facebook promises only to limit Infowars’ promotion in the News Feed. To that point, Alexios Mantzarlis has some relevant questions: How has this worked out with InfoWars? How often have fact-checkers flagged an InfoWars post as false? How many people fewer were reached because of it? And can InfoWars still advertise and monetize on the platform?
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Robert Mueller's Indictment Today of 12 Russian Hackers Could Be His Biggest Move Yet
Good overview of today’s indictments in Wired.
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Facebook, Google and Twitter will testify at House Judiciary hearing
This sort of feels like the Diamond and Silk hearing all over again, but this time representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube will be on hand for a House Judiciary Committee hearing on social media filtering. I’ll be covering it.
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Inside Facebook, Twitter and Google's AI battle over your social lives
Bad headline, but Alfred Ng has some interesting details on how Facebook tries to stamp out fake accounts. Including using your phone’s gyroscope to check if you’re breathing! When you sign up for Facebook on your phone, the app isn’t just giving you the latest updates and photos from your friends and family. In the background, it’s utilizing the phone’s gyroscope to detect subtle movements that come from breathing. It’s measuring how quickly you tap on the screen, and even looking at what angle the phone is being held. […] The company also relies on AI to automatically tell if an account is fake based on how many accounts are on one device, as well as its activities after it’s created. Facebook’s AI will label an account as a bot if it signs up and is able to send more than 100 friend requests within a minute, he said.
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4,500 Tech Workers, 1 Mission: Get Democrats Elected
Republicans know how effective Facebook and Google can be at targeting voters. Democrats, incredibly, are still waking up to this fact, report Sheera Frankel and Kevin Roose. But they’re getting help: One of the group’s biggest tasks, Ms. Alter said, is persuading candidates to campaign heavily on social media, rather than relying solely on TV ads and printed mailers. Many Democrats running in 2018 are spending a much smaller percentage of their ad budgets on digital ads than their rivals, sometimes as little as 10 percent versus more than 40 percent for Republicans, according to two political consultants with ties to multiple campaigns. Tech for Campaigns has advised Democrats in about 60 races since it started, including Justin Nelson, who is running for attorney general in Texas, and Rob Quist, who was narrowly defeated in a special congressional election in Montana last year. The group plans to work with 200 campaigns by the end of the year, with a special focus on helping state-level candidates like Ms. Eskamani, who typically do not have the budgets to hire dedicated digital teams.
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Information Operations are a Cybersecurity Problem: Toward a New Strategic Paradigm to Combat Disinformation
Here’s a good long paragraph from a short piece from Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta about how we are unprepared to deal with modern information warfare: As the American Enterprise Institute’s Phillip Lohaus put it, “We tend to think of our cyberdefenses as physical barricades, barring access from would-be perpetrators, and of information campaigns as retrograde and ineffective. In other words, we continue to focus on the walls of the castle, while our enemies are devising methods to poison the air.” When lawmakers and business leaders discuss “cyber attacks,” they’re generally thinking of network intrusions and exfiltration of data — for example, password phishing, malware, DDOS attacks, and other types of exploits or sabotage that target specific devices or networks. Information warfare, by contrast, is an attack on cognitive infrastructure, on people themselves, on society, and on systems of information and belief. Its targets are diffuse and widespread. There are best practices and frameworks for tackling and preventing cybersecurity attacks: identification and management of vulnerable infrastructure, building a defensive environment around that infrastructure, detecting and analyzing all anomalous events on the network, responding to actual attacks, improving those defensive measures, and recovering from successful attacks. There isn’t much out there for dealing with information warfare, and that gap is leaving democratic societies vulnerable.
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Activism in the Social Media Age
Social media tends to be valued more highly by people of color, in part because it surfaces issues important to them more frequently than the mainstream media, which is of course mostly white. Lots to chew on here: Majorities of whites, blacks and Hispanics all believe social media play a very or somewhat important role in getting elected officials to pay attention to issues, creating sustained movements for social change, or influencing policy decisions. But there are some differences in the intensity of their views. Most notably, 36% of blacks and 27% Hispanics say social media are very important for getting elected officials to pay attention to issues, compared with 19% of whites. Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely than whites to describe social media as very important for influencing policy decisions and creating sustained movements for social change.
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Facebook's apology ads are working
Alex Kantrowitz finds data that says people are warming up to Facebook again after the massive advertising campaign apologizing for the past two years.
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Facebook Makes Moves on Instagram’s Users
“The power dynamic between the social media platform and its photo-sharing app is shifting,” writes Sarah Frier in this timely piece about Facebook’s incursions into the its still-beloved subsidiary: In late June, Spencer Chen got an unusual notification from Instagram. The app prompted him to check out a friend’s new photo—on Facebook. Chen grabbed a screenshot and posted the notification on the internet, calling it a cry for attention by the older social network. It felt like a cheap trick, he says, like “placating big brother in the Facebook building.”
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The Twitter Purge: How Many Followers Trump, Nicki Minaj and Others Lost
Research has shown that nothing is more viscerally satisfying than watching celebrities lose Twitter followers. The Times is here to help you enjoy your Friday evening: The New York Times tracked the accounts of more than 3,000 of the most popular celebrities, politicians and world leaders to see who lost the greatest number of followers. It’s important to note that just because an account’s follower count dropped doesn’t mean the user bought fake followers. Suspicious accounts are known to follow some of the most popular accounts to make them look more authentic.
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Plane Bae Woman's Statement Confirms the Worst
“Plane bae woman” — who was surreptitiously filmed flirting with her seat mate as part of a mega-viral Twitter thread — released a statement about the whole affair. She comes down on the side of those who say that surreptitiously filming people, posting the clips online, and subjecting them to weeks of harassment is a bad thing: I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world. I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not a romance—it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.
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Reddit employee saved Gamergate forum KotakuInAction after its creator tried to destroy it
The creator of the worst Gamergate forum shut it down after having an attack of conscience — and then Reddit saved it from extinction. Notably, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao retweeted a developer who tweeted in response: “ Wow @Reddit go fuck yourself.” The creator of r/KotakuInAction, a GamerGate subreddit, is speaking up about creating what he calls “one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated Reddit.” User David-me briefly locked the subreddit, explaining in a lengthy post that the forum has become filled with racism and sexism. “I did this,” he wrote. “Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.” KotakuInAction has since returned, however, thanks to a Reddit administrator.
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Facebook Groups widely used for sharing pirated Hollywood movies
Facebook wants more users to participate in groups that are very meaningful. It turns out that people find groups that give away pirated movies very meaningful! The social network is awash with groups devoted to freely sharing pirated Hollywood movies with hundreds of thousands of users, Business Insider has found. With names like “Full HD English Movie” and “Free full movies 2018,” these Facebook groups make no attempt to hide their purpose or to conceal catalogs brimming with the latest blockbusters like “Ant Man and the Wasp” and “A Quiet Place.” Business Insider found them by simply searching for “free movies” on Facebook.
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Facebook poaches top Google engineer to help design its own chips
OK! Facebook has hired one of Google’s chip developers, Shahriar Rabii, to help the social network in its ongoing effort to design its own silicon, according to a report from Bloomberg. Facebook hopped on the chip-developing bandwagon earlier this year, when they started to build a team that could design custom chips to power server and consumer hardware.
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How Do We Cover The Information Wars?
Charlie Warzel wrote a truly great newsletter today focused on how reporters covering the alt-right and trolls need to question their own methdology, and evolve along with the trolls. A must read for reporters, and a good read for anyone immersed in this coverage: Ultimately, coverage decisions come down to the question of how important and influential these communities truly are when left to their own devices. Since Trump took office, the pro-Trump media has been adept at injecting its talking points into the internet and watching as they’re picked up by more mainstream conservative press like Fox News. Would these narratives and memes and hashtags still reach them reliably if mainstream reporters ignored them? The question is the same with the the alt-right and white nationalist communities. Would the groups have felt empowered enough to march in the streets with torches in Charlottesville last August if they’d not had mainstream media coverage? Or was their brazen attitude shaped by the vibrant and supportive online communities they’ve built? Another fundamental — and unanswered — question about both the pro-Trump online media apparatus and the alt-right is just how big those groups really are. The underbelly of the pro-Trump media as well as the alt-right is largely anonymous; any of its players operate in the shadows. Add in automated astroturfing campaigns, bots, potential manipulation by foreign actors masquerading as Americans, and shady Twitter chat rooms and you’ve got a largely unmeasurable murky mess. So: are the pro-Trump media and alt-right factions just small networks unwittingly inflated ? Or are they truly robust and reflective of a once dormant community of anger and hate on the anonymous internet?
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Facebook would make a martyr by banning Infowars
Josh Constine tells Facebook not to ban Infowars for fearing of making Alex Jones a martyr. 1: Who cares if he’s a martyr? Limiting his audience limits the number of people inspired to go shoot up pizza restaurants. 2. This is another take that privileges Jones’ feelings above the feelings of, say, the Sandy Hook families that are harassed by people exposed to Jones’ views on Facebook. Why downranking and quarantine? Because banning would only stoke conspiratorial curiosity about these inaccurate outlets. Trolls will use the bans as a badge of honor, saying, “Facebook deleted us because it knows what we say is true.” They’ll claim they’ve been unfairly removed from the proxy for public discourse that exists because of the size of Facebook’s private platform.
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This is just a very good pitch for an Airbnb for horses
The weekend is here, and I invite you to check out this week’s podcast with Dream Machine’s Alexia Bonatsos. She pitches me Airbnb for horses, and I pitch her Theranos for the blockchain. It’s a good time.
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Why Nudists Love Twitter
There are a lot of disturbing things on Twitter, but it’s hard not to feel a surge of affection for its thriving community of nudists, who are so happy to have a place online where they can be extremely naked at all times: Belcher isn’t a porn star or spam account sharing unsolicited photographs of his penis—he’s part of the thriving community of nudists on Twitter who have flocked to the platform after most others have made a policy of censoring or banning images of naked bodies. Nudists on Facebook have had their profiles suspended after failing to properly crop or censor their photos. On Instagram, they’ve been penalized for showing female nipples or too much pubic hair. Tumblr allows NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, but nudists say the platform is so overrun with spam that it’s unusable. Meanwhile, two of the very things that have made Twitter toxic for many people—its maximalist commitment to free speech and its lack of enforcement of real names—have also, strangely, made it the best place to be a nudist on the internet. A fun content strategy to try out over the weekend!
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Questions? Comments? Weekend plans? casey@theverge.com
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