politics – Techdirt (original) (raw)

How The Cowardice Of The LA Times And Washington Post Highlights The Danger Of The Link Taxes They Demand, And Their Hypocrisy

from the we-won’t-and-we’ll-make-it-so-you-can’t-either dept

As Mike and others have pointed out, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have utterly failed the public. While it is of course their right to endorse, or not endorse, anyone they choose, the refusal to provide any such endorsement in an election with such high stakes abandons the important role the press plays in helping ensure that the electorate is as informed as it needs to be to make its self-governance choices. They join the outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others who have also pulled their punches in headlines and articles about the racist threats being made in the course of the presidential campaign, or inaccurately paint a false coherence between the candidates in their headlines and articles, and in doing so kept the public from understanding what is at stake. The First Amendment protects the press so that it can be free to perform that critical role of informing the public of what it needs to know. A press that instead chooses to be silent is of no more use than a press that can’t speak.

The issue here is not that the LA Times and Washington Post could not muster opinions (in fact, one could argue that its silence is actually expressing one). The issue is more how they’ve mischaracterized endorsements as some sort of superfluous expression of preference and not a meaningful synthesis of the crucial reporting it has done. In other words, despite their protests, the endorsement is supposed to be reporting, a handy packaging of its coverage for readers to conveniently review before voting.

If it turns out that the publication can draw a conclusion no better than a low-information voter, when it, as press, should have the most information of all, then it can no longer be trusted as a useful source of it. While both the LA Times and Washington Post have still produced some helpful political reporting, their editorial reluctance to embrace their own coverage makes one wonder what else they have held back that the public really needed to know about before heading to the ballot box. Especially when it seems the Times in particular also nixed the week-long series of Trump-focused articles it had been planning, which would have culminated in the editorial against him – the absence of that reporting too raises the strong suspicion that other relevant reporting has also been suppressed.

This crucial educative role that the press plays to inform public discourse so necessary for democracy to successfully function is now going unserved by the publications who have now abdicated that important job. Which is, of course, their choice: it is their choice in whether and how to exercise the editorial discretion of what to cover and what to conclude. The press freedom the First Amendment protects includes the freedom to be absolutely awful in one’s reporting decisions. No law could constitutionally demand anything otherwise and still leave that essential press freedom intact.

But if these incumbent outlets are not going to do it, then someone else will need to. The problem we are faced with is that not only are these publications refusing to play this critical democracy-defending role, but they are also actively trying to prevent anyone else from doing it. Because that’s the upshot to all the “link taxes” they and organizations they support keep lobbying for.

As we’ve discussed many times, link taxes destroy journalism by making that journalism much more difficult to find. The link sharing people are now able to freely do on social media and such would now require permission, which would necessarily deter it. The idea behind link taxes it would raise revenue if people had to pay for the permission needed to link to their articles. But all such a law would be sure to do is cut media outlets off from their audiences by deliberately cutting off a main way they get linked to them.

While the goal of the policy, to support journalism, may be noble, the intention cannot redeem such a counterproductive policy when its inevitable effect will be the exact opposite. It is, in short, a dumb idea. But if link taxes are imposed it will be a dumb idea everyone has to live with, no matter how much it hurts them. And it will hurt plenty. Because even if it manages to generate some money, the only outlets likely to ever see any of it would be the big incumbents – the same ones currently failing us. Smaller outlets, by being smaller, would be unlikely to benefit – compulsory licensing schemes such as this one rarely return much to the longtail of supposed “beneficiaries.” Yet for those smaller outlets keen to build audiences and then monetize that attention in ways most appropriate for it, these link tax schemes will be crippling obstacles, preventing their work from even getting seen and leaving them now without either revenue or audience. Which will make it impossible for them to survive and carry the reporting baton that the larger outlets have now dropped. Which therefore means that the public will still have to go without the reporting it needs, because the bigger outlets aren’t doing it and the smaller ones now can’t.

Laws that impose regulatory schemes like these are of dubious constitutionality, especially in how they directly interfere with the operation of the press by suppressing these smaller outlets. But what is perhaps most alarming here is the utter hypocrisy of these incumbent outlets to claim link taxes are needed to “save” journalism while not actually doing the journalism that needs saving, yet demanding a regulatory scheme that would effectively silence anyone interested in doing better.

If they wonder why journalism is struggling, then the thing they need to do is look in the mirror. The way to save journalism is to actually practice journalism. No link tax is going to make the LA Times or Washington Post play the role they have chosen not to play anymore. But they will make it so that no one else can play it either. And that’s no way to save journalism; that’s how you kill it for good.

And with it the democracy that depends on it.

Filed Under: cjpa, endorsements, jcpa, journalism, link taxes, politics
Companies: la times, washington post

Chris Rufo Is Exploiting The Fact That Academic Plagiarism Norms Are Absurd

from the fix-plagiarism-by-fixing-the-norms dept

Let’s be honest, Christopher Rufo is the ratfucking king. While I don’t agree with him about anything, when it comes to dirty tricks, nobody does it half as good as him, he’s the best. Whenever Rufo releases a new report, the “woke” tremble, and pray he’s targeting someone else.

Rufo’s current crusade is focused on academic plagiarism. About a year ago, he started accusing prominent progressive academics – mostly Black women – of plagiarizing parts of their scholarship. His method was brilliantly simple, essentially just comparing the academic’s work to their sources and highlighting the similarities. Lo and behold, a lot of academics appear to copy banal observations and statements of fact without using quotation marks or attributing them to a source.

Anyway, Rufo gets results. His report accusing Harvard President Claudine Gay of plagiarizing parts of her 1998 dissertation, among other works, helped precipitate her resignation. And his recent report accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of plagiarizing parts of her book 2009 Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer from press releases and Wikipedia, among other sources, was immediately picked up by the New York Times.

The genius of Rufo’s grift is that he’s right, at least according to his targets and their supporters. Academics universally define plagiarism as copying words or ideas without proper attribution, and they’ve gradually convinced just about everyone else to accept their definition, including journalists. What’s more, they’ve made plagiarism the academy’s only capital crime, punishable by expulsion or worse. Just ask any student hauled into the academic star chamber called an “honor council.”

The only problem is that academics and journalists alike are massive hypocrites, who enforce their own plagiarism norms against themselves almost entirely in the breach, and even then only reluctantly. When students plagiarize, there’s no excuse, but somehow when academics plagiarize there are always mitigating factors, even though you’d think academics are far better situated to avoid plagiarism than their students.

I’ll be blunt. The copying Rufo identified is absolutely plagiarism, as academics and journalists define it. Students are punished on the regular for doing exactly the same thing. And if it’s wrong for students, it has to be wrong for their professors as well. The wrongness of copying without attribution can’t depend on who’s doing the copying.

But why is plagiarism wrong?

Gay, Harris, and the other academics targeted by Rufo copied expressions notable only for their banality. If that’s plagiarism, then plagiarism is a joke. Press releases and Wikipedia were created to be copied. Nobody cares about attribution, because it just doesn’t matter. In fact, there’s no reason to attribute most of the facts and ideas used in a scholarly work, unless attribution will help the reader. And that goes for professors and students alike. No one should suffer for violating pointless plagiarism norms.

Unfortunately, just about everyone is deeply invested in the moral legitimacy of plagiarism norms, especially academics and journalists. It’s incredibly hard for people to question the moral justification of plagiarism norms, let alone whether they should be enforced. Everyone just assumes that plagiarism is wrong, so plagiarists should be punished.

Give me a break. All of the plagiarism Rufo identifies is remarkable only for its banality. For years, no one noticed the copying, because no one cared about it. And they were right not to care, because it didn’t matter. We should just extend the same grace to students, where it matters even less. A student copied, so what? If they copied well, they learned a skill academics and others use all the time. And if they copied poorly, their grade will reflect it. No need for further punishment.

Rufo’s brand of fugazi is brilliant, because academics are incapable of seeing their own bullshit, let alone seeing through it. When you come for the king, you’d better not miss. Unfortunately, Rufo’s academic opponents couldn’t hit a barn door. If they want to beat Rufo’s plagiarism charges, they have to embrace them.

The obvious solution is to tell scholars – and everyone else! – to provide quotations and citations only when they’re actually helpful to readers. If academics want to win the war with Rufo, they’ll have to abandon plagiarism norms, in order to save them.

Brian L. Frye is the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky.

Filed Under: christopher rufo, citations, claudine gay, copying, kamala harris, plagiarism, politics, ratfucking

Newsom’s Unconstitutional AI Bills Draw First Amendment Lawsuit Within Minutes Of Signing

from the stop-passing-shit-bills dept

I do not understand why California Governor Gavin Newsom thinks he has to be the Democratic equivalent of Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, signing obviously unconstitutional laws for the sake of winning culture war arguments.

It’s really shameful. It’s cheap political pandering, while disrespecting the rights of everyone he’s supposed to represent.

Newsom and his Attorney General, Rob Bonta, keep losing First Amendment lawsuits challenging the bad internet laws he keeps signing (even if Newsom pretends he won them). And he’s wasting California taxpayer money fighting losing battles while engaging in petty political stunts.

The latest are a pair of obviously unconstitutional AI bills, AB 2655 and AB 2839, about AI and deepfakes (and possibly AB 2355, which might be slightly more defensible, but not much). While much of the media coverage has been about SB 1047, an equally bad bill Newsom seems unlikely to sign, the California legislature spent this session coming up with a ton of awful and unconstitutional ideas.

The specifics of the laws here place limits on “election-related deepfakes.” This gets a bit trickier from a First Amendment standpoint because of two things pushing in opposite directions. The first is that election-related political speech is definitely considered some of the most well-protected, most untouchable speech under the First Amendment.

A big reason why we have that First Amendment is that the founders wanted to encourage a vigorous and sometimes contentious debate on the issues and our leaders. For that reason, I think courts will pretty clearly toss out these laws as unconstitutional.

The one thing pushing back on this is there is that there is one area where courts have granted states more leeway in saying certain election-related information is not protected: when it’s lies about actual voting, such as where voting will be, when and how. There was a recent paper looking at some of these restrictions.

But the problem is that the laws Newsom just signed are not, in any way, limited in that manner. AB 2839 bans the sharing of some election-related deepfakes around election time.

AB 2655 then requires “a large online platform” to block political deepfakes around election time. Notably, it exempts broadcast TV, newspapers, magazines, and vaguely defined “satire or parody” content, which increases the list of reasons it’s clearly unconstitutional. Similar laws are thrown out for being “underinclusive” in not covering other similar content, since that proves that the government’s action here is not necessary.

Of course, that “satire or parody” exception just means everyone sharing these videos will claim they’re satire or parody. Any lawsuits would then be fought over whether or not they’re satire or parody, and that’s something judges shouldn’t be deciding.

AB 2355 requires political ads to disclose if they used AI. This is… kinda meaningless? As digital creation tools increasingly will use AI in the background for all sorts of things (fix the lighting! adjust the cloud cover!) this gets kind of silly.

Gavin Newsom tweeted about how he would use these laws to force Elon to remove a stupid, obvious deepfake he had posted of Kamala Harris, as if playing up that this is an unconstitutional stunt.

Look, I get that Newsom isn’t big on the First Amendment. But tweeting out that you signed a bill to make sure a specific piece of content gets removed from social media is pretty much waving a giant red flag that says “HEY, I’M HERE VIOLATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT, LOOK AT ME, WHEEEEEEEE!!!”

Anyway, within probably minutes of Newsom signing the bill into law, the first lawsuit challenging 2655 and 2839 was filed. It’s by Christopher Kohls, who created the video that Elon shared, and which Newsom directly called out as one that he intended to forcibly remove. As expected, Kohl claims his video (which is, I assure you, very, very stupid) is a “parody.”

On July 26, 2024, Kohls posted a video parodying candidate Kamala Harris’s first presidential campaign ad. The humorous YouTube video (“the July 26 video”) is labeled “parody” and acknowledges “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.”

The July 26 video features AI-generated cuts of a voice sounding like Vice President Harris narrating why she should be President. In the video “Harris” announces she is the “Democrat candidate for President because Joe Biden”—her prior running mate, current boss, and the President—“finally exposed his senility at the” infamous presidential debate with former President Trump on June 27, 2024. The video’s voiceover closely resembles Harris’s voice and the production itself mirrors the aesthetic of a real campaign ad—using clips from Harris’s own campaign videos—but the comedic effect of the video becomes increasingly clear with over-the-top assertions parodying political talking points about Harris and her mannerisms. “She” claims to have been “selected because [she is] the ultimate diversity hire and a person of color, so if you criticize anything [she] say[s], you’re both sexist and racist.” The “Harris” narrator claims that “exploring the significance of the insignificant is in itself significant,” before the video cuts to a clip of the real Harris making similarly incomprehensible remarks about “significance.”

Kohls, who is ideologically opposed to Harris’ political agenda, created this content to comment about Harris’s candidacy in humorous fashion

So here’s the thing. If Newsom had kept his mouth shut, California AG Rob Bonta could have turned around and said Kohls has no standing to sue here, because the video is clearly a parody and the law exempts parody videos. But Newsom, wanting to be a slick social media culture warrior, opened his trap and told the world that the intent of this law was to remove videos exactly like Kohls’ stupid video.

And as stupid as I think Kohls’ video is, and as pathetic as it is that Elon would retweet it, the lawsuit is correct on this:

Political speech like Kohls’ is protected by the First Amendment

I don’t think the lawsuit is particularly well done. It’s a bit sloppy, and the arguments are not as strong as they might otherwise be. I think there could be better filings challenging these laws, but this law seems so blatantly unconstitutional that even a poorly argued case should be able to win.

Yes, this is equally as bad as the awful laws being passed in Florida and Texas (and to some extent New York). It’s kind of incredible how these four states (two strongly Republican, two strongly Democrat) just keep passing the worst, most obviously unconstitutional internet/speech laws, and thinking that just because partisan idiots cheer them on it must be fine.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, ab 2355, ab 2655, ab 2839, ai, california, chirstopher kohls, deepfake videos, deepfakes, elections, elon musk, free speech, gavin newsom, misinformation, moral panic, parody, politics, rob bonta
Companies: twitter, x

Zuckerberg Vows To Stop Apologizing To Bad Faith Politicians, Right After Doing Just That

from the yeah,-sure,-whatever dept

Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg apologized for something he didn’t actually do to appease a bad faith actor demanding he take responsibility for something that didn’t happen. This week, he’s claiming that he’s done falsely apologizing to bad faith actors demanding accountability for things he’s not responsible for.

Pardon me, but I think I’ll wait for some actual evidence of this before I take it on faith that he’s a changed man.

There were plenty of times over the last decade that Mark Zuckerberg seemed both unwilling and unable to speak up about how content moderation / trust & safety actually worked. He was so easily battered down by bad faith political actors into issuing pointless apologies that it became a sort of common occurrence. Politicians began to realize they could capitalize on this kind of theater to their own benefit.

Over the course of that decade, there were many times when Zuck could have come out and more clearly explained the reality of these things: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale, mistakes will always be made, and some people will always disagree with some of our choices. As such, there are times that people will have reasonable criticisms of decisions the company has made, or policies it has chosen to prioritize, but it’s got nothing to do with bad faith, or partisan politics, or the woke mind virus, or anything like that at all.

It just has to do with the nature of content moderation at scale. There are many malicious actors out there, many calls are subjective in nature, and operationalizing rules across tens of thousands of content moderators to protect the health and safety of users on a site is going to be fraught with decisions people disagree with.

Zuckerberg could have taken that stance at basically any point in the last decade. He could have tried to share some of the nuances and trade-offs inherent in these choices. Yet, each and every time, he seemed to fold and play politics.

So, there’s one side of me that thinks his recent appearance on some podcast in which he suggests he’s done apologizing and now focused on being more open and honest is nice to hear.

The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.

“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”

Of course, that would be a hell of a lot more compelling if, literally two weeks ago, Zuckerberg hadn’t sent a totally spineless and craven apology for things that didn’t even happen to one of the most bad faith “just looking for someone else to blame” actors around: Jim Jordan.

So it’s a little difficult to believe that Zuck has actually turned over a new leaf regarding political posturing, caving, and apologizing for things he wasn’t actually responsible for. It just looks like he’s shifted which bad faith actors he’s willing to cave to.

The problem in all of this is that there are (obviously!) plenty of things that social media companies and their CEOs could do better to provide a better overall environment. And there are (obviously!) plenty of things that social media companies and their CEOs could do better to explain and educate the public about the realities of social media, trust & safety, and society itself.

There are all sorts of problems that are pinned on social media that are really society-level problems that governments have failed to deal with going back centuries. A real leader would strive to highlight the differences between the things that are societal level problems and platform level problems. A real leader would highlight ways in which society should be attacking some of those problems, and where and how social media platforms could assist.

But Zuckerberg isn’t doing any of that. He’s groveling before bad faith actors… and pretending that he’s done doing so. Mainly because those very same bad faith actors keep insisting (in a bad faith way) that Zuck’s previous apologies were because of other bad faith actors conspiring with Zuck to silence certain voices. Except that didn’t happen.

So forgive me for being a bit cynical in believing that Zuck is “done” apologizing or “done” caving to bad faith actors. The claim he’s making here appears to be explicitly about now caving to a new and different batch of bad faith actors.

Filed Under: apologies, bad faith actors, content moderation, jim jordan, mark zuckerberg, politics, trade offs
Companies: meta

Techdirt Podcast Episode 401: How Fact Checking Fails

from the paved-with-good-intentions dept

There’s been plenty of conversation over the past decade about how unprepared the mainstream media was for the shifts that have happened in politics and political discourse, especially when it comes to finding… well… the truth. As we move towards the 2024 election, the challenges of reporting and fact checking are once again in the spotlight, and this week we’re joined by NYU Journalism Professor and Jay Rosen to talk about the state of modern journalism, and how fact checking so often fails.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: fact checking, jay rosen, journalism, podcast, politics

Vivek Ramaswamy Buys Pointless Buzzfeed Stake So He Can Pretend He’s ‘Fixing Journalism’

from the puffery-and-performance dept

Fri, May 31st 2024 05:30am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted repeatedly how the primary problem with U.S. media and journalism often isn’t the actual journalists, or even the sloppy automation being used to cut corners; it’s the terrible, trust fund brunchlords that fail upwards into positions of power. The kind of owners and managers who, through malice or sheer incompetence, turn the outlets they oversee into either outright propaganda mills (Newsweek), or money-burning, purposeless mush (Vice, Buzzfeed, The Messenger, etc., etc.)

Very often these collapses are framed with the narrative that doing journalism online somehow simply can’t be profitable; something quickly disproven every time a group of journalists go off to start their own media venture without a useless executive getting outsized compensation and setting money on fire (see: 404 Media and countless other successful worker-owned journalistic ventures).

Of course these kinds of real journalistic outlets still have to scrap and fight for every nickel. At the same time, there’s just an unlimited amount of money available if you want to participate in the right wing grievance propaganda engagement economy, telling white young males that all of their very worst instincts are correct (see: Rogan, Taibbi, Rufo, Greenwald, Tracey, Tate, Peterson, etc. etc. etc. etc.).

One key player in this far right delusion farm, failed Presidential opportunist Vivek Ramaswamy, recently tried to ramp up his own make believe efforts to “fix journalism.” He did so by purchasing an 8 percent stake in what’s left of Buzzfeed after it basically gave up on trying to do journalism last year.

Ramaswamy’s demands are silly toddler gibberish, demanding that the outlet pivot to video, and hire such intellectual heavyweights as Tucker Carlson and Aaron Rodgers:

“Mr. Ramaswamy is pushing BuzzFeed to add three new members to its board of directors, to hone its focus on audio and video content and to embrace “greater diversity of thought,” according to a copy of his letter shared with The New York Times.”

By “greater diversity of thought,” he means pushing facts-optional right wing grievance porn and propaganda pretending to be journalism, in a bid to further distract the public from issues of substance, and fill American heads with pudding.

But it sounds like Ramaswamy couldn’t even do that successfully. For one thing, Buzzfeed simply isn’t relevant as a news company any longer. Gone is the real journalism peppered between cutesy listicles, replaced mostly with mindless engagement bullshit. For another, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti (and affiliates) still hold 96 percent of the Class B stock, giving them 50 times voting rights of Ramaswamy.

So as Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge notes, Ramaswamy is either trying to goose and then sell his stock, or is engaging in a hollow and performative PR exercise where he can pretend that he’s “fixing liberal media.” Or both. The entire venture is utterly purposeless and meaningless:

“You’ve picked Buzzfeed because the shares are cheap, and because you have a grudge against a historically liberal outlet. It doesn’t matter that Buzzfeed News no longer exists — you’re still mad that it famously published the Steele dossier and you want to replace a once-respected, Pulitzer-winning brand with a half-assed “creators” plan starring Tucker Carlson and Aaron Rodgers. Really piss on your enemies’ graves, right, babe?”

While Ramaswamy’s bid is purely decorative, it, of course, was treated as a very serious effort to “fix journalism” by other pseudo-news outlets like the NY Post, The Hill, and Fox Business. It’s part of the broader right wing delusion that the real problem with U.S. journalism isn’t that it’s improperly financed and broadly mismanaged by raging incompetents, but that it’s not dedicated enough to coddling wealth and power. Or telling terrible, ignorant people exactly what they want to hear.

Of course none of this is any dumber than what happens in the U.S. media sector every day, as the Vice bankruptcy or the $50 million dollar Messenger implosion so aptly illustrated. U.S. journalism isn’t just dying, the corpses of what remains are being abused by terrible, wealthy puppeteers with no ideas and nothing of substance to contribute (see the postmortem abuse of Newsweek or Sports Illustrated), and in that sense Vivek fits right in.

Filed Under: disinformation, journalism, media, misinformation, politics, propaganda, vivek ramaswamy
Companies: buzzfeed

Freshly Indicted Biden Deepfaker Prompts Uncharacteristically Fast FCC Action On AI Political Robocalls

from the careful-what-you-wish-for dept

Fri, May 24th 2024 05:30am - Karl Bode

Earlier this year you probably saw the story about how a political consultant used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn’t particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact.

But it clearly spooked the government, which was already nervously watching AI get quickly integrated in global political propaganda and disinformation efforts.

The Biden deepfake quickly resulted in an uncharacteristically efficient joint investigation by the FCC and state AGs leading to multiple culprits, including Life Corp., a Texas telecom marketing company, a political consultant by the name Steve Kramer, and a magician named Paul Carpenter, who apparently “holds a world record in straitjacket escapes.”

But Kramer was the “mastermind” of the effort, and when busted back in February, claimed to NBC News that he was secretly trying to prompt regulatory action on robocalls, likening himself to American Revolutionary heroes Paul Revere and Thomas Paine (seriously):

“This is a way for me to make a difference, and I have,” he said in the interview. “For 500,Igotabout500, I got about 500,Igotabout5 million worth of action, whether that be media attention or regulatory action.”

This week Kramer was indicted in New Hampshire, and now faces five counts that include bribery, intimidation and suppression. Now that he’s been formally indicted, Kramer, likely heeding the advice of counsel, is significantly less chatty than he was earlier this year.

Whether he’s telling the truth about his intentions or not, Kramer has gotten his wish. The whole mess has prompted numerous new AI-related efforts by the historically somewhat feckless FCC. Back in February, the FCC proposed a new rule declaring such calls illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which it already uses to combat robocalls (often badly).

And this week, the FCC announced it would also be considering new rules requiring disclosure of the use of AI in political ads:

“As artificial intelligence tools become more accessible, the Commission wants to make sure consumers are fully informed when the technology is used,” [FCC boss Jessica] Rosenworcel said in a news release. “Today, I’ve shared with my colleagues a proposal that makes clear consumers have a right to know when AI tools are being used in the political ads they see, and I hope they swiftly act on this issue.”

We’ve explored in great detail how the FCC has been a bit of a feckless mess when it comes to the policing of robocalls. In part because it’s had its legal authority chipped away by industry lobbying and dodgy court rulings for years, but also because big telecom giants (affixed to our domestic surveillance apparatus) and “legit” marketing companies lobby revolving door regulators for rule loopholes.

Everything the FCC does, however wimpy, inevitably faces a major court challenge by corporations keen on making money off of whatever the FCC is trying to protect the public from. It’s why in the year 2024 scammers and scumbags have rendered our voice communications networks nearly unusable. Hopefully the FCC’s efforts to combat AI deep fake political robocalls results in a more productive outcome.

Filed Under: ai, automation, deepfake, disinformation, fcc, misinformation, politics, propaganda, robocalls

from the destroying-all-your-priors dept

It’s been almost an article of faith among many (especially since 2016) that social media has been a leading cause of our collective dumbening and the resulting situation in which a bunch of fascist-adjacent wannabe dictators getting elected all over the place.

But, we’ve always found that argument to feel massively, if not totally overblown. And, the data we’ve seen has highlighted how little impact social media has actually had on elections (cable news might be a bit different).

Now there’s a new study out of NYU’s Center for Social Media & Politics, which has been working through a ton of fascinating social media data over the past few years. This latest study suggests that the impact of social media on the 2020 election appears to have been minimal.

This is based on looking at the behavior of people who deactivated their Facebook and Instagram accounts in the runup to the election, and how that changed (or didn’t change) their behavior.

We use a randomized experiment to measure the effects of access to Facebook and Instagram on individual-level political outcomes during the 2020 election. We recruited 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users who used the platform for more than 15 min per day at baseline. We randomly assigned 27% to a treatment group that was paid to deactivate their Facebook or Instagram accounts for the 6 wk before election day, and the remainder to a control group that was paid to deactivate for just 1 wk. We estimate effects of deactivation on consumption of other apps and news sources, factual knowledge, political polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, political participation, and candidate preferences.

There were a few interesting findings, though I’m not sure any are particularly surprising. They found that users without social media lessened their knowledge of news events, but increased their ability to recognize disinformation.

The study also found that the deactivation had effectively no impact on “issue polarization.” This result is different than when a similar study was done in 2018, which the authors chalk up, potentially, to the differences between a mid-term election and a general election.

The issue polarization variable is an index of eight political opinions (on immigration, repeal of Obamacare, unemployment benefits, mask requirements, foreign policy, policing, racial justice, and gender relations), with the signs of the variables adjusted so that the difference between the own-party and other-party averages is positive. These questions were chosen to focus on issues that were prominent during the study period. Neither Facebook nor Instagram deactivation significantly affected issue polarization, and the 95% CI bounds rule out effects of ±0.04 SD.

As a point of comparison for these magnitudes, ref. 5 find that Facebook deactivation reduced an overall index of political polarization prior to the 2018 midterm elections. This includes a statistically insignificant reduction of 0.06 SD in a measure of affective polarization, and a significant reduction of 0.10 SD in a measure of issue polarization. One possible explanation for the difference in effects on issue polarization is that our study took place during a presidential election, where the environment was saturated with political information and opinion from many sources outside of social media. Another possible explanation is that the set of specific issues on which we focus here may have produced different responses. As another comparison point, ref. 26 estimate that affective polarization has grown by an average of 0.021 SD per year since 1978.

They also found no change in the “perceived legitimacy of the election” which is interesting given how prevalent that issue has been (especially among the Trumpist contingent). If you thought people only falsely believed the election was stolen because of Facebook, the data just doesn’t support that:

The perceived legitimacy variable is an index of agreement with six statements: i) Elections are free from foreign influence, ii) all adult citizens have equal opportunity to vote, iii) elections are conducted without fraud, iv) government does not interfere with journalists, v) government protects individuals’ right to engage in unpopular speech, and vi) voters are knowledgeable about candidates and issues. Neither Facebook nor Instagram deactivation had a significant effect, and the 95% CI bounds rule out effects of ±0.04 SD.

There’s more in the study as well, but it’s good to see more actual data and research along these lines. As a first pass, it again looks like the rush to blame social media for all the ills in the world might just be a bit overblown.

Filed Under: disinformation, elections, politics, studies
Companies: facebook, instagram, meta, nyu

Fake ‘Pink Slime’ Propaganda Newspapers Surge Ahead Of Fall Election

from the I've-got-a-head-full-of-pudding dept

Mon, Apr 15th 2024 05:26am - Karl Bode

For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either “news deserts,” or local news that’s mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing local journalism just wasn’t profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet… didn’t.

Those same academics will then tell you that the end result is an American populace that’s decidedly less informed and more divided, something that not only has a measurable impact on electoral outcomes, but paves the way for more state and local corruption (since fewer journalists are reporting on stuff like local city council meetings or local political decisions). It also opened the door to authoritarianism.

Every six months or so, a news report will emerge showing how all manner of political propagandists and bullshit artists have rushed to fill the vacuum created by longstanding policy failures and our refusal to competently fund local journalism at scale.

Of particular problem has been so-called “pink slime” newspapers, or fake local news papers built by local partisan operatives to seed misinformation and propaganda in the minds of poorly educated and already misinformed local voters.

Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University studied the phenomenon in 2022 and found that there were 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit (on top of the bullshit they already consume online).

And, as expected, the problem is accelerating as we head into another election season. The total of such fake newspapers has tripled since 2019, and now roughly equals the number of real journalism organizations in America. In many instances, these networks are better funded and better organized than real journalism orgs, which find themselves relentlessly under fire by those with wealth and power who’d prefer journalism simulacrum over hard-nosed reporting:

“Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said her research suggests that following the 2022 midterms “a lot more money” is being poured into pink slime sites, including advertising on Meta.

“A lot of these sites have had makeovers and look more realistic,” she said. “I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of that moving forward.”

When the “both sides” press covers this pink slime phenomenon, they sometimes try to imply that this kind of stuff is happening perfectly symmetrically among both major parties (as this Financial Times story does). But one NPR report indicates that roughly 95 percent of the fake newspapers they tracked were created to aid Republican candidates.

Angry at the factual reality espoused by academia, science, and journalism, the ever-more-extremist U.S. right wing has engaged in a very successful 45+ year effort to undermine U.S. journalism, academia, and even libraries at every turn, and then replace them with a vast and highly successful propaganda and delusion network across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and now the internet.

It’s a massive propaganda ecosystem that extends way beyond fake newspapers. It’s a self-contained participatory alternate reality where ideology is king and facts no longer matter. It’s everything academics spent decades warning us about. And, if you somehow hadn’t noticed in the Trump era, it’s working. Just ask your family members who think a NYC real estate conman is pious.

Democrats tend to be feckless and often incoherent when it comes to coherent and forceful counter-messaging to increasingly radical right wing propaganda. They also haven’t understood the severity of the problem, and have generally avoided having any kind of coherent media reform policies. If they respond to the problem, it will likely involve behavior that looks similar.

Meanwhile many in the academic and journalism industries still don’t seem to have the slightest awareness they’re under systemic, existential attack, often blaming the implosion on ambiguous but somehow always unavoidable market realities.

But the evidence is everywhere you look. Journalists are being fired by the thousands; folks with expertise are being replaced by incompetent brunchlords; and the ad-engagement based infotainment economy continues to shift from real reporting to controversy-churning, distraction-engagement bait.

There’s plenty we could do to address the problem. We could adopt stronger education and media criticism standards like Finland to prepare kids for a world full of propaganda. We could staff outlets with competent leadership and find new and creative ways to fund real, independent journalism. We could adopt media policies that rein in mindless consolidation, which tends to steadily erode opinion diversity.

But we do absolutely none of that because it’s simply not profitable enough. And in a country where mindlessly chasing wealth always takes top priority, you ultimately get what you pay for.

Filed Under: consolidation, disinformation, fake news, fake newspapers, journalism, misinformation, pink slime, politics, propaganda

A TikTok Ban Is A Pointless Political Turd For Democrats

from the election-season-seppuku dept

Fri, Mar 15th 2024 05:25am - Karl Bode

As you probably noticed, the House just passed the controversial ban on TikTok, with 352 Representatives in favor, and 65 opposed. The bill is now likely to be slow-walked to the Senate where its chance of passing is murky, but possible. Biden (which has been using the purportedly “dangerous national security threat” to campaign with) has stated he’ll sign the bill should it survive the trip.

The ban (technically a forced divestment, followed by a ban after ByteDance inevitably refuses to sell) passed through the house with more than a little help from Democrats:

Not talked much about in press coverage is the fact that the majority of constituents don’t actually support a ban (you know, the whole representative democracy thing). Support for a ban has been dropping for months, even among Republicans, and especially among the younger voters Democrats have already been struggling to connect with in the wake of the bloody shitshow in Gaza:

As the underlying Pew data makes clear, a lot of Americans aren’t sure what to think about the hysteria surrounding TikTok. And they’re not sure what to think, in part, because the collapsing U.S. tech press has done a largely abysmal job covering the story, either by parroting bad faith politician claims about the proposal and app, or omitting key important context.

Context like the fact the U.S. has been too corrupt to pass an internet privacy law, resulting in years of repeated scandal (with TikTok being arguably among the least of them). Congress has been lobbied into apathy by a massive coalition of cross-industry lobbyists with unlimited budgets. But the U.S. government is also disincentivized to act because it abuses the dysfunction to avoid having to get traditional warrants.

The press has also been generally terrible at explaining to the public that the ban doesn’t actually do what it claims to do.

Banning TikTok, but refusing to pass a useful privacy law or regulate the data broker industry is entirely decorative. The data broker industry routinely collects all manner of sensitive U.S. consumer location, demographic, and behavior data from a massive array of apps, telecom networks, services, vehicles, smart doorbells and devices (many of them *gasp* built in China), then sells access to detailed data profiles to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together, including Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence.

Often without securing or encrypting the data. And routinely under the false pretense that this is all ok because the underlying data has been “anonymized” (a completely meaningless term). The harm of this regulation-optional surveillance free-for-all has been obvious for decades, but has been made even more obvious post-Roe. Congress has chosen, time and time again, to ignore all of this.

Banning TikTok, but doing absolutely nothing about the broader regulatory capture and corruption that fostered TikTok’s (and every other companies’) disdain for privacy or consumer rights, isn’t actually fixing the problem. In fact, as Mike has noted, the ban creates entirely new problems, from potential constitutional free speech violations, to its harmful impact on online academic research.

I’ve mentioned more than a few times that I think the ongoing quest to ban TikTok is mostly a flimsy attempt to transfer TikTok’s fat revenues to Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Oracle, or Facebook under the pretense of national security and privacy, two things our comically corrupt, do-nothing Congress has repeatedly demonstrated in vivid detail they don’t have any genuine interest in.

TikTok creators seem to understand this better than the gerontocracy or the U.S. tech press:

None of this is to say that TikTok doesn’t actually pose some privacy or national security problems.

But if Congress were really serious about privacy, they’d pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers.

If Congress were serious about national security, they’d meaningfully fight corruption, and certainly wouldn’t support a multi-indictment facing authoritarian NYC real estate con man with a fourth-grade reading level for fucking President.

If Congress were serious about combating propaganda (foreign, domestic, corporate, or otherwise) they’d impose more meaningful updated education standards, fight harmful consolidation in local TV broadcast “news,” and protect and finance academic and journalistic institutions under relentless assault by authoritarians, AI-wielding hedge fund bozos, and incompetent brunchlords.

So when Congress pops up to claim it’s taking aim at a single popular app because it’s suddenly super concerned about consumer privacy, propaganda, and national security, skeptics are right to steeply arch an eyebrow. You realize we can see your voting histories and policy priorities, right?

Xenophobia, Protectionism and Information Warfare

The GOP motivation for a TikTok ban has long been obvious: they believe TikTok’s growing ad revenues technically belong, by divine right, to white-owned U.S. companies. But the GOP also sees TikTok as an existential threat to their ever-evolving online propaganda efforts, which have become a strategic cornerstone of an increasingly extremist, authoritarian party whose policies are broadly unpopular.

The GOP is fine with rampant privacy abuses and propaganda — provided they’re the ones violating privacy or slinging political propaganda. You’ll recall Trump’s big original fix for the “TikTok problem” (before a right wing investor in TikTok recently changed his mind, for now) was a cronyistic transfer of ownership of TikTok to his Republican friends at Walmart and Oracle.

Former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his Saudi-funded Liberty Strategic Capital is already hard at work putting investors together to buy the app. If the GOP (or a proxy) manages to buy TikTok, they’ll engage in every last abuse they’ve accused the Chinese government of. TikTok will be converted, like Twitter, into a right wing surveillance and propaganda echoplex, where race-baiting authoritarian propaganda is not only unmoderated, but encouraged.

All under the pretense of “protecting free speech,” “antitrust reform,” or whatever latest flimsy pretense authoritarians are currently using to convince a gullible and lazy U.S. press that they’re operating in good faith.

Why Democrats would support any of this remains an open question. The ban would likely aid GOP propaganda efforts, piss off young voters, and advertise the party (which had actually been faster to embrace TikTok than the GOP) as woefully out of touch. All while not actually protecting consumer privacy or national security in any meaningful way. And creating entirely new problems.

Democratic support for a ban seems largely motivated by lobbying pressure from Facebook/Meta, which has been using the same knobs the GOP and telecom industry used to destroy net neutrality to seed little moral panics around DC for several years. Facebook/Meta is, if it’s not clear, exclusively interested in having the government destroy a competitor it hasn’t been able to out-innovate.

National security, consumer privacy, or good faith worries about propaganda don’t enter into it.

Some Democratic Reps, like Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Jacobs seem to understand the trap, keeping the focus on a need for a federal privacy law that reins in the privacy and surveillance abuses of all companies that do business in the U.S., foreign or domestic. Some senators, like Ron Wyden, have worked hard to ensure equal attention is paid toward rampant data broker abuses.

But 155 House Democrats voted for the ban, either because they’re corrupt, or they have absolutely no idea how any of this actually works. Pissing off your constituents by ruining an app used by 150+ million (mostly young) Americans during an election season is certainly a choice, especially given negligible constituent support–and growing evidence it likely creates more problems than it professes to solve.

Filed Under: disinformation, information warfare, national security, politics, privacy, propaganda, republicans, security, social media, tiktok ban