tucker carlson – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Community Notes Is Great Until It Challenges Elon, And Then It’s Being ‘Manipulated’ By State Actors

from the amazing-that-state-actors-only-target-elon dept

Oh Elon. As we’ve discussed, Elon is infatuated with Community Notes as a sort of crowdsourced alternative to actually funding a trust & safety staff and tooling. And while we actually like Community Notes and think more social media should use similar tools, it’s simply not a full trust & safety replacement.

But, over the past year, we’ve seen that Elon loves to point out when Community Notes supports his priors, and repeatedly claims victory when Community Notes debunks (or even quibbles with) content that Musk doesn’t like. If you look, you can find him cheering on Community Notes time and time again.

Not too long ago, ExTwitter changed the terms of its creator payout system such that creators who regularly get fact-checked via Community Notes will no longer get payouts.

But… how does the man in charge feel about things when he gets fact checked via Community Notes? Well, it appears that his tune quickly changes. While there have been a few times he’s been Community Noted in the past, and he’ll sometimes brush it off with a “yes, even I’m open to having such notes placed on my account,” when it’s a higher profile thing he seems to freak out.

Over the weekend, Tucker Carlson started pushing a very misleading story regarding YouTube sensationalist Gonzalo Lira who made his name as one of those jackass “dating coaches,” (i.e., “pickup artists”) who became a pro-Russia propagandist once the invasion of Ukraine began. Carlson’s version of the story pitched Lira as a “journalist” who was “imprisoned in Ukraine” for “criticizing Zelensky.”

Lira was arrested earlier this year for violations of Ukraine’s criminal code. There are many legitimate questions that can be asked regarding the nature of Ukraine’s laws regarding propaganda and free speech. But, the underlying accusations against Lira seem more focused on how he was revealing the identity and location of both Ukrainian soldiers and western journalists covering the war.

Either way, Musk picked up on Carlson’s story, falsely claimed Lira had been imprisoned for 5 years, and trying to demand answers as to what was happening with him. Community Notes quickly stepped in to first point out that Carlson’s description of Lira’s situation was misleading, and then that Elon’s tweets were also misleading.

After discovering that his own posts were being Community Noted (will he lose access to monetization?), he started claiming that “state actors” were “gaming” Community Notes. And then, hilariously, claimed that this was really a “honey pot” to catch those gaming the system.

The Community Notes folks quickly hit back:

They pointed out that:

Community Notes requires agreement from contributors of differing perspectives, as such is highly resistant to gaming. The entire Community Notes algorithm and data is open source, and can be reviewed by anyone…

Community Notes ftw.

Soon after that, the Community Notes on Elon’s post disappeared. Funny that.

And… soon after that, a different Community Note appeared on Elon’s tweet again pushing back on the idea that Community Notes was easy to game:

So, yes, any such system of crowdsourcing things can be gamed, though ExTwitter’s implementation of Community Notes (a modification of the tool Polis) is done in a way that, at the very least, makes it resistant to such gaming. It’s not impossible to game, but it’s also not easy given the way it’s set up.

But, still, given how often Elon acts like Community Notes is an infallible system that solves most of his trust & safety issues, it’s interesting to note that apparently it’s only “gamed” by “state actors” when its calling out his own false tweets. The rest of the time Community Notes is so accurate that the company can base payment information on it. So, when Community Notes supports Elon’s views, it’s a key part of ExTwitter’s platform strategy. When it goes against Elon’s views, it’s being abused by state actors.

What an astounding coincidence.

Filed Under: community notes, crowdsourcing, elon musk, fact checking, gonzalo lira, state actors, tucker carlson
Companies: twitter, x

The Daily Caller Says It Will Use Buffy Wicks’ Journalism Bill To Make Sure Google Pays It To Produce More Nonsense

from the they're-not-even-hiding-it dept

It seems the propaganda peddlers are no longer even trying to pretend any more how they plan to abuse the bills being pushed by Democrats to “regulate” social media. It would be nice if some of the Democratic politicians actually listened to them. First, we had the story of how the Heritage Foundation, the main think tank of the GOP, flat out said they intended to use the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to censor LGBTQ content as “harmful” to children.

And now, we have the website Tucker Carlson created, the Daily Caller, coming out in support for California Rep. Buffy Wicks’ Journalism Preservation Act while directly admitting that the reason they’re doing so is that it will prevent tech companies from moderating their content when they publish misleading propaganda.

The main issue in the article is the Daily Caller is calling out a trade group representing some of the internet companies, the Chamber of Progress, for its recent study that highlighted that under the CJPA (Buffy Wicks’ bill to create a link tax that forces internet companies to pay the news providers for… letting users link to their content) the biggest beneficiaries would be nonsense peddling outfits owned by Rupert Murdoch.

We mentioned this study recently, while calling out that even if you don’t trust the source of the study, you should at least suggest what’s wrong in their analysis. Is it not true that under the CJPA, Democrat Buffy Wicks will literally be forcing California companies (some of which her constituents work for) to fund Rupert Murdoch’s news orgs? If it’s not true, then present the evidence.

But, here, the Daily Caller goes further. And that’s because one of the worst parts of the CJPA is that it has this non-retaliation clause, that basically says that if a news organization files with a covered internet website under the bill, it cannot have its content downranked or removed. Now, there’s some catchall language that allows Wicks to pretend this isn’t how the bill works. Because the bill still allows companies to “enforce its terms of service,” but simply by saying that such a site cannot retaliate means that any news org will claim retaliation for any attempt to downrank or remove its propaganda content.

And, that’s exactly what the Daily Caller calls out in noting why it and its friends are so excited about this bill. They know it becomes a sledge hammer to use a Democrat-sponsored bill, to allow them to force their content onto Google, Facebook and more:

Conservative publications and independent journalists are the most likely to be victims of censorship from the gatekeepers at Big Tech, and the CJPA would take a sledgehammer to that power by making them finally pay conservative outlets.

Are there any journalists left in Sacramento who are not working for news orgs who would get paid off by this Wicks bill who might ask Rep. Wicks why she’s supporting a bill where the website infamous nonsense peddler Tucker Carlson created, is eagerly stating how it will stop “big tech” from handling basic moderation tasks to limit propaganda and misleading bullshit, while also forcing those tech companies to pay the nonsense peddlers?

It seems like a question Wicks should answer.

Filed Under: buffy wicks, cjpa, content moderation, disinformation, nonsense peddlers, tucker carlson
Companies: google, the daily caller

Elon Musk Is Full Of Shit, Again. No, Federal Agencies Did Not Have ‘Full Access’ To DMs

from the just-making-shit-up dept

Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter, including DMs.

“The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter blew my mind,” Musk says in video posted ahead of the Monday night interview. “I was not aware of that,” Musk adds, claiming that his predecessors even allowed those agencies access to infiltrate users’ direct messages.

From everything that’s been discussed so far, and the way that the old Twitter regime handled requests for information from Twitter (i.e., repeatedly fighting the government in court when it requested DM info, and that includes when Democrats on the January 6th Committee subpoenaed info) this sounded highly unlikely to be true. Given how frequently Twitter was seen directly and publicly challenging demands for information, and revealing how often it rejected government requests for information in its transparency reports (that Elon no longer issues), this whole claim seemed highly questionable.

Certainly, none of the Twitter Files revealed anything like this.

Given the bizarre claim, I reached out to three separate former Twitter employees who would be in positions to know how the company handled federal government requests for information. Two out of the three actually started off their responses with swear words out of anger that Elon is flat out making shit up. All insisted he’s absolutely, categorically wrong about this claim.

From one:

This is completely false. Pre-Elon Twitter worked tirelessly to protect users from overreaching government requests for information. The idea that Twitter was somehow fighting the US government in courts, while giving the US government access to DMs, is simply absurd. Moreover, it’s dangerous rhetoric.

Another former exec called it a “shocking lie” and noted:

DMs were exceedingly locked down. The FBI needed a search warrant to get that kind of content…. There were tools in place to be able to respond to valid legal process – but [it] would go through EXTREME scrutiny.

The third also noted that DMs were “specially locked down” and also pointed out that the company had made specific promises to the FTC regarding who had access to DMs (remember the consent decrees?) and that execs at the company knew full well that lying to the FTC would be very, very bad.

Of course, I would surmise that the company’s executives used to know that. I doubt it’s true today. However, given Elon is making those claims publicly, I’m guessing the FTC may be sending over more requests for information.

Honestly, this seems like typical Elon, where he makes claims based on what he thinks his audience wants to hear rather than anything connected to reality. As per usual, he’s playing to the Fox News audience (he did the same thing when he did his BBC interview last week). But as some of the people quoted above note, this is not just absolute bullshit, it’s a dangerous lie that implies things about the former management team that are simply not true.

If confronted on this, I’m sure he’d claim that he meant the kind of access they got through valid legal process, which is not even remotely “full access to everything that was going on at Twitter.” Alternatively, as one person I spoke to noted, there’s a reading of this (that I’m sure Elon didn’t mean) that what actually blew his mind was that the government did not, in fact, have full access to everything. But there’s no way that’s actually what he meant.

Instead, he’s just making shit up without realizing the consequences. Because he’ll never face them. He never does.

Now, after that clip, he does talk about encrypting DMs, which he’s been promising for a while, and which we applauded. Because it would be a big and important step. But it’s also incredibly difficult to do well, and easy to screw up. And given how things have been working at Twitter lately, I wouldn’t trust the DM encryption until it’s been audited. So, really, a lot of this seems to be Elon’s warped understanding of why he needed to encrypt DMs. Doing so definitely makes it much more difficult for government to ever get access to anyone’s DMs, but that doesn’t mean that “various government agencies” had “full access” to people’s DMs. That’s just utter bullshit.

Filed Under: dms, elon musk, ftc, privacy, surveillance, tucker carlson
Companies: twitter

Semafor Joins A Very Broken US Media Industry Claiming To Have Found The Cure For Eroded Trust In News. But Have They Really?

from the reinventing-the-wheel dept

Thu, Oct 20th 2022 05:33am - Karl Bode

Former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends have launched a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization’s launch events didn’t go particularly well: a “trust in news” event that somehow didn’t see the problem with platforming and amplifying millionaire propagandist Tucker Carlson as a respectable voice in media.

From the start, Semafor has tried to portray itself as a truly unique take on news, and their introductory post by Smith once again takes this tack. Smith goes through what he believes are the major pitfalls in modern news (too many reporters with opinions! too many outlets telling people what they want to hear! too much focus on the U.S.! not enough outward bound linking to other reporters’ work!).

Many of these problems are true. And both Semafor and Smith claim to have a new formula that will fix all of them in one fell swoop. But when you read the paragraph about what Semafor is specifically doing differently to restore trust in news, it’s filled with fairly routine observations and ideas — presented as if nobody on Earth had ever had them before:

Our approach is more literal, and it’s built from the core principles of journalism. We take people seriously when they say they know that reporters are human beings — and experts in their beats — who have views of their own. But they’d also like us to separate the facts from our views. They’d like us to be humble about the possibility of disagreement. And they’d like us to distill differing views, and gather global perspective.

That’s all fine and good, but again, nothing here is particularly unique. A focus on more international stories is particularly welcome in an understandably U.S.-obsessed press (especially tech), but again, outlets like RestofWorld have already made this observation and are doing a good job serving that underserved market (and in a not particularly dissimilar font).

Fairly routine concepts are portrayed as foundationally revolutionary:

Some of them think we can pull this off. Others think we’re a little nuts. Our approach “flies completely in the face of what most people are currently doing,” Morgan said.

Granted the work will speak for itself, and many of the reporters they’ve collected (including Smith himself) are incredible scoop machines. But the specific claim you’re going to single-handedly restore trust in news — without actually presenting any original thoughts on that front — is bizarre hubris.

The outlet claims one of the key ways they’ll differentiate themselves is by separating out a reporter’s view from the established facts using what they claim is a revolutionary new design for articles that breaks out journalist opinion and analysis into its own section:

But when you actually read some of the pieces in question, the changes in question aren’t particularly revolutionary, and many of the reporters (so far) aren’t being given a long enough leash to truly explore this supposedly newfound freedom:

After reading a few @Semafor launch pieces, I kinda wish the "[Reporter]'s View" sections actually included…the reporter's view?

Instead it seems to be a section for some very standard-issue context/analysis, e.g.https://t.co/ETwkiYfdNO

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) October 18, 2022

As Techdirt has pointed out on constant occasions, one of the biggest problems with U.S. news is the “he said, she said,” “view from nowhere” style of reporting that’s prevalent at outlets like Politico, Reuters, Axios, and many others. Reporting that takes a pseudo-objective approach to news, framing everything with a bizarre false-symmetry that buries factual reality in a pile of perfectly balanced quotes.

This kind of reporting spent decades burying the truth on subjects like racism, climate change, and corruption. It’s also been just mercilessly exploited by fascist propagandists and white supremacists the world over who are eager to “flood the zone with shit,” degrade trust in established institutions and the press, and befuddle the public before introducing their easy solution (hate anyone who isn’t like them).

Calling a spade a spade (in this case a massive, effective right wing conspiracy and propaganda apparatus built over 45 years across old and new media) will cost you readership, so it’s arguable that Semafor literally can’t fix (much less honestly identify) a major source of the trust in news erosion they claim to have a solution for. David Roberts offered up this thread that gets at a lot of what’s frustrating me:

… to wit: any journalistic outlet that hews to basic journalistic values (above all, accuracy) is going to be labeled left-wing by the current right.

You're either fair & accurate or you appeal to cons. This is not a circle that can be squared.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) October 19, 2022

The real money is in sacrificing truth to placate everybody — most especially the U.S. right wing — lest you lose Conservative viewers. You can see outlets like CNN and CBS embracing this pivot. It results in a sort of mushy Axios/Politico “both sides” journalism that again normalizes fascism because it’s financially disadvantageous to honestly and candidly call out conspiratorial authoritarianism as what it is.

You’re simply going to make more money placating authoritarians and hoovering up the ad-engagement bucks created by the controversial, divisive bile they’re pumping into the discourse.

It’s all underpinned by a myopic institutionalism that thinks reporters should be fired for expressing human opinions on Twitter (or for having done some activism in college), but is happy to pander to Amazon during Prime Day, or remain blithely obtuse to how the inherent bias of white, affluent, male, editorial leadership helped normalize everything from climate disaster to creeping U.S. authoritarianism.

Again, there’s very little indication from Smith’s post that Semafor and its editorial leadership understand any of this. And again, the outlet’s very first event, specifically focused on “restoring trust in news,” platformed a key far right propagandist as a legitimate journalist without, at any time, calling a duck a duck or holding his feet to the fire for a decade of dangerous and ignorant propaganda.

That doesn’t portend great things editorially, and while hopefully the outlet’s quality reporting truly does restore some faith in the press at a very dangerous time in U.S. politics, there’s also a very real possibility this is just Axios in a new font, run by trust fund DC access brunchlords with an overpowering allergy to upsetting powerful advertisers, event sponsors, and sources when it truly matters.

Filed Under: ben smith, corruption, editorial, fascism, he said she said, journalism, media, media criticism, reporting, semafor, trust in news, tucker carlson
Companies: semafor

Ben Smith’s New Media Venture Ably Demonstrates Why Platforming Authoritarian Propagandists Is A Lose-Lose Scenario

from the what-are-we-even-doing-here? dept

Fri, Jul 8th 2022 12:17pm - Karl Bode

Former Buzzfeed and New York Times reporter Ben Smith is poised to launch a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. To grab some attention for the venture’s looming launch, Semafor recently partnered with the Knight Foundation to launch the company’s first event: The Future of News: Trust and Polarization.

The event featured folks like former Wall Street Journal editor Gerald Seib, Al Jazeera host Femi Oke, Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz, and Politico’s John Harris. Absent from the event was any academic or outside expert actually versed in why trust in US news has deteriorated. In their place, Smith announced he’d be doing an exclusive interview with… Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

The decision to platform a bigot and propagandist as part of an event on trust in news didn’t go over particularly well among people actually trying to, you know, restore trust in news. Such as media reform activist Nandini Jammi, who co-founded Sleeping Giants and Check My Ads (both campaigns to limit the power and wealth of COVID-denying, conspiracy-heavy, race-baiting Fox News):

Ben’s response was fairly typical: he had to interview Tucker Carlson because Tucker Carlson is a very important man who doesn’t provide many interviews. It would be journalistic malpractice, Smith implied, to do anything else:

Our plans are to ask hard questions of powerful people — I don't think there are a lot of journalists who would refuse to do that interview?

— Ben Smith (@semaforben) June 30, 2022

The idea that this was being done to generate controversy and attention for a media venture, itself an act likely to reduce trust in news (at a conference purportedly about trust in news), was just skipped over. Also not considered: that one might just not give Carlson an even bigger bullhorn, instead giving that mental real estate to any number of media reform activists or academics laboring in obscurity.

After weeks of criticism and promises that Smith would hold Carlson’s feet to the fire, the interview arrived and Smith did… exactly none of that.

You can watch the interview itself here. Carlson, on webcam from his Manhattan or Hamptons closet (probably because his mansion kitchen wouldn’t project the desired man of the people persona) ran roughshod over Smith for a good half an hour, all to Carlson’s amusement.

At no point did Smith demonstrate real control over the interview, letting Carlson ramble on at length about how terrible middle-aged liberal women are, how he’s not actually a racist, how his critics in the press are the _actual propagandists_… without Smith seriously challenging the claims. Smith himself seems uncomfortable throughout, nervously fiddling with his notes in between lobbing softballs.

At one point, Smith repeats Carlson’s core claim that he’s “effectively just misunderstood.” At other points, attempted gotcha questions don’t land, such as asking if Carlson’s ever been discriminated against at work as a white Protestant. Almost every time Smith has an opportunity to press Carlson on outright lies, he either changes the subject or lets Carlson change the subject for him.

You then have to ask: what was the actual benefit in terms of the event’s premise? Ben’s promise, that he’d hold Carlson accountable with hard questions, never materialized. So the end result was little more than further amplification of Carlson’s falsehoods, the validation of Carlson’s role as a pseudo-journalist, and the perpetuation of the false idea that fascism is a valid platform that’s up for debate.

Before the event, Smith’s noble dedication to journalism was lauded by numerous folks in media, who agreed that you simply have to give a white supremacist authoritarian pretending to be a journalist an even bigger platform — at a trust in news conference. You just don’t have a choice!

Some folks in media suggested that turning down an interview with Carlson would be akin to turning down an interview with Hitler, and you just don’t do that. Others tried to make the point that because Carlson already has a massive nightly platform, there’s really no harm in elevating him further at an event specifically dedicated to solving sagging trust in U.S. journalism.

According to Smith and friends, platforming Carlson was the right call because it created the opportunity to challenge Carlson’s positions, be they agitating deep-rooted racial divisions for ratings, harming public health by amplifying COVID conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism, or parroting the incoherent ramblings of the country’s surging, conspiratorial, and increasingly violent authoritarian right.

But at no point did an actual, competent challenge to Carlson’s falsehoods find its way to the stage.

Worse, that’s a half hour that could have been given any number of academics and experts with actual solutions to the problem. But actual media scholars well versed in why trust in US media is flailing weren’t just under-represented at the event, they were completely absent. It was a choice to embrace controversy over substance, ironically and inadvertently illustrating why trust in U.S. media is falling apart.

There are numerous reasons for eroded trust in US news. The death of quality local news opened the door wide to propagandists, foreign intelligence, and pink slime. Tone-deaf Luddite classism rules at major outlets like the New York Times. The shift toward an ad-based engagement model financially incentivized an entire industry to prioritize controversy and hysteria over boring substance and expertise.

Like so many others, Carlson has weaponized this dysfunction, feeding a steady diet of increasingly hysterical outrage drivel to partisans for clout. He’s perfected the act of media trolling at scale; making unhinged claims he knows will then be hate retweeted by outraged critics oblivious they’re being exploited as a human amplifier (a favorite pastime of Carlson predecessor Ann Coulter).

Platforming, debunking, or even debating fascist propagandists is a lose-lose scenario. You can’t defeat it with “gotcha” questions, because fascists have zero compulsion about lying, and no incentive to meet you in honest dialogue. Their goal is simple: to platform fascist ideology, to expose that ideology to as broad as audience as possible, and to frame fascism itself as a valid policy that’s up for debate.

The very second you’ve entered into this arrangement you’ve already lost.

Don’t try to debunk. Don’t try to debate. Don’t think you’re helping by dunking on Carlson with a hate retweet. Don’t get caught in a fight over whether an obvious fascist is a fascist. Instead find somebody under-represented who’s actually pushing real solutions and amplify them instead. Don’t feed the trolls.

That’s not to say fascists should be completely ignored and never challenged. But at some point, if democracy, trust in media, and foundational institutions are to be preserved, you have to enter into a savvy calculus about which signals are worth boosting, and which are harmful and exploitative. This was a trust in news event. Host actual experts with a good faith interest in solving the problem.

Somebody ignorant to modern discourse could easily walk away from the interview believing that Carlson, a millionaire frozen food empire heir turned opportunistic propagandist, is actually a brave, truth-telling journalist unfairly forced to hide in his closet by the powers that be. And that the real propagandists are anyone that would dare question Carlson’s noble intentions.

That we’re six-plus years into a massive surge in trumpist propaganda-soaked authoritarianism — and affluent, influential media leaders still don’t understand how any of this works — isn’t a great sign for what comes next. You win the game that fascists are trying to play by not playing it, giving the valuable mental real estate they hope to occupy to voices genuinely interested in real solutions and reform.

Filed Under: ben smith, fascism, lies, propaganda, trust, trust in news, truth, tucker carlson
Companies: semafor

Blaming Video Games For Mass Shootings Is Ridiculous; Stop It

from the nice-try dept

Mike just wrote about how, in the wake of the abhorrent mass shooting that occurred in upstate New York over the weekend, some of our leaders have begun the normal cleansing ritual: blame the things we already hated for the new bad thing that happened whether that makes any sense at all or not. In the case of the previous post, both public servants and buffoonish Sunday news talk hosts discussed how this was all the fault of Section 230 (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and everyone’s favorite boogeyman, social media. It is abundantly clear to anyone with a brain that these two scapegoats were already targets for those now blaming them. Apparently, these people were simply lying in wait looking for a trigger so that they could shout “Social Media! Section 230!” and they decided that 10 people losing their lives in a racist attack was just that sort of thing.

As Mike said, it’s ridiculous and it should stop. The alleged shooter in this instance wrote a manifesto of absurd length, patiently detailing out his motivations for his actions. Those motivations largely concerned race, false theories about the replacement of white people within the country, and hate. To read those musings and then choose to blame an entity entirely absent from discussion is deeply cynical.

But if you thought this was going to end with social media and Section 230, well, you haven’t been paying attention. Because some trains are never late, some folks, who would very much like to obscure where this alleged mass murderer got these ideas about race from, would like you to assume this is also the fault of video games.

Fox host: It seems like these [shootings] have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and so violent pic.twitter.com/wil6FRPoir

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) May 15, 2022

In case you cannot view the embedded tweet, I can summarize the Fox News host’s two main concepts. First, the host wonders aloud what could possibly be going through the mind of someone like the alleged mass murderer. Second, he suggests that these mass shootings have all gotten so much worse at the same time that video games have become more realistic and violent.

Let’s do this in reverse order. Casually tossing in some correlation with video games and mass murders being “worse” is quite pernicious. If Fox News has any data it would like to cite, then it should do so. As someone who has reported on this topic for something like a decade now, witnessing how gun rights groups blame gaming, politicians from one side of the aisle blame gaming, and even major media groups tacitly blame gaming, I’ve also noticed how the actual facts concerning the link between gaming and violence mostly amounts to a spectrum of “doesn’t really matter” to “definitely doesn’t matter“.

So why are a Fox News host, and others on the right, bringing this up while also feigning curiosity as to what was going on in the shooter’s mind? Quite possibly it’s because that host knows damned well that the shooter’s manifesto contained ideas quite similar to some Fox News hosts and other like-minded networks.

On May 14, a man allegedly shot and killed 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, using weapons adorned with white supremacist messaging. A writing uploaded online before the attack, and allegedly from the shooter, invoked the false “great replacement” conspiracy theory as the motive for the attack. The conspiracy theory claims that certain people, particularly Jews, are trying to “replace” white Americans and remove them from power. It was originally popularized in far-right online spaces but has since been espoused by some high-ranking Republican politicians such as Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, as well as conservative media personalities like Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.

Now, I want to be very, very clear here: to date, there has been no indication of the alleged shooter name-checking any of these hosts or networks or politicians in his writing. Instead, he indicates he found content on some backwater sites. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that the hosts and politicians mentioned above have very much parroted sanitized versions of “great replacement” theory in broadcasts viewed by millions of people. That sort of speech, evil as it may be, is protected speech. But it’s quite silly for those working for those same networks to simply ignore that issue nearly entirely and instead point at video games as the cause of the shooting. As Fox News has done, for instance.

This is purposeful, there can be no doubt. Extreme cable news outlets know what they’re doing. And, in some small part, they have blood on their hands. That they choose not to alter their programming, even as the crime scene is spattered with the blood of innocents and the bodies are being fit for coffins, is equal parts infuriating and unsurprising.

Filed Under: blame, replacement theory, responsibility, shooting, tucker carlson, video games
Companies: fox news, news corp.

Disproving The Nonsense About The FBI & Jan. 6th Would Be Easier If The FBI Didn't Have A History Of Entrapping People In Made Up Plots

from the you-guys-made-this-worse dept

There’s a very, very dumb conspiracy theory making the rounds — and I want to be very clear on this — that has zero evidence to support it, that the FBI was actually behind the January 6th invasion of the Capitol. It was originally reported by a wacky extremist news organization that I won’t even bother naming here, and then got a lot more attention when Fox News made it a story via Tucker Carlson’s show. The underlying confusion is that a (former Trump admin official who was let go after attending a conference with white nationalists but then later appointed to a new job within the Trump White House) reporter completely misunderstood what “unindicted co-conspirator” means in various charging documents.

What it generally means are people the government has not yet charged, and who they don’t want to name so they don’t tip them off (or where they don’t yet know who they are, or don’t have enough evidence to charge, or for a variety of other reasons). What it absolutely never means, is an undercover FBI agent or informant. Those people are not ever described as unindicted co-conspirator. But the reporter somehow got it into his head that this meant they were FBI agents, and then went to town with a conspiracy theory blaming the FBI for the insurrection, claiming that it was designed to “frame the entire MAGA movement.”

As noted, this is false, and there is no evidence to support this. At all. It’s a fiction of imagination from someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, and of course Tucker Carlson ran with it, because that’s what Tucker Carlson does.

But… here’s the thing: it would be a hell of a lot easier to debunk this nonsense if the FBI (especially since 9/11) didn’t have a depressingly long history of… setting up fake terrorist plots in order to entrap people to get big headlines around an arrest of someone who never had any means to actually carry out the attack. We’ve covered examples of these kinds of FBI activities for years. We’ve written about examples of this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

No doubt, what the FBI does in those cases is disgusting and highly questionable. It often involves them searching out people who are either mentally troubled or really desperate, and then proposing they get involved in a completely fictional terrorist plot — a plot that the individuals would have no possible chance of actually carrying out on their own. The undercover FBI agents (or the confidential informant working for the FBI) then proceed to do all the actual “planning” including buying any of the necessary materials and getting all the details in order. Then, after the planning has reached a certain point and the sucker is bought in on the plan, they’re arrested, and the FBI claims it “stopped” a terrorist attack — which usually gives the FBI lots of glowing press attention.

Of course, the reality is that there was no threat. There was no actual plot. There is never any ability to actually carry anything out. The weapons or bombs or whatever are all faked or never actually in existence. It’s all a shadow play so the FBI can try to get some headlines and pretend they’re doing something.

But that’s clearly not what happened with January 6th. For one thing, the events of January 6th actually happened. The Capitol was actually invaded. Damage was actually done. If the FBI was planning it as per their usual homegrown plots, no actual attack would have happened. Also, if you look at the pattern of who the FBI has gone after with these plots… it’s not really been the Trump supporting MAGA militia type.

Either way, though, people wouldn’t have to be doing this big silly debunking of this kind of nonsense conspiracy theory if the FBI didn’t actually have a track record of doing this kind of thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

So, you know, perhaps they should stop doing that.

Filed Under: conspiracy theory, doj, entrapment, fbi, january 6th, own plot, tucker carlson, undercover

Thanks To Crappy Cable Channel Bundles, Non-Watchers Hugely Subsidize Tucker Carlson And Fox News

from the fossilized-business-models dept

Thu, Apr 29th 2021 05:13am - Karl Bode

We’ve talked about the problem with bloated, expensive cable TV channel bundles for a long time. You might recall the push for “a la carte” TV channels (being able to buy cable TV channels individually) was even a pet project of the late John McCain, though his legislative efforts on that front never really went anywhere. And while the rise of streaming competition helped mitigate the problem somewhat, the tactic of forcing US cable TV consumers to buy massive bundles filled with channels they don’t watch remains a very real annoyance.

The latest case in point: many folks are realizing that the attempt to drive advertisers away from white supremacy apologists like Tucker Carlson aren’t really working, in part thanks to the traditional cable TV bundle. In short, because Fox News is included in most cable TV lineups, millions of Americans are throwing money at Fox News despite never watching the channel:

Lots of people asking about Tucker Carlson?s advertisers and, well, he doesn?t have any left. Like almost zero.

Fox News operates his show at a loss when it comes to ad revenue.

They pay for him through carriage fees, which we all pay into through our basic cable packages. https://t.co/yvwrcEGatO

— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) April 21, 2021

I spent much of February talking to as many media scholars as I could for a piece trying to find a solution for the Fox News disinformation problem. The reality is there are very few policy proposals that wouldn’t run afoul of the First Amendment, especially with a rightward-lurching Supreme Court. One that might actually help work remains pushing actively to eliminate the bloated cable TV bundle:

“You?d kill those stations in a heartbeat if they didn?t get bundled in every cable package,? said Christopher Terry, assistant professor of media law at the University of Minnesota. ?All of those outlets thrive in the delivery to the audience they get by being included in every package, but in an a la carte cable package, only a handful of the true believer crowd would be willing to pay extra for them.”

?Imagine if they had to survive in an actual market-based scenario where the number of viewers they could have was limited by the people who would pay to have access to that specific content,? he added. ?You?d cut them off at the knees and use their own rhetoric to do so while making cable companies more accountable to the local customer base.”

Actually competing for attention, imagine that! Again, this was something that was supposed to be addressed by market forces via the streaming revolution, though many of the same failures in traditional cable simply wandered over to the streaming sector (not surprising since the same broadcasters and telecom giants dominated both arenas). And while streaming does provide greater choice, cable TV remains the dominant platform. As a result, Fox News still hauls in massive subsidies from a dated business model that involves tens of millions of Americans paying for a channel they never watch:

“Fox News makes $1.8 billion from the carriage fees it charges cable TV providers to include the channel in bloated, increasingly expensive cable TV bundles. But just 3 million of the nation?s 90 million cable TV subscribers actively watch the channel. In other words, 87 million Americans pay their cable company for and thus subsidize Fox News?despite rarely if ever actually watching the channel.”

“According to a survey conducted late last year, about 14% of cable TV subscribers watch Fox News regularly. But every cable TV subscriber pays an average of 1.72amonthtoreceiveFoxNews.Incontrast,311.72 a month to receive Fox News. In contrast, 31% of cable TV subscribers regularly watch FX (owned by Disney) but the channel adds just 1.72amonthtoreceiveFoxNews.Incontrast,310.81 to an average cable bill.

Judd Legum recently crunched the numbers further, showing how a lot of Fox News’ income comes utterly unearned, from people who may have zero interest in the racist tirades of a frozen TV dinner empire heir:

“According to a survey conducted late last year, about 14% of cable TV subscribers watch Fox News regularly. But every cable TV subscriber pays an average of 1.72amonthtoreceiveFoxNews.Incontrast,311.72 a month to receive Fox News. In contrast, 31% of cable TV subscribers regularly watch FX (owned by Disney) but the channel adds just 1.72amonthtoreceiveFoxNews.Incontrast,310.81 to an average cable bill.

This means, for every actual viewer, Fox News receives a 7.75subsidyfrompeoplewhoneverwatchFoxNews.Thisisahighersubsidythanothernon−sportschannels,likeFX(7.75 subsidy from people who never watch Fox News. This is a higher subsidy than other non-sports channels, like FX (7.75subsidyfrompeoplewhoneverwatchFoxNews.Thisisahighersubsidythanothernon−sportschannels,likeFX(1.79), CNN ($3.18), and TBS ($2.79), receive. And none of those channels regularly spreads white nationalist talking points to millions of viewers.”

But again, as John McCain showed, breaking this logjam is easier said than done. Maine, for example, recently tried to pass a law forcing cable giants to sell channels individually, but found itself quickly sued by Comcast, which claimed the law violated the company’s free speech rights (Comcast’s winning that battle so far). The cable and broadcast industry has lobbied relentlessly to ensure this shift to individual channels never happens, claiming that moving to an a la carte model would kill niche channels and raise consumer prices (both things that repeatedly happened anyway).

Granted this isn’t just about not liking the channel or disagreeing with the channels politics. There’s clear evidence, especially on the COVID front, that the bullshit pouring out of the Rupert Murdoch empire is actively harming human health:

“A media watchdog found over 250 cases of COVID-19 misinformation on Fox News in just one five-day period, and economists demonstrated that Fox News had a demonstrable impact on non-compliance with public health guidelines,? the lawmakers wrote.”

If you can’t rely on the wisdom of the courts, free market competition, or regulators to disrupt the Fox News disinformation parade, that leaves activists like Media Matters, which have increasingly been trying to target the problem with it’s Unfox My Cable Box campaign. But even if we’re to simply wait for the purely organic death of the traditional cable TV channel bundle at the hands of the streaming television and pissed consumers, it’s not entirely clear, based on the popularity of many bigoted influencers, that dangerous dipshittery won’t just find a new form to inhabit.

Bullshit is more profitable than truth under the engagement-driven, ad-based business models we’re building, and that’s simply a fact. Policies that change this reality won’t be easy to come by. The world’s top media policy experts are glacially pondering practical solutions to the toxic sludge of disinformation pouring out of the face of trolls like Tucker Carlson, but you may want to go read a book, because it’s gonna be a long wait.

Filed Under: bundles, cable bundles, fox news, subsidization, tucker carlson
Companies: news corp

Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: That Time Twitter Nazis Got A Reporter Barred From Twitter Over Some Jokes

from the free-speech? dept

Reporter Jon Schwarz, over at The Intercept, has yet another story of content moderation at scale gone wrong, focusing this time on Twitter and his own account. It seems that a bunch of white supremacists on Twitter got mad at him, found an old joke, taken out of context, reported it en masse, and Twitter blocked him over it. Schwarz’s story is worth reviewing in detail, but I think he gets the wrong message out of it. His take is, more or less, that Twitter doesn’t much care about lowly users, and can’t be bothered to understand the context of things (we’ll get to the details of the spat in a moment):

It would be easy to interpret this as active contempt by Twitter for its users. But it?s more likely to be passive indifference. Like any huge corporation, Twitter is focused on the needs of its customers, which are its advertisers. By contrast, Twitter?s users are not its customers. They?re its product. Grocery stores don?t care if a can of soup complains about being taken off the shelf.

Similarly, contrary to speculation by some, I don?t think CEO Jack Dorsey secretly sympathizes with his Nazi user base. He probably just enjoys being a billionaire. As he?s said, ?from a simple business perspective ? Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.? Whatever else you want to say about Nazis, they definitely drive engagement, which in turn lets Twitter charge higher prices for diaper ads.

I even sympathize a little bit with Twitter?s conundrum. They aspired to be a globe-straddling highly profitable monopoly that had no responsibility for what their users did. This was a circle that couldn?t be squared. Proctor & Gamble doesn?t want its promoted tweets to appear right above hypothetical user @hh1488 livestreaming himself massacring 17 congregants at an Albuquerque mosque.

I was simply caught in the natural dynamics that flow from this contradiction. The structure of multinational publicly-traded corporations inevitably puts them somewhere politically from the center-right to the hard-right.

While an interesting take, I’d argue that it gets nearly every important point confused. Indeed, I’d argue that Schwarz is making the very same mistake that conservatives who blame Twitter for supposedly anti-conservative bias are making: looking just at their own situations and the content moderation choices they’re aware of, and imparting on the company some sort of natural political motive. Twitter is neither “liberal” nor is it, as Schwarz says, “center-right to the hard-right.” It’s a company. It doesn’t have political beliefs like that. (Relatedly, in the past, I’ve made it quite clear how misleading and unhelpful the whole “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” line is).

So, now let’s dig into the specifics of what happened to Schwarz and why, rather than it being some sort of political bias at play, or (as Schwarz hints at in his opening) Twitter bending over to appease white supremacists, that this is yet another manifestation of Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem… that it’s impossible to do content moderation well at scale.

What happened here was that first Schwarz made a joke about Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who appeared to be doing some dog whistling:

As Schwarz notes, he is referencing a joke from the sitcom “30 Rock”:

In fact, I was referring to a famous ?30 Rock? joke, which had now assumed human form in Carlson. When NBC executive Jack Donaghy decides that TGS, the TV-show-within-the-show, doesn?t have wide enough appeal, he complains to its head writer Liz Lemon:

> JACK:The television audience doesn?t want your elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing ? > > LIZ:Jack, just say Jewish, this is taking forever.

That’s not the joke he got blocked over, though. Instead, former KKK leader and all around awful person, David Duke, took that joke and paired it with another out-of-context joke from a few years earlier to mock Schwarz. I’m not linking to Duke’s tweet, but this was the joke that he paired with the one above to say “These are not good people, folks.” Which, truly, is some world class projection.

In case you’re unable to load the image, Schwarz’s 2015 tweet had said:

you know, it actually would make much more sense if jews and muslims joined forces to kill christians.

As Schwarz explained, in context, this is actually the kind of snarky reply that Duke would have historically agreed with, because it was part of a longer thread criticizing Israel (something Duke does frequently, though perhaps with other motivations in mind):

But Duke is such a cretin that it never occurred to him that my 2015 joke was exactly what he adores: criticism of Israel. That?s hopefully clear even out of context. But thanks to Twitter?s advanced search function, you can see that I was talking specifically in the context of two events ? the publication of photographs of Gaza taken after Israel?s bombing campaign in Operation Protective Edge, and the murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That week I also wistfully suggested, ?how about nobody kill anybody and then we go from there.?

Either way, lots and lots of Carlson and Duke fans reported that particular tweet to Twitter (and, of course, bombarded Schwarz with the kind of Twitter barrage that seems all too common these days) and Twitter took action over that tweet.

I have no great insight into how this particular decision went down, but having spent a lot of time in the past few years talking with content moderation folks at Twitter (and other social media platforms), what’s a lot more likely than Schwartz’s theory is simply this: Twitter has constantly had to tweak its rules over time, and because there is a decently large number of people on the “trust and safety” team, they need to have rules that can be easily understood and carried out — and that means that understanding context is generally not possible. Instead, there will be some more bright line rules — things like “no references to killing or violence directed at specific protected classes of people.” This is the kind of rule that you could easily see put in place on just about any set of content moderation rules.

And, when looked at through that lens, Schwarz’s tweet, even in jest, would trip that line. It’s a statement about killing people of a particular religion.

As for why it only caused trouble four years after the tweet, again, the reason is pretty simple. It’s not because Twitter Nazis were reporting it so often, but because anyone reported it. Twitter doesn’t review each and every tweet. They review tweets that come to their trust & safety team’s attention. And, I’ve heard first hand from people at Twitter that if they come across older tweets, even ones that have been up for many years, if they violate current rules, they will be subject to action.

Again, from the position of thinking about how to run a content moderation/trust & safety team at scale, you can totally see how these rules would get put in place, and how they’d actually be quite sensible. I’m guessing just about every internet platform that has any kind of content policy has just such a rule. And it’s easy to sit here and say, “but in context, it’s clear that he’s making a joke” or “it’s clear he’s trying to make a very different point and not literally advocating for Jews and Muslims to kill Christians.”

But how do you write those exceptions into the rules such that an entire diverse team of employees on a trust & safety team can understand that?

You can try to put in an “except for jokes” clause, but that would require everyone to be able to recognize a joke. Also, it would lead to gaming the system where people would advocate for such killings… and then claim “just joking!” It would also require a team that is culturally sensitive and able to recognize humor, context, and joking for nearly every cultural group around the globe.

That’s literally impossible.

And that’s why this is just yet another example of why content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. It has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with left-right. It has nothing to do with Twitter appeasing neo-Nazis. It has everything to do with the impossibility of moderating speech at scale.

Filed Under: content moderation, content moderation at scale, david duke, jokes, jon schwarz, masnick's impossibility theorem, tucker carlson