House Democrats Decide To Hand Facebook The Internet By Unconstitutionally Taking Section 230 Away From Algorithms

from the this-is-not-a-good-idea dept

We've been pointing out for a while now that mucking with Section 230 as an attempt to "deal" with how much you hate Facebook is a massive mistake. It's also exactly what Facebook wants, because as it stands right now, Facebook is actually losing users to its core product, and the company has realized that burdening competitors with regulations -- regulations that Facebook can easily handle with its massive bank account -- is a great way to stop competition and lock in Facebook's dominant position.

And yet, for reasons that still make no sense, regulators (and much of the media) seem to believe that Section 230 is the only regulation to tweak to get at Facebook. This is both wrong and shortsighted, but alas, we now have a bunch of House Democrats getting behind a new bill that claims to be narrowly targeted to just remove Section 230 from algorithmically promoted content. The full bill, the "Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act of 2021 is poorly targeted, poorly drafted, and shows a near total lack of understanding of how basically anything on the internet works. I believe that it's well meaning, but it was clearly drafted without talking to anyone who understands either the legal realities or the technical realities. It's an embarrassing release from four House members of the Energy & Commerce Committee who should know better (and at least 3 of the 4 have done good work in the past on important tech-related bills): Frank Pallone, Mike Doyle, Jan Schakowsky, and Anna Eshoo.

The key part of the bill is that it removes Section 230 for "personalized recommendations." It would insert the following "exception" into 230.

(f) PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATION OF INFORMATION PROVIDED BY ANOTHER INFORMATION CONTENT PROVIDER.—

‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—Subsection (c)(1) does not apply to a provider of an interactive computer service with respect to information provided through such service by another information content provider if—

‘(A) such provider of such service—
‘‘(i) knew or should have known such provider of such service was making a personalized recommendation of such information; or
‘‘(ii) recklessly made a personalized recommendation of such information; and
‘‘(B) such recommendation materially contributed to a physical or severe emotional injury to any person.

So, let's start with the basics. I know there's been a push lately among some -- including the whistleblower Frances Haugen -- to argue that the real problem with Facebook is "the algorithm" and how it recommends "bad stuff." The evidence to support this claim is actually incredibly thin, but we'll leave that aside for now. But at its heart, "the algorithm" is simply a set of recommendations, and recommendations are opinions and opinions are... protected expression under the 1st Amendment.

Exempting Section 230 from algorithms cannot change this underlying fact about the 1st Amendment. All it means is that rather than getting a quick dismissal of the lawsuit, you'll have a long, drawn out, expensive lawsuit on your hands, before ultimately finding out that of course algorithmic recommendations are protected by the 1st Amendment. For much more on the problem of regulating "amplification," I highly, highly recommend reading Daphne Keller's essay on the challenges of regulating amplification (or listen to the podcast I did with Daphne about this topic). It's unfortunately clear that none of the drafters of this bill read Daphne's piece (or if they did, they simply ignored it, which is worse). Supporters of this bill will argue that in simply removing 230 from amplification/algorithms, this is a "content neutral" approach. Yet as Daphne's paper detailed, that does not get you away from the serious Constitutional problems.

Another way to think about this: this is effectively telling social media companies that they can be sued for their editorial choices of which things to promote. If you applied the same thinking to the NY Times or CNN or Fox News or the Wall Street Journal, you might quickly recognize the 1st Amendment problems here. I could easily argue that the NY Times' constant articles misrepresenting Section 230 subject me to "severe emotional injury." But of course, any such lawsuit would get tossed out as ridiculous. Does flipping through a magazine and seeing advertisements of products I can't afford subject me to severe emotional injury? How is that different than looking at Instagram and feeling bad that my life doesn't seem as cool as some lame influencer?

Furthermore, this focus on "recommendations" is... kinda weird. It ignores all the reasons why recommendations are often quite good. I know that some people have a kneejerk reaction against such recommendations but nearly every recommendation engine I use makes my life much better. Nearly every story I write on Techdirt I find via Twitter recommending tweets to me or Google News recommending stories to me -- both based on things I've clicked on in the past. And both are (at times surprisingly) good at surfacing stories I would be unlikely to find otherwise, and doing so quickly and efficiently.

Yet, under this plan, all such services would be at significant risk of incredibly expensive litigation over and over and over again. The sensible thing for most companies to do in such a situation is to make sure that only bland, uncontroversial stuff shows up in your feed. This would be a disaster for marginalized communities. Black Lives Matter? That can't be allowed as it might make people upset. Stories about bigotry, or about civil rights violations? Too "controversial" and might contribute to emotional injury.

The backers of this bill also argue that the bill is narrowly tailored and won't destroy the underlying Section 230, but that too is incorrect. As Cathy Gellis just pointed out, removing the procedural benefits of Section 230 takes away all the benefits. Section 230 helps get you out of these cases much more quickly. But under this bill, now everyone will add in a claim under this clause that the "recommendation" cause "emotional injury" and now you have to litigate whether or not you're even covered by Section 230. That means no more procedural benefit of 230.

The bill has a "carve out" for "smaller" companies, but again gets all that wrong. It seems clear that they either did not read, or did not understand, this excellent paper by Eric Goldman and Jess Miers about the important nuances of regulating internet services by size. In this case, the "carve out" is for sites that have 5 million or fewer "unique monthly visitors or users for not fewer than 3 of the preceding 12 months." Leaving aside the rather important point that there really is no agreed upon notion of what a "unique monthly visitor" actually is (seriously, every stats package will give you different results, and now every site will have incentive to use a stats package that lies and gives you lower results to get beneath the number), that number is horrifically low.

Earlier this year, I suggested a test suite of websites that any internet regulation bill should be run against, highlighting that bills like these impact way more than Facebook and Google. And lots and lots of the sites I mention get way beyond 5 million monthly views.

So under this bill, a company like Yelp would face real risk in recommending restaurants to you. If you got food poisoning, that would be an injury you could now sue Yelp over. Did Netflix recommend a movie to you that made you sad? Emotional injury!

As Berin Szoka notes in a Twitter thread about the bill, this bill from Democrats, actually gives Republican critics of 230 exactly what they wanted: a tool to launch a million "SLAM" suits -- Strategic Lawsuits Against Moderation. And, as such, he notes that this bill would massively help those who use the internet to spread baseless conspiracy theories, because THEY WOULD NOW GET TO SUE WEBSITES for their moderation choices. This is just one example of how badly the drafters of the bill misunderstand Section 230 and how it functionally works. It's especially embarrassing that Rep. Eshoo would be a co-sponsor of a bill like this, since this bill would be a lawsuit free-for-all for companies in her district.

10/ In short, Republicans have long aimed to amend #Section230 to enable Strategic Lawsuits Against Moderation (SLAMs)

This new Democratic bill would do the same

Who would benefit? Those who use the Internet to spread hate speech and lies about elections, COVID, etc

— Berin Szóka 🌐 (@BerinSzoka) October 14, 2021

Another example of the wacky drafting in the bill is the "scienter" bit. Scienter is basically whether or not the defendant had knowledge that what they were doing was wrongful. So in a bill like this, you'd expect that the scienter would require the platforms to know that the information they were recommending was harmful. That's the only standard that would even make sense (though would still be constitutionally problematic). However, that's not how it is in the bill. Instead, the scienter is... that the platform knows they recommend stuff. That's it. In the quote above the line that matters is:

such provider of a service knew or should have known such provider of a service was making a personalized recommendation of such information

In other words, the scienter here... is that you knew you were recommending stuff personally. Not that it was bad. Not that it was dangerous. Just that you were recommending stuff.

Another drafting oddity is the definition of a "personalized recommendation." It just says it's a personalized recommendation if it uses a personalized algorithm. And the definition of "personalized algorithm" is this bit of nonsense:

The term 'personalized algorithm' means an algorithm that relies on information specific to an individual.

"Information specific to an individual" could include things like... location. I've seen some people suggest that Yelp's recommendations wouldn't be covered by this law because they're "generalized" recommendations, not "personal ones" but if Yelp is recommending stuff to me based on my location (kinda necessary) then that's now information specific to me, and thus no more 230 for the recommendation.

It also seems like this would be hell for spam filters. I train my spam filter, so the algorithm it uses is specific to me and thus personalized. But I'm pretty sure that under this bill a spammer whose emails are put into a spam filter can now sue, claiming injury. That'll be fun.

Meanwhile, if this passes, Facebook will be laughing. The services that have successfully taken a bite out of Facebook's userbase over the last few years have tended to be ones that have a better algorithm for recommending things: like TikTok. The one Achilles heel that Facebook has -- it's recommendations aren't as good as new upstarts -- gets protected by this bill.

Almost nothing here makes any sense at all. It misunderstands the problems. It misdiagnoses the solution. It totally misunderstands Section 230. It creates massive downside consequences for competitors to Facebook and to users. It enables those who are upset about moderation choices to sue companies (helping conspiracy theorists and misinformation peddlers). I can't see a single positive thing that this bill does. Why the hell is any politician supporting this garbage?

Filed Under: algorithms, anna eshoo, frank pallone, intermediary liability, jan schakowsky, mike doyle, news feeds, personalized recommendations, recommendations, section 230
Companies: facebook, yelp

The Most Important Part Of The Facebook / Oversight Board Interaction Happened Last Week And Almost No One Cared

from the pay-attention dept

The whole dynamic between Facebook and the Oversight Board has received lots of attention -- with many people insisting that the Board's lack of official power makes it effectively useless. The specifics, again, for most of you not deep in the weeds on this: Facebook has only agreed to be bound by the Oversight Board's decisions on a very narrow set of issues: if a specific piece of content was taken down and the Oversight Board says it should have been left up. Beyond that, the Oversight Board can make recommendations on policy issues, but the companies doesn't need to follow them. I think this is a legitimate criticism and concern, but it's also a case where if Facebook itself actually does follow through on the policy recommendations, and everybody involved acts as if the Board has real power... then the norms around it might mean that it does have that power (at least until there's a conflict, and you end up in the equivalent of a Constitutional crisis).

And while there's been a tremendous amount of attention paid to the Oversight Board's first set of rulings, and to the fact that Facebook asked it to review the Trump suspension, last week something potentially much more important and interesting happened. With those initial rulings on the "up/down" question, the Oversight Board also suggested a pretty long list of policy recommendations for Facebook. Again, under the setup of the Board, Facebook only needed to consider these, but was not bound to enact them.

Last week Facebook officially responded to those recommendations, saying that it had agreed to take action on 11 of the 17 recommendations, is assessing the feasibility on another five, and was taking no action on just one. The company summarized those decisions in that link above, and put out a much more detailed pdf exploring the recommendations and Facebook's response. It's actually interesting reading (or, at least for someone like me who likes to dig deep into the nuances of content moderation).

Since I'm sure it's most people's first question: the one "no further action" was in response to a policy recommendation regarding COVID-19 misinformation. The Board had recommended that when a user posts information that disagrees with advice from health authorities, but where the "potential for physical harm is identified but is not imminent" that "Facebook should adopt a range of less intrusive measures." Basically, removing such information may not always make sense, especially if it's not clear that the information in disagreement with health authorities might not be actively harmful. As per usual, there's a lot of nuance here. As we discussed, early in the pandemic, the suggestions from "health authorities" later turned out to be inaccurate (like the WHO and CDC telling people not to wear masks in many cases). That makes relying on those health authorities as the be all, end all for content moderation for disinformation inherently difficult.

The Oversight Board's response in this issue more or less tried to walk that line, recognizing that health authorities' advice may adapt over time as more information becomes clear, and automatically silencing those who push back on the official suggestions from health officials may lead to over-blocking. But, obviously, this is a hellishly nuanced and complex topic. Part of the issue is that -- especially in a rapidly changing situation, where our knowledge base starts out with little information and is constantly correcting -- it's difficult to tell who is pushing back against official advice for good reasons or for conspiracy theory nonsense reasons (and there's a very wide spectrum between those two things). That creates (yet again) an impossible situation. The Oversight Board was suggesting that Facebook should be at least somewhat more forgiving in such situations, as long as they don't see any "imminent" harm from those disagreeing with health officials.

Facebook's response isn't so much pushing back against the Board's recommendation -- but rather to argue that it already takes a "less intrusive" approach. It also argued that Facebook and the Oversight Board basically disagree on the definition of "imminent danger" from bad medical advice (the specific issue came up in the context of someone in France recommending hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID). Facebook said that, contrary to the Board's finding, it did think this represented imminent danger:

Our global expert stakeholder consultations have made it clear that, that in the context of a health emergency, the harm from certain types of health misinformation does lead to imminent physical harm. That is why we remove this content from the platform. We use a wide variety of proportionate measures to support the distribution of authoritative health misinformation. We also partner with independent third-party fact-checkers and label other kinds of health misinformation.

We know from our work with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other public health authorities that if people think there is a cure for COVID-19 they are less likely to follow safe health practices, like social distancing or mask-wearing. Exponential viral replication rates mean one person’s behavior can transmit the virus to thousands of others within a few days.

We also note that one reason the board decided to allow this content was that the person who posted the content was based in France, and in France, it is not possible to obtain hydroxychloroquine without a prescription. However, readers of French content may be anywhere in the world, and cross-border flows for medication are well established. The fact that a particular pharmaceutical item is only available via prescription in France should not be a determinative element in decision-making.

As a bit of a tangent, I'll just note the interesting dynamic here: despite "the narrative" which claims that Facebook has no incentive to moderate content due to things like Section 230, here the company is arguing for the ability to be more heavy handed in its moderation to protect the public from danger, and against the Oversight Board which is asking the company to be more permissive.

As for the items that Facebook "took action" on, a lot of them are sort of bland commitments to do "something" rather than concrete changes. For example, at the top of the list were things around confusion between the Instagram community guidelines and the Facebook community guidelines, and to be more transparent about how those are enforced. Facebook says that they're "committed to action" on this, but I'm not sure I can actually tell you what actions it's actually taken.

We’ll continue to explore how best to provide transparency to people about enforcement actions, within the limits of what is technologically feasible. We’ll start with ensuring consistent communication across Facebook and Instagram to build on our commitment above to clarify the overall relationship between Facebook’s Community Standards and Instagram’s Community Guidelines.

Um... great? But what does that actually mean? I have no idea.

Evelyn Douek, who studies this issue basically more than anyone else, notes that many of these commitments from Facebook are kind of weak:

Some of the “commitments” are likely things that Facebook had in train already; others are broad and vague. And while the dialogue between the FOB and Facebook has shed some light on previously opaque parts of Facebook’s content moderation processes, Facebook can do much better.

As Douek notes, some of the answers do reveal some pretty interesting things that weren't publicly known before -- such as how its AI deals with nudity, and how it tries to distinguish the nudity it doesn't want from things like nudity around breast cancer awareness:

Facebook explained the error choice calculation it has to make when using automated tools to detect adult nudity while trying to avoid taking down images raising awareness about breast cancer (something at issue in one of the initial FOB cases). Facebook detailed that its tools can recognize the words “breast cancer” but users have used these words to evade nudity detection systems, so Facebook can’t just rely on just leaving up every post that says “breast cancer.” Facebook has committed to providing its models with more negative samples to decrease error rates.

Douek also notes that some of Facebook's claims to be implementing the Board's recommendations are... misleading. They're actually rejecting the Board's full recommendation:

In response to the FOB’s request for a specific transparency report about Community Standard enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook said it was “committed to action.” Great! What “action,” you might ask? It says that it had already been sharing metrics throughout the pandemic and would continue to do so. Oh. This is actually a rejection of the FOB’s recommendation. The FOB knows about Facebook’s ongoing reporting and found it inadequate. It recommended a specific report, with a range of details, about how the pandemic had affected Facebook’s content moderation. The pandemic provided a natural experiment and a learning opportunity: Because of remote work restrictions, Facebook had to rely on automated moderation more than normal. The FOB was not the first to note that Facebook’s current transparency reporting is not sufficient to meaningfully assess the results of this experiment.

Still, what's amazing to me is that these issues, which might actually change key aspects of Facebook's moderation basically got next to zero public attention last week as compared to the simple decisions on specific takedowns (and the massive flood of attention the Trump account suspension decision will inevitably get).

Filed Under: content moderation, policies, recommendations
Companies: facebook, oversight board

Stop Blaming Algorithms For Misinformation And Threats To Democracy; The Real Problem Is Societal

from the fixing-the-wrong-thing dept

For quite some time now, we've pointed out that we should stop blaming technology for problems that are actually societal. Indeed, as you look deeper at nearly every "big tech problem," you tend to find the problem has to do with people, not technology. And "fixing" technology isn't really going to fix anything when it's not the real problem. Indeed, many proposals to "fix" the tech industry seem likely to exacerbate the problems we're discussing.

Of course, the "techlash" narrative is incredibly powerful, and the media has really run with it of late (as have politicians). So, it's nice to see at least Wired is starting to push back on the narrative. A new cover story makes it clear that "Bad Algorithms Didn't Break Democracy." It's a great article, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. It acknowledges the narrative, and even that the techlash narrative is appealing at a surface level:

It’s easy to understand why this narrative is so appealing. The big social media firms enjoy enormous power; their algorithms are inscrutable; they seem to lack a proper understanding of what undergirds the public sphere. Their responses to widespread, serious criticism can be grandiose and smarmy. “I understand the concerns that people have about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands,” said Mark Zuckerberg, in an October speech at Georgetown University. “I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”

If these corporations spoke openly about their own financial interest in contagious memes, they would at least seem honest; when they defend themselves in the language of free expression, they leave themselves open to the charge of bad faith.

But as the piece goes on to highlight, this doesn't really make much sense -- and despite many attempts to support it with actual evidence, the evidence is completely lacking:

Over the past few years, the idea that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter somehow created the conditions of our rancor—and, by extension, the proposal that new regulations or algorithmic reforms might restore some arcadian era of “evidential argument”—has not stood up well to scrutiny. Immediately after the 2016 election, the phenomenon of “fake news” spread by Macedonian teenagers and Russia’s Internet Research Agency became shorthand for social media’s wholesale perversion of democracy; a year later, researchers at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center concluded that the circulation of abjectly fake news “seems to have played a relatively small role in the overall scheme of things.” A recent study by academics in Canada, France, and the US indicates that online media use actually decreases support for right-wing populism in the US. Another study examined some 330,000 recent YouTube videos, many associated with the far right, and found little evidence for the strong “algorithmic radicalization” theory, which holds YouTube’s recommendation engine responsible for the delivery of increasingly extreme content.

The article has a lot more in it -- and you should read the whole thing -- but it's nice to see it recognizes that the real issue is people. If there's a lot of bad stuff on Facebook, it's because that's what its users want. You have to be incredibly paternalistic to assume that the best way to deal with that is to have Facebook deny users what they want.

In the end, as it becomes increasingly untenable to blame the power of a few suppliers for the unfortunate demands of their users, it falls to tech’s critics to take the fact of demand—that people’s desires are real—even more seriously than the companies themselves do. Those desires require a form of redress that goes well beyond “the algorithm.” To worry about whether a particular statement is true or not, as public fact-checkers and media-literacy projects do, is to miss the point. It makes about as much sense as asking whether somebody’s tattoo is true. A thorough demand-side account would allow that it might in fact be tribalism all the way down: that we have our desires and priorities, and they have theirs, and both camps will look for the supply that meets their respective demands.

Just because you accept that preferences are rooted in group identity, however, doesn’t mean you have to believe that all preferences are equal, morally or otherwise. It just means our burden has little to do with limiting or moderating the supply of political messages or convincing those with false beliefs to replace them with true ones. Rather, the challenge is to persuade the other team to change its demands—to convince them that they’d be better off with different aspirations. This is not a technological project but a political one.

Perhaps it's time for a backlash to the techlash. And, at the very least, it's time that instead of just blaming the technology, we all take a closer look at ourselves. If it's a political or societal problem, we're not going to fix it (at all) by blaming Facebook.

Filed Under: algorithms, blame, disinformation, humans, misinformation, recommendations, societal problems

New Study Suggests That YouTube's Recommendation Algorithm Isn't The Tool Of Radicalization Many People Believe (At Least Not Any More)

from the well,-look-at-that dept

It's become almost "common knowledge" that various social media recommendation engines "lead to radicalization." Just recently in giving a talk to telecom execs, I was told, point blank, that social media was clearly evil and clearly driving people into radicalization because "that's how you sell more ads" and that nothing I could say could convince them otherwise. Thankfully, though, there's a new study that throws some cold water on those claims, by showing that YouTube's algorithm -- at least in late 2019 -- appears to be doing the opposite.

To the contrary, these data suggest that YouTube's recommendation algorithm actively discourages viewers from visiting radicalizing or extremist content. Instead, the algorithm is shown to favor mainstream media and cable news content over independent YouTube channels....

Indeed, as you read through the report, it suggests that YouTube's algorithm if it has any bias at all, it's one towards bland centrism.

The recommendations algorithm advantages several groups to a significant extent. For example, we can see that when one watches a video that belongs to the Partisan Left category, the algorithm will present an estimated 3.4M impressions to the Center/Left MSM category more than it does the other way. On the contrary, we can see that the channels that suffer the most substantial disadvantages are again channels that fall outside mainstream media. Both right-wing and left-wing YouTuber channels are disadvantaged, with White Identitarian and Conspiracy channels being the least advantaged by the algorithm. For viewers of conspiracy channel videos, there are 5.5 million more recommendations to Partisan Right videos than vice versa.

We should also note that right-wing videos are not the only disadvantaged groups. Channels discussing topics such as social justice or socialist view are disadvantaged by the recommendations algorithm as well. The common feature of disadvantages channels is that their content creators are seldom broadcasting networks or mainstream journals. These channels are independent content creators.

Basically, YouTube is pushing people towards mainstream media sources. Whether or not you think that's a good thing is up to you. But at the very least, it doesn't appear to default to extremism as many people note. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's that way for everyone. Indeed, there are some people criticizing this study because it only studies non-logged in user recommendations. Nor does it mean that it wasn't like that in the past. This study was done recently, and it's been said that YouTube has been trying to adjust its algorithms quite a bit over the past few years in response to some of these criticisms.

However, this actually highlights some key points. Given enough public outcry, the big social media platforms have taken claims of "promoting extremism" seriously, and have taken efforts to deal with it (though, I'll also make a side prediction that some aggrieved conspiracy theorists will try to use this as evidence of "anti-conservative bias" despite it not showing that at all). Companies are still figuring much of this stuff out and insisting that because of some anecdotes of radicalization that it must always be so, is obviously jumping the gun quite a bit.

In a separate Medium blog post by one of the authors of the paper, Mark Ledwich, it's noted that the "these algorithms are radicalizing everyone" narrative also is grossly insulting to people's ability to think for themselves:

Penn State political scientists Joseph Philips and Kevin Munger describe this as the “Zombie Bite” model of YouTube radicalization, which treats users who watch radical content as “infected,” and that this infection spreads. As they see it, the only reason this theory has any weight is that “it implies an obvious policy solution, one which is flattering to the journalists and academics studying the phenomenon.” Rather than look for faults in the algorithm, Philips and Munger propose a “supply and demand” model of YouTube radicalization. If there is a demand for radical right-wing or left-wing content, the demand will be met with supply, regardless of what the algorithm suggests. YouTube, with its low barrier to entry and reliance on video, provides radical political communities with the perfect platform to meet a pre-existing demand.

Writers in old media frequently misrepresent YouTube’s algorithm and fail to acknowledge that recommendations are only one of many factors determining what people watch and how they wrestle with the new information they consume.

Is it true that some people may have had their views changed over time by watching a bunch of gradually more extreme videos? Sure. How many people did that actually happen to? We have little evidence to show that it's a lot. And, now, there is some real evidence suggesting that YouTube is less and less likely to push people in that direction if they're among those who might be susceptible to such a thing in the first place.

For what it's worth, the authors of the study have also created an interesting site, Recfluence.net where you can explore the recommendation path of various types of YouTube videos.

Filed Under: algorithms, engagement, radicalization, recommendation algorithm, recommendations
Companies: youtube

The Great Hack Wasn't A Hack And Big Tech's Problems Aren't Really About Big Tech

from the symptoms-not-the-disease dept

There must be some irony in the fact that the well-hyped documentary film about Cambridge Analytica/Facebook, called The Great Hack was released by Netflix -- a company who really is kinda famous for trying to suck up as much data as possible to build a better algorithm to keep you using its service more -- and potentially violating people's privacy in the process. I know it's ancient history in terms of internet years, and everyone has decided that Facebook and Google are the root of all internet/data evils, but back in 2006, Netflix launched a contest, offering $1 million to anyone who could "improve" its recommendation algorithm over a certain threshold. It took a few years, but the company awarded the $1 million to a team that improved its algorithm -- though, it never actually implemented that algorithm, claiming that the benefits "did not seem to justify the engineering effort."

But, perhaps more interesting, was that while the contest was ongoing, some computer scientists de-anonymized the dataset that Netflix had released, leading some to point out that the whole project almost certainly violated the law. Eventually, Netflix shuttered its plans for a follow up contest as part of a legal settlement regarding the privacy violations of the original.

So, perhaps feel a bit conflicted when Netflix's vaunted algorithm recommends "The Great Hack" for you to watch.

This is not to say the documentary is not important, but it does highlight our troubling desire to immediately point fingers and describe certain things as "evil." Even the name -- The Great Hack -- is ridiculously misleading. Nothing Cambridge Analytica did involved a "hack" in the way most people think of the word. Yes, you could argue that it was a "hack" of the larger system -- using Facebook's platform in a way that was not intended, but easily done, but it didn't involve any technical proficiency. Just a willingness to use the data that way.

But, it's interesting to me to see the press rush in to use the documentary as the exclamation point to the narrative that's become popular these days: that Silicon Valley is too obsessed with collecting data as a business model. Janus Rose, at Vice, has a big piece that describes the movie as a condemnation of "surveillance capitalism."

The real “great hack” isn’t Cambridge’s ill-gotten data or Facebook’s failure to protect it. It’s the entire business model of Silicon Valley, which has incentivized the use of personal data to manipulate human behavior on a massive scale.

Emily Dreyfuss at Wired, paints a similar portrait:

In that way, The Great Hack is a modern horror story. The villain is Cambridge Analytica, yes, but also Facebook, and all the systems that let people become manipulated by the digital psychological clues they leave through their lives. It's terrifying because it's true.

Natasha Lomas at TechCrunch, points out that Netflix is revealing "the defining story of our time" in the transactional nature of data on social platforms:

But in displaying the ruthlessly transactional underpinnings of social platforms where the world’s smartphone users go to kill time, unwittingly trading away their agency in the process, Netflix has really just begun to open up the defining story of our time.

Oddly, none of them mention Netflix's algorithm and history. Ah, right. Because the narrative these days is Facebook/Google/Silicon Valley. Netflix has mostly migrated south to Hollywood. And, Hollywood and the media industry have no history at all of "manipulating" the public. Nope, no history of that at all.

None of this is to absolve Silicon Valley and the big tech companies -- who really have done a piss poor job of thinking through the consequences of basically anything they've done, but forgive me for being marginally skeptical when the same industries that have a long history of pushing propaganda and trying to manipulate audiences in one direction or another suddenly start clutching pearls at the new kids on the block.

And if you want to point fingers, there are lots of directions they could go as well. All the internet haters seem to have glommed onto Shosana Zuboff's term "Surveillance Capitalism" as a sort of shibboleth to the savvy to show that you know (you know) those internet companies are truly evil in their hearts. But taken to its logical extreme, one might as well blame Wall Street. When you have a company, say, like Pinterest, that tries to avoid social media "growth hacking" then Wall St. punishes it. Witness the ongoing freakout through the past few months from Wall St. as it grapples with Alphabet/Google's revenue growth slowing.

If companies are constantly being told that they have a "fiduciary duty" to increase the stock, and Wall Street flips out any time they can't keep growing at insane, unsustainable rates, is it any wonder that all of the incentives lead us to a place where companies focus heavily on growth?

Again, this is not an excuse. It's all a problem. But we don't solve large societal problems by picking off one symptom of the disease that's really just a link in a larger societal chain. Surveillance capitalism is a symptom. Abusive data practices are a symptom. Propaganda and political grandstanding are symptoms. There are big societal problems at the root of all this -- but very few seem to be interested in exploring what they are and how to deal with them. Instead, we just get one part of the surveillance capitalist propaganda machine to convince everyone that another part of the surveillance capitalist propaganda machine is the problem. And, because that bit of propaganda is successfully manipulative and compelling, lots of people buy into it.

The narrative is here and it won't be changed.

Now, what does Netflix recommend we watch next?

Filed Under: algorithms, data, growth, influence, innovation, privacy, recommendations, surveillance capitalism, the great hack, wall st.
Companies: facebook, google, netflix

British News Channel Touts Amazon Bomb Materials Moral Panic That Ends Up Being About Hobbyists And School Labs

from the oops dept

Moral panics take many forms, from Dungeons & Dragons being a lure to satanism in the eyes of parents to the wonderful theory that playing chess would turn children into violent psychopaths. What these moral panics tend to share in common is the extraction of seemingly nefarious details on a subject which, out of context, are interpreted in a demonizing manner and then exported for public consumption. Thus the public gets often well-meaning but highly misleading information on the terribleness of some innocuous thing.

This practice continues to this day, often times helped along by a media environment desperate for clicks and eyeballs. A recent example of this would be British media's Channel 4 News finding that Amazon's algorithm had a habit of recommending a combination of products together that appeared designed for terrorist-style explosives.

Channel 4 News has discovered that Amazon's algorithm guides users to the necessary chemical combinations for producing explosives and incendiary devices. Ingredients which are innocent on their own are suggested for purchase together as "Frequently bought together" products, as it does with all other goods.

Ingredients for black powder and thermite are grouped together under a “Frequently bought together” section on listings for specific chemicals. Steel ball bearings often used as shrapnel in explosive devices, ignition systems and remote detonators are also readily available; some promoted by the website on the same page as these chemicals as products that “Customers who bought this item also bought”.

Anyone reading this report would reach the obvious conclusion: either Amazon has enough customers trying to make terror-bombs that the algorithm is reacting to that, or Amazon is purposefully pushing and radicalizing innocent product purchasers into bomb-making terror demons. Channel 4 noted that beyond the chemicals needed to produce "black powder" and thermite, Amazon commonly listed ball-bearings, ignition systems, and switch-detonators alongside them as items frequently purchased with those products. Even the saltiest among us would forgive the public reading all of this for losing their minds over the report.

Except, of course, all of this comes along with a perfectly innocuous explanation, as detailed by Pinboard's Maciej Cegłowski.

The 'common chemical compound' in Channel 4's report is potassium nitrate, an ingredient used in curing meat. If you go to Amazon's page to order a half-kilo bag of the stuff, you'll see the suggested items include sulfur and charcoal, the other two ingredients of gunpowder. (Unlike Channel 4, I am comfortable revealing the secrets of this 1000-year-old technology.) The implication is clear...But as a few more minutes of clicking would have shown, the only thing Channel 4 has discovered is a hobbyist community of people who mill their own black powder at home, safely and legally, for use in fireworks, model rockets, antique firearms, or to blow up the occasional stump.

Yes, making black powder is perfectly legal in the UK, and for good reason. Hobbyists use it all the time. It's so popular, in fact, because it's a difficult substance to set off by accident. As for the ball bearings, those go in a ball mill or drum, which is used to mix the powders together and get the particles to a like size, important for their use in black powder. They aren't shrapnel at all.

The ball bearings Amazon is recommending are clearly intended for use in the ball mill. The algorithm is picking up on the fact that people who buy the ingredients for black powder also need to grind it. It's no more shocking than being offered a pepper mill when you buy peppercorns.

As for the thermite and the "widely available chemical" the Channel 4 piece goes on about, it essentially describes the chemicals needed to make thermite and magnesium-ribbon. As Cegłowski notes, this combination produces what is called a thermite reaction. If that term sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you likely performed the thermite reaction in chemistry class.

The thermite reaction is performed in every high school chemistry classroom, as a fun reward for students who have had to suffer through a baffling unit on redox reactions. You mix the rust and powdered aluminum in a crucible, light them with the magnesium ribbon, and watch a jet of flame shoot out, leaving behind a small amount of molten iron. The mixed metal powders are hard to ignite (that's why you need the magnesium ribbon), but once you get them going, they burn vigorously.

The main consumer use for thermite, as far as I can tell, is lab demonstrations and recreational chemistry. Importantly, thermite is not an explosive—it will not detonate. So Channel 4 has discovered that fireworks enthusiasts and chemistry teachers shop on Amazon.

So, the moral panic ginned up by Channel 4 essentially amounts to hobbyists and chemistry teachers getting a little convenient help from Amazon's algorithm as they go about their day. Not exactly the "holy shit, everyone is making bombs!" story that the "news" piece wanted to tell, but it has the advantage of actually being true. Perhaps most amazingly is how bereft of common sense the claims by Channel 4 were. After all, were its assertions true, why in the world aren't there bombs going off in record numbers using these chemical combinations?

If nothing else, however, this story does serve as a nice "anatomy of a moral panic", as the Idle Words post so helpfully titles this whole episode.

Filed Under: algorithms, bomb making, moral panic, recommendations, uk
Companies: amazon

Appeals Court Reverses Its Own Ruling: It's NOT Trademark Infringement For Amazon To Provide Useful Search Results

from the watch-this dept

Just a few months back we had written about an odd case occurring in California between Multi-Time Machines, which makes watches, and Amazon, which sells watches, but not MTM watches. This trademark case over search results on watches took an odd turn after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals attempted to turn back the time-piece, applying a discarded doctrine called "initial interest confusion." This doctrine made it trademark infringement for retailers to point customers looking for product X to product Y instead, particularly by using certain product placement practices. The Ninth Circuit essentially dropped the doctrine in 2011, after a series of inconsistent rulings bred all kinds of confusion. In this particular case, Amazon customers entering "MTM watches" into the search field were presented with watches made by competitors, because Amazon doesn't carry MTM watches. In other words: "We don't carry that product, but we do carry these similar products that you might be interested in." The 9th Circuit initially ruled in favor of Amazon, but the appeals court reversed that ruling and set the trial to go before a jury using, again, the initial interest confusion doctrine.

But confusion is the key word here, apparently, because that same court agreed to a request by Amazon for a rehearing. At the rehearing, Amazon reiterated that it clearly identified the manufacturers and companies in its search results and that there was no actual customer confusion to be found. The court then reversed itself, ruling that the initial court's ruling in favor of Amazon had been proper.

Multi Time Machine, Inc., manufacturer of MTM Special Ops watches, alleged that Amazon’s website infringed its trademark because of the manner in which the website responded to a shopper’s search request for the watches. Affirming the district court’s summary judgment in favor of Amazon, the panel held that Amazon’s search results page did not create a likelihood of confusion by displaying a list of several other brands of military style watches. The panel concluded that because the page clearly labeled the name and manufacturer of each product offered for sale and even included photographs of the items, no reasonably prudent shopper accustomed to shopping online would likely be confused as to the source of the products.

There are a couple of items of note here. In its ruling, the court does not come out and directly strike down the idea of initial interest confusion. In fact, despite an amicus brief offered by Public Citizen and the EFF, the ruling generally only refers to initial interest confusion when describing the basis for MTM's complaint. In other words, it essentially punted on the question. It's also worth noting that there could still be a request that the case be reheard "en banc", so the court may hit the reset button on the case entirely.

But the real fun is how the court reversed itself. Paul Alan Levy has a nice write up of the details, but essentially one of the judges simply switched teams.

The panel has now reversed itself in an opinion by Circuit Judge Barry Silverman, the author of the original dissenting opinion, and affirmed the lower court’s grant of summary judgment. In dissent, Circuit Judge Carlos Bea (the author of the now-discarded majority opinion) angrily charges that the majority “sub silentio overrules this court’s ‘initial interest confusion’ doctrine.”

The third judge, Gordon Quist, had originally sided with Bea, but upon review appears to have decided that he did so in error and now joins the new majority in favor of Amazon. Courtroom drama, does it get any better?

In the end, it seems plainly silly to handcuff an online retailer from returning useful search results to not-confused customers in favor of a trademark doctrine that appears to have been deemed useless four years previous. It's a shame the court didn't decide to take that question head on, but this is certainly better than the court's original ruling.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, ads, initial interest confusion, recommendations, trademark, watches
Companies: amazon, mtm

DailyDirt: Eat This, Don't Eat That...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fad diets and diet recommendations seem to change every few years. Whole eggs were bad for you, but now they should be considered as part of a balanced diet. What makes a diet balanced? More carbs? Less Fat? Maybe you should just walk every day to your nearest Subway and only eat sandwiches. Or maybe you can just track your calories and eat whatever you want. Or not.

• The American Heart Association and the US govt have been recommending low cholesterol, low saturated-fat diets for over 50 years. However, mounting evidence is removing foods high in cholesterol from the "bad" food lists -- and maybe someday foods with saturated fat won't be perceived as unhealthy either. [url]
• Saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. The unintended consequences of vilifying fat in our diet has shifted people to consume more carbohydrates -- which actually do have proven negative health effects. [url]
• Dietary guidelines from Brazil are a bit non-specific, but they also sound pretty reasonable. Brazil's dietary advice includes this point: "Be wary of food advertising and marketing." [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: calories, cholesterol, diet, food, health, jared fogle, recommendations, saturated fat

Even If Google Could Improve Its Recommendations, Is It The Government's Job To Tell It To Do So?

from the seems-troubling dept

There were reports a few weeks ago that the European Commission has reopened its antitrust investigation into Google. The main issue is how Google promotes certain (usually internal) results in so-called "answer boxes" in a way that may hurt other sites. We've been skeptical of the idea of European bureaucrats deciding what Google's search results should look like, but earlier this year, it appeared that a settlement had been reached in which Google would point to competitors' results in some cases.

Against this backdrop, a few organizations, led by Yelp and TripAdvisor have created a somewhat fascinating site and tool called Focus On The User -- a play on Google's own core philosophy of "focus on the user and all else will follow." The site makes a very compelling argument that when Google is returning opinions (i.e., ratings) rather than factual answers, that it could do a much better job than just pointing to results from Google+. That is, if you do a search on "best restaurants in San Francisco" Google will show you results as rated by Google+ user reviews.

The Focus on the User site shows that rather than just relying on Google's own data, users would benefit greatly if Google used its own search algorithm to pull in results from reviews elsewhere. In short, where you might see a box up top with seven to ten reviews (all linking to Google pages), Yelp and TripAdvisor are arguing that if you just used Google's "organic" search algorithm to find the most relevant review pages, consumers get a much better experience. And they have a fair amount of data to back that up, showing a greater number of clicks in such a box (which you can test yourself via the site).

As noted above, the results are compelling. Using Google's own algorithm to rank all possible reviews seems like a pretty smart way of doing things, and likely to give better results than just using Google's (much more limited) database of reviews. But here's the thing: while I completely agree that this is how Google should offer up reviews in response to "opinion" type questions, I still am troubled by the idea that this should be dictated by government bureaucrats. Frankly, I'm kind of surprised this isn't the way Google operates, and it's a bit disappointing that the company doesn't just jump on this as a solution voluntarily, rather than dragging it out and having the bureaucrats force it upon them.

So while the site is fascinating, and the case is compelling, it still has this problem of getting into a very touchy territory where we're expecting government's to design the results of search engines. It seems like Yelp, TripAdvisor and others can make the case to Google and the public directly that this is a better way to do things, rather than having the government try to order Google to use it.

Filed Under: antitrust, eu, government, recommendations, regulators, search
Companies: google, tripadvisor, yelp

What To Do When Facebook Suggests You Become Friends With Your Husband's Other Wife

from the friend-the-police? dept

Personally, I've found that Facebook's "recommendations" of people I might know is kind of a mixed bag. Sometimes it reminds me of people I probably should be connected to, but other times it's pretty random. If I don't know the person, I might take a look at who we know in common, but I generally won't friend such people. Still, there are times when the recommendations might turn up something... interesting. Such is the case, apparently, with the woman who discovered that her husband was married to someone else after Facebook recommended his other wife to her, and she noticed the wedding photos in her profile. For what it's worth, the guy had left his first wife years earlier, and married the second wife after he'd moved out... but at no point had either the wife or husband moved towards getting a divorce. After trying to find out what was up by calling his mother, the guy showed up at wife number one's house promising to make things right if she didn't tell anyone. That didn't happen, and he's now facing bigamy charges. And people say Facebook isn't useful...

Filed Under: bigamy, divorce, friends, recommendations
Companies: facebook