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| October 15 · Issue #400 · View online |
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Over the past week or so, it has felt like the entire public conversation around tech has turned a now familiar question: what should stay up, and what should come down? Third, Twitter sought to clarify its never-enforced rules around what to do if a “world leader” ever incites violence against a private individual, promotes terrorism, or violates a handful of other big rules. In some cases it will remove the tweet; in others it will put it behind a warning. That’s all well and good, but policy is what you enforce — and until Twitter takes an action on one of these tweets, it’s really just talk. Fair-housing advocates are accusing Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms of abusing the legal provision that grants tech companies broad immunity for content people post on its platforms. They want Congress to ensure online rental services cannot ignore — and profit off— listings that violate state and local housing laws. Most of the debate over Congress reviewing of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has focused on social media companies: Republicans argue they’re using the law to unfairly silence conservative voices and Democrats say the act should be changed to ensure social media giants take greater responsibility for disinformation and other problematic content. But this latest attack, coming just days before a House Energy and Commerce joint subcommittee hearing to examine the decades-old law, shows that changes could have consequences for other tech platforms such as online marketplaces. OK, so that one is kind of an outlier … or at least, another conversation. As for the rest, it strikes me that they all revolve around what platforms sometimes refer to, euphemistically, as “borderline content.” The basic idea is that the closer a piece of content comes to violating a platform’s rules, the more that people tend to engage with it. In a world where many people want more attention than they’re getting, creating borderline content is one of the few proven recipes for success. But because it may violate a platform’s rules, it requires a lot of agonizing discussions among members of the policy team and other executives. And because borderline content tends to touch on sensitive or controversial subjects, the backdrop of those discussions is often a public-relations crisis. But even if that content is less prominent to most users, it will still be hosted on company servers — and will require intervention from moderators. I expect that to be doubly true next year in the United States, when we have a presidential election to look forward to. In short, the swarm of headlines about content moderation over the past week should not be mistaken as a coincidence. What stays up — and what comes down — has never been a more salient question in people’s minds. And absent any meaningful regulation, expect the tech platforms to keep fumbling their way forward, trying to appease as many users as possible.
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Thanks to everyone who wrote in with thoughts about Facebook, political ads, and lies. I’ve already said a lot on this subject, but I wanted to highlight two popular ideas in your replies. One is that lying in political ads might not feel so noxious if politicians had to lie to Facebook’s entire user base, rather than micro-targeted segments — where their lies might go unnoticed. One of you wrote: Could there be a partial solution for disinformation that won’t abridge our free speech rights by banning micro targeting? What if instead of trying to constrain what people say in ads we force them to say it to everyone? Ban micro targeting for all political ads. Make a law that all political ads must be broadcast to all interests in the region affected. So national election ads must broadcast nationally regardless of party affiliation or interest. State election ads must broadcast state wide etc. More radically what if internet ads had to be paired with message equivalent TV, cable, and newspaper ads? I bet that would reduce the effectiveness of disinformation campaigns because it would make it harder (but not impossible) to radicalize the target audience without inflaming the opposition. Another popular idea, and one that Facebook has considered in the past: just ban political ads altogether. This feels overly defeatist to me — and could disadvantage good candidates who don’t yet have national name recognition. But given the public-relations beatings that I expect Facebook to take over its new policy in the coming year, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company eventually did ban political ads. Facebook seems to concede that it — like broadcasters — exercises gatekeeping control over attention, advertising dollars, and political debate, and therefore has a fiduciary responsibility of some kind. But the platform wants to cherrypick only the permissive aspects of regulation: don’t moderate for disinformation. What Facebook fails to acknowledge is that it isn’t neutral. It is favoring candidates who smear their opponents and amplify baseless conspiracies. It’s not just that the platform takes these ads; its algorithmic design juices their circulation by advantaging the incendiary over the informative to increase engagement.
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Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.
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When it comes to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Facebook ads, the odds are overwhelming that people seeing them were born before 1975. For Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the opposite is true: People born in 1975 or after are more than twice as likely to see his Facebook ads than those born earlier. A gender split is clear, too: About half of Mr. Sanders’s audience are men, while about two-thirds of Mr. Biden’s are women. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, more or less, splits the difference between them. She has targeted a Facebook audience that more closely mirrors the projected universe of likely Democratic primary voters in 2020: more women than men (though not by as much as Mr. Biden), leaning older more than younger (but again, not by as much as Mr. Biden).
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Some Amazon sellers use a chatbot to automate the entire interaction. “Hello! Thanks for your interest!” responds one Facebook page, named VPOW GE. “Do you wanna test our FREE portable breathalyzer? It’s [ sic] real cost is USD 33.99, but now it is free for testing in limited time! (If yes, simply click the “yes” button under the picture to proceed.)” Each of the page’s questions were followed by clickable “yes” and “no” buttons. Do you have Amazon and PayPal accounts? Yes. Can you leave a review one week after receiving the package? Yes. Confirm that your first review was published before June 1, 2019. Yes, confirmed. The page then offers a detailed set of instructions. Search for a particular keyword, look for the brand name WEIO, add the product to your Amazon Wish list, then order the product. Make sure you don’t use a gift card. Half of the refund will be issued within 24 hours of receipt. The other half will arrive after you send a screenshot of your review. But be sure to wait ONE WEEK before reviewing.
Meanwhile, Facebook is expanding in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest office now employs more than 5,000 people, making it the second-largest Facebook workspace outside of the Menlo Park headquarters. (Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire)
Twitter’s head of product, Kayvon Beykpour, came on The Vergecast to discuss upcoming features, how the company is handling verification, and whether or not they’ll ever roll out an auto-delete feature for tweets. Casey co-hosted the interview alongside our boss, Nilay Patel — I hope you’ll check it out. (Andrew Marino / The Verge)
Recode launched a new podcast called Reset about how tech is changing our lives. It’s hosted by our friend Arielle Duhaime-Ross, who was formerly the first climate change correspondent in American nightly TV news. Reset comes out thrice weekly; the debut episode is about bio-hacking. (Liz Nelson / Recode)
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Just as never-ending social feeds sent some of us running back to email, so too are never-ending direct messages sending people back to text messages. The latest example, via Taylor Lorenz: celebrities encouraging you to text “them” directly. For the most part, this seems to just sign folks up for a promotional SMS mailing list. On the other hand, you now may or may not have access to the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy: “I’m sitting here and I’m thinking, I’m about to go into this next era of my life and I’m going to be doing a lot of positive things, a lot of disruptive things, a lot of things I really don’t want everybody, like everybody to know about,” Diddy said in an IGTV video posted on Oct. 2. “On the ’Gram, everybody knows about everything. I want a deeper connection with my fans.” His number is 917-746-1444. Let us know if you get through!
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