Big Tech Giant Companies Have A Private Meeting To Censor AmericaReps from up to a dozen of the US’s biggest tech companies plan to meet in San Francisco to discuss efforts to counter manipulation of their platforms.
Representatives from a host of the biggest US tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting for Friday to share their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.
Last week, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Gleicher wrote.
The meeting, the Facebook official wrote, will have a three-part agenda: each company will present the work they’ve been doing to counter information operations; there will be a discussion period for problems each company faces; and a talk about whether such a meeting should become a regular occurrence.
In May, nine of those companies met at Facebook to discuss similar problems, alongside two US government representatives, Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, created in November. Attendees left the meeting discouraged that they received little information from the government.
Tech companies, Facebook and Twitter in particular, have faced intense scrutiny for how slowly they initially reacted to reports that foreign intelligence and affiliated operations used their platforms to manipulate users ahead of the 2016 election, leading to drops in user confidence and a threat of regulation from lawmakers.
In February, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office charged 13 people affiliated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a “troll factory” where employees created personas across multiple platforms — with breaking laws in order to influence American voters. Since then, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube have each had at least one public purge of accounts believed to be foreign influence operations.
The meeting highlights tech companies’ recent efforts to be more proactive with governments’ use of their sites to achieve political goals. Several companies have announced operations this week where they partnered with other organizations to address such problems.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it had, for the 12th time since 2016, legally acquired control of a handful of web domains registered by Russian military intelligencefor phishing operations, then shut them down. The next day, after receiving a tip from the threat intelligence company FireEye, Facebook and Twitter announced they had taken down a network of fake news sites and spoofed users meant to create sympathy for the Iranian government’s worldview. Google made a similar announcement about YouTube on Thursday.
They think it’s okay to censor you because they are taking bribes and kickbacks from the Lobbyist.
Legacy conservatives have sent a clear message to the masters of the universe in Silicon Valley. That message is: “we surrender!”
That about sums up the new, self-destructive tendency in the D.C. conservative establishment. A growing number of “free market” advocates are making the case that Facebook, a 2-billion user behemoth with no serious competitor, has every right to censor the conservative movement and its leaders.
According to this argument, Facebook isn’t an all-conquering monopoly with more power to shape opinion than the worst totalitarian governments of the 20th century. No — it’s just a little, innocent, “private company” operating in a “free market.” Just like a socially conservative cake shop in the midwest!
It’s genius, when you think about it. To counter the allegation that it censors conservatives, Facebook plans to work with conservatives who are totally OK with their movement being censored, as long as it’s a corporate superpower doing it and not the government.
It would be one thing if the think-tank conservative set were saying that the unchecked political power of Silicon Valley doesn’t warrant regulation yet, but holding out on the possibility of such regulation if things get worse. That, at least, would act as a deterrent, in much the same way that the Democrats’ threat of regulation is forcing Facebook to take action on fake news and data privacy.
But that’s not their argument. Instead, it’s the same tired 1980s dogma that free market competitors to Facebook and Google will fix the problem, and that regulation is never the answer.
“Facebook can ultimately make decisions about what kind of speech it wants to have on its platform” was the conclusion of Klon Kitchen, tech policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Berin Szóka of TechFreedom, the go-to conservative for the “everything’s fine!” argument on social media censorship, argues that we just have to wait for the “next Facebook”, while disingenuously comparing all proposals for social media regulation to the Fairness Doctrine, a pre-1980s piece of legislation that stifled competition in broadcast media.
This argument, which can be paraphrased as “everything I don’t like is the Fairness Doctrine”, follows a similar logic to those that compare the construction of a border wall to the second coming of fascism.
None of these free market geniuses have grasped that Google and Facebook aren’t just monopolies (any first-grade economics teacher can tell you that a market dominated by monopolies is not “free”), they are unique in the vast power they have over the flow of information. No other organization in history has had the power to shape opinion, control public discourse, and influence democratic voters.
Facebook has the power to kill a news website by adjusting its algorithm without warning. They have already done so on two occasions. By signalling to news publishers that their standards are changing, Facebook has the power to change the way news organizations behave on an international scale. That’s to say nothing of their power to manipulate voter registration and turnout.
Google, meanwhile, holds a 90 percent market share in search and is even more terrifying in its power. Recent research has shown that the company can change the preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent, just by tweaking their search suggestions. The Soviet Union could only have dreamed of such manipulative power. And it all lies in the hands of one company, with no regulation and no oversight to contain it.
Nevermind the fact that these companies are monopolies. Even if they were not, their unaccountable political power deserves oversight in its own right. Social media companies are not like newspapers or radio stations. Nor, evidently, are they neutral platforms. They are something entirely new, and the problem of their unrivaled power cannot be addressed by reference to the past.
Don’t expect legacy conservatives to understand that, though. Armed with slogans from the 1980s, they’re still fighting the battles of a bygone era. They have abdicated the fight against the masters of the universe. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us should.
These too are idiots. Why don’t they stop people from drug overdoses?
MSNBC host and former Republican Joe Scarborough has joined the liberal campaign against the NRA and is calling on video streaming services to ban the NRA’s channel from their platforms.
Liberal activists are trying to pressure Amazon, Apple, Google and Roku into banning NRA from their platforms as a response to last week’s Florida school shooting, which followed a series of law enforcement failures. Scarborough jumped on the bandwagon Friday evening and called on the companies to censor NRATV.
“Lawyers from @Apple @amazon @Google and @RokuPlayer should watch these disturbing videos and remove this channel. They incite violence and could make anyone streaming them liable,” Scarborough claimed.
Former Republican Joe Scarborough comes out as pro-censorship (Screenshot/Twitter)
Scarborough and his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, have both endorsed the liberal campaign to pressure companies into cutting any ties with the NRA.
Screenshot/Twitter
Screenshot/Twitter
Several companies including United Airlines and Delta, among others, have severed partnerships with the NRA in response to the liberal pressure campaign.
On Sunday afternoon, when Elmer T. Williams’s wife told him that a mass shooting had taken place at a church in Texas, he leapt into action. First, he skimmed a handful of news stories about the massacre. Then, when he felt sufficiently informed, he went into his home video studio, put on his trademark aviator sunglasses, and hit record.
Roughly an hour later, Mr. Williams, 51, a popular right-wing YouTube personality who calls himself “The Doctor of Common Sense,” had filmed, edited and uploaded a three-minute monologue about the Sutherland Springs church shooting to his YouTube page, which had roughly 90,000 subscribers. Authorities had not yet named a suspect, but that didn’t deter Mr. Williams, who is black, from speculating that the gunman was probably “either a Muslim or black.”
Later, after the shooter was identified as a white man named Devin P. Kelley, Mr. Williams posted a follow-up video. He claimed that Mr. Kelley was most likely a Bernie Sanders supporter associated with antifa — a left-wing anti-fascist group — who may have converted to Islam. Despite having no evidence for those claims, Mr. Williams argued them passionately, saying that photos of Mr. Kelley circulating online suggested that he was a violent liberal.
“Sometimes, you can tell a lot from a person’s picture,” Mr. Williams said.
I came across Mr. Williams’s videos several hours after the massacre, when one of them appeared prominently in YouTube’s search results about the shooting, alongside other videos making unverified claims that had been posted by pages with names like TruthNews Network and The Patriotic Beast.
YouTube has long been a haven for slapdash political punditry, but in recent months, a certain type of hyper-prolific conspiracist has emerged as a dominant force. By reacting quickly and voluminously to breaking news, these rapid-response pundits — the YouTube equivalent of talk radio shock-jocks — have successfully climbed the site’s search results, and exposed legions of viewers to their far-fetched theories.
In a phone interview from his home in Houston, Mr. Williams told me that he had created more than 10,000 YouTube videos over an eight-year period, posting as many as 20 monologues per day, and racking up estimated 200 million views.
His hit productions have included fact-challenged videos like “Barack and Michelle Obama Both Come Out The Closet,” which garnered 1.6 million views, and “Hillary Clinton Is On Crack Cocaine,” which had 665,000. He was admitted to YouTube’s partner program, which allows popular posters to earn money by displaying ads on certain types of videos, and claims to have made as much as $10,000 a month from his channel.
“I like to call myself a reporter who reports the news for the common person,” Mr. Williams said.
Whether motivated by profit or micro-celebrity, the success of sensationalists like Mr. Williams has become a vexing problem for companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which owns YouTube.
These companies sort and prioritize information for their users, and most have built ranking systems that boost news from mainstream outlets over stories from less credible sources. But those algorithms can be gamed in breaking news situations by users who work fast, uploading their videos in the valuable minutes between when news breaks and when the first wave of legitimate articles and videos appears.
“Before reliable sources put up stories, it’s a bit of a free-for-all,” said Karen North, a professor studying social media at the University of Southern California. “People who are in the business of posting sensationalized opinions about the news have learned that the sooner they put up their materials, the more likely their content will be found by an audience.”
Elmer T. Williams said he had created more than 10,000 YouTube videos, posting as many as 20 monologues per day on hot-button topics.
The phenomenon is not limited to YouTube. After last month’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, a Facebook safety check page featured a story from a site called “Alt-Right News” that made false statements about the gunman, and Google’s search results displayed a conspiracy theory from 4Chan, the notoriously toxic message board. After last month’s terrorist attack in New York City, a trending topic page on Twitter briefly featured a story from Infowars, a conservative site that is popular among the conspiracy-minded.
Conservatives have argued that YouTube unfairly targets their videos while allowing liberal channels, such as The Young Turks, to post heated political commentary. And some dispute that there is any conscious gaming going on.
“There is absolutely no strategy,” said Paul Joseph Watson, an editor-at-large at Infowars and a popular YouTube personality who has 1.1 million subscribers. On the day of the Texas church shooting, one of Mr. Watson’s tweets appeared as a result in Google searches for the shooter’s name, although it has since disappeared.
Tech companies, already under fire for the ease with which they allowed Russia to interfere in last year’s election, have also vowed to take a harder stance on domestic misinformation. Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, told congressional investigators last week that the company would take steps to keep false stories from being featured on trending topic pages.
“It’s a bad user experience, and we don’t want to be known as a platform for that,” Mr. Edgett said.
YouTube, whose community guidelines prohibit hateful and threatening content, has begun using artificial intelligence to help identify offensive videos. But conspiracy theories don’t announce themselves, and machines can’t yet handle the complicated business of fact-checking.
In Mr. Williams’s case, human intervention seems to have been necessary. On Tuesday, shortly after I asked YouTube some questions about Mr. Williams’s account, all of his videos disappeared, and his profile was replaced by a message saying, “This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech.”
Mr. Williams, who said he had recently left his job as an operations manager at a hazardous materials plant to focus on full-time punditry, has tangled with YouTube’s hate speech policies before. The company shut down one of his previous accounts for similar infractions, which he claimed cost him 250,000 subscribers and a lucrative income stream.
“If YouTube didn’t punish me,” Mr. Williams said, “I could easily be making over $30,000 a month.”
In a statement, YouTube said that Mr. Williams’s account was banned “as soon as it was flagged to us,” because its terms of service prohibit repeat rule-breakers from opening new accounts. It also said that its terms prohibit advertising from appearing on videos featuring “controversial and sensitive events, tragedies, political conflicts, and other sensitive topics.”
Even before this week’s crackdown, Mr. Williams was branching out. He sells cellphone ringtones on his website, and was considering starting his own paid streaming service. Tuesday night, just hours after he was banned by YouTube, Mr. Williams posted a video on Vimeo, another video-hosting platform. He pledged to keep insulting his favorite targets — Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama — and not shy away from controversy, no matter what the policies said.
“I don’t want to be on YouTube anymore,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s too communist.”
Report: Google ‘Coming After Critics’ in Academia and Journalism, ‘Forming Into a Government of Itself’
Google is “coming after critics in academia and journalism,” according to the Washington Post, who added that the company “is forming into a government of itself.”
“Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent,” claimed Zephyr Teachout, an academic, activist, and former Democratic political candidate in an article for the Washington Post.
Referencing the news this week that members of the Open Markets team she was part of at the Google-funded New America Foundation think tank had been kicked out after they praised the European Union’s decision to fine Google for violating anti-trust regulations, Teachout highlighted the irony of Google’s former slogan “Don’t be evil,” adding, “It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent.”
“Google is forming into a government of itself, and it seems incapable of even seeing its own overreach. We, as citizens, must respond in two ways,” proclaimed Teachout. “First, support the brave researchers and journalists who stand up to overreaching power; and second, support traditional antimonopoly laws that will allow us to have great, innovative companies — but not allow them to govern us.”
Teachout also wrote an article for the Intercept this week, where she explained, “In 2010, while I was pushing to break up big banks because they had become too powerful, I started to realize that the problem in America wasn’t just big banks, it was corporate monopolies.”
In the article, Teachout also announced she will be “the board chair of a new organization, comprised of the same team [kicked out of New America], doing the same work.”
“We will be launching in the fall, and I am helping to create a new digital campaign, Citizens Against Monopoly, to help channel the tremendous public concern that we know exists around monopoly power,” she concluded. “Google’s actions make it more important than ever that we stand up to fight monopolies. At the end of the day, this is about freedom.”