echo chamber – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the complainer-in-chief dept

After months of fact-free complaints about bias against conservatives on social media, the White House has finally decided to engage in a fact-finding mission. And by “fact-finding mission,” I mean “knock together a shitty webform to collect complaints.” Or build a mailing list for the 2020 election run. Who knows. But here it is in all of its “will this do” glory.

It opens with this statement before it starts harvesting personal info.

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies.

No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.

From there, the form asks for first name, last name, citizenship, zip code, phone number (optional), and email address. If you’re not a US citizen or resident, the White House’s form says it can’t help you. That’s pretty weird considering this form does nothing more than harvest information, most of it personal. If non-US citizens want to share their personal information — and their stories of social media bias — with the administration, they should be able to. But that’s how the White House set this up: Americans only.

After that, it’s time to start detailing the bias. Pick a platform and start bitching. Start by giving the government the link to your social media account, describe the incident, and upload screenshots of the tweet/post removed for ~~violating terms of use~~ being conservative.

You also have the option of being added to the White House’s newsletter email list. Then you have prove you’re not a robot by typing in the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. Fortunately for the bots, the question and answer never change, so not much a bulwark against exploitation.

Finally, you have to agree to the White House’s “user agreement,” conveniently located at another site and hidden behind a shortened link.

At the White House’s site, you’ll learn that complaining about bias via this webform gives the government permission to:

…use, edit, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, post, or otherwise distribute all or part of the Content (including edited, composite, or derivative works made therefrom).

Forever.

The license you grant is irrevocable and valid in perpetuity, throughout the world, and in all forms of media.

And there’s nothing you can do if the government decides to alter your tweet and turn it into the centerpiece of its next Congressional hearing.

You waive any right to inspect or approve any Content or edited, composite or derivative works made from Content (including those which may contain your Information) before use. You are not entitled to any prior notice before the U.S. Government uses Content or Information. You are not entitled to any compensation for Content.

And even though the government has taken irrevocable possession of your content, it’s still your content where it matters most.

You solely bear all responsibility for all Content.

This isn’t about political bias. This is about confirmation bias. The White House has asked people to complain about being blocked or banned. Only those with negative experiences are invited to participate and that slant guarantees a bunch of unreliable narratives. Everything fed into this ad hoc complaint box will be vetted by an administration already convinced the social media deck is stacked against conservatives.

This will allow the administration to cherry-pick what it needs to back up the claims it’s been making for months and ignore everything else. It will give the President a stack of printed-out tweets to wave at social media company execs during the next closed door meeting. What it won’t produce is much reliable evidence of bias. The lack of reliability won’t matter to the administration or the man at the top.

The real question, though, is what the administration plans to do with this info. It seems the ultimate goal is to talk itself into believing the bias problem is bad enough the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity will need to be damaged to make it right.

But, for now, at least the government has given the public a platform to complain about beverage companies threatening to send their urine to journalists.

Filed Under: bias, campaigns, conservative bias, content moderation, echo chamber, social media, social media bias, white house
Companies: facebook, twitter, youtube

If You're Blaming Facebook For The Election Results, You're An Idiot

from the there's-real-anger-at-the-status-quo dept

Yeah, okay, I know there are a million and one “hot takes” going on across the media about what happened yesterday and “what went wrong.” I already wrote about what the election means for tech policy and civil liberties, but the trite setup of the blame game is getting really stupid, really fast. I had already started writing up a response to this silly Vox article about how “Facebook is harming our democracy” before the election (the story came out over the weekend), but now that I’m seeing more and more people (especially in the media) blaming Facebook and “algorithms” for the results of the election, I’m turning it into this post: if you’re blaming Facebook for the results of this election, you’re an idiot.

Facebook’s algorithm and whatever “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” or whatever it may have created did not lead to this result. This was the result of a very large group of people who are quite clearly — and reasonably — pissed off at the status quo. Politics has been a really corrupt game for basically ever, and for the past few decades, lots of people have been trying to pretend it wasn’t as corrupt as it really is. The fact that Trump is likely to be as corrupt — if not more so — than those who came before him didn’t matter. People were upset and voted against a candidate who, to them, basically defined the status quo and the problems with the system. This was a “throw the bums out” vote, and many of the bums deserved to be thrown out. That they voted in someone likely to be worse (especially given who he’s surrounded himself with so far) wasn’t the point. Just as with Brexit, this was a vote of “what we have now ain’t working, let’s try something different.”

It’s no surprise many people argued that Clinton was the wrong candidate to go against Trump. She absolutely was. She was the status quo candidate in a time when lots and lots of people didn’t want the status quo.

But that’s not Facebook’s fault. And the idea that a better or different algorithm on Facebook would have made the results any different is just as ridiculous as the idea that newspaper endorsements or “fact checking” mattered one bit. People are angry because the system has failed them in many, many ways, and it’s not because they’re idiots who believed all the fake news Facebook pushed on them (even if some of them did believe it). Many people don’t think Trump will be any good, but they voted for him anyway, because the status quo is broken.

There is a large slice of voters who told exit pollsters they thought Trump was dishonest, had a bad temperament, etc.–but voted for him.

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) November 9, 2016

The idea that people are just such suckers they believe whatever Facebook puts in front of them is silly. That’s not how it works:

The fundamental problem here is that Facebook?s leadership is in denial about the kind of organization it has become. ?We are a tech company, not a media company,? Zuckerberg has said repeatedly over the last few years. In the mind of the Facebook CEO, Facebook is just a ?platform,? a neutral conduit for helping users share information with one another.

But that?s wrong. Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions ? steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories. The fact that these decisions are being made by algorithms rather than human editors doesn?t make Facebook any less responsible for the harmful effect on its users and the broader society.

Yes, many people are falling for fake or bogus or sensationalized news — and the Trump campaign expertly took a kernel of truth (that many mainstream media sources didn’t want him to win) and spun it into the idea that no media story highlighting his flaws, lies or corruption (no matter how carefully and factually reported) could be believed. But people are believing those stories because they match with their real world experience of seeing how the system has worked (or not worked) for too long.

I’ve already expressed my concerns about what a Trump presidency will do for the issues that I spend my days focused on — and it’s not good. But as loyal readers here at Techdirt should know well, we’ve never been particularly supportive of the way things have been running in the government all along — and that’s through 10 years under Democratic presidencies and 8 years under GOP presidencies. The federal government has a long history of doing bad stuff: stomping on free speech and expanding surveillance (who cares about the 1st or 4th Amendments?), pushing policies that will harm innovators in favor of legacy industries (including in both the copyright and patent spaces) and generally disregarding what’s best for the public. I fear that Trump will make things significantly worse, but I certainly recognize the need to change the status quo overall. And not because of Facebook’s stupid algorithm.

Filed Under: algorithms, anger, democracy, donald trump, echo chamber, filter bubble, politics, status quo
Companies: facebook

Why Is The FCC Only Holding Net Neutrality Meetings In DC?

from the there's-a-big-country-out-there dept

On Friday, the FCC announced plans to host a bunch of “open internet roundtable discussions” as it continues to explore the rules that it will put in place. That’s a good idea… until you realize that all of the meetings will be held in Washington DC. And, of course, by doing that, it more or less guarantees that the space will be filled by lobbyists and friends, rather than the actual public. EFF is asking the FCC to get out of Washington DC and to talk to real people, rather than just telco insiders — pointing out that it’s done so before and can easily do so again. While I’m sure the big broadband players would still seek out “friendly” seat-fillers at any location around the country, getting the debate outside the beltway would do a lot towards actually getting a more honest discussion going.