Nancy Pelosi and Fakebook Dirty Tricks
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If we as a society deem that type of content to be improper and that it should not be allowed on such platforms, then let's make that explicit from a legal perspective and regulate them.
Most people would also be pretty uncomfortable with the government vicariously deciding what they can say through Facebook. I'm sure it would cut both ways, as well. Not a stretch to see a president using an "anti-fake news" provision to stop damaging news about a scandal spread about him on social media.
Therein lies the problem. The video was slowed down and the audio slightly distorted. I don't see a set of metrics that can capture that "type" of alteration that doesn't also capture tons of content. Unless, of course, you go down the route of saying "it's illegal to post any altered video or image of any politician."
It isn't unusual to misrepresent a politician's message. It certainly isn't unusual for partisans to refuse to fairly represent their opponent's central point - either through a sense of mischief, because they just don't understand it or a genuine belief that there are more important issues at stake.
This video is clearly a low blow, and deceptive, but it isn't at all obvious that it is different from lying about something that Nancy Pelosi said. 'Solving' that in any way will likely cause some spectacular partisan fireworks when a difficult case comes by. Whoever gets control of the body that gets to choose what is fact and what is fiction is going to have disproportionate power.
Ultimately the fact is that freedom of speech does not actually work if people have actual freedom of speech. It only works under certain circumstances where most of the media toes the line with the political establishment and is relatively controlled.
Ban SNL, ban the daily show?
Newspapers publish lies and propaganda all the time. Ref any supermarket checkout magazine.
Today’s problems with tech aren’t tech. They’re all human problems. People forgot and don’t know how to sort through bullshit. If people really rely on Facebook to form opinions, then go vote, America, we have a problem.
Phone number interoperability was to establish an unbranded phone network that could be serviced by any telco. Making every service deliver messages to and from Facebook would be an absolute nightmare.
Perhaps you should think of it more as e.g. e-mail.
We need privacy and accountability more than the ability to further reduce the cost of a message from $0.0001 to $0.00005
No, telcos were interoperable by fiat because there can only be so many phone lines.
A good faith interpretation of interoperability is that any service simply has to publish an equivalent API that allows interacting with "its" users in the service's own data model/paradigm. The market of competitors will then happily sort out the details of how to smooth the gaps.
Why the "scare quotes"? I know you weren't quoting me since I didn't use those words.
I don't trust a free market to get everything perfectly right. I simply trust a government even less and believe they will screw it up even more.
I describe myself as libertarian, and if you want to make the argument that regulation will be transmuted by the incumbents to calcify their own positions, I'm right there with you. But it's wholly disingenuous to assert that services could only be obtusely constrained to the lowest common denominator, rather than considering a sensible system of interoperability that would align incentives properly. Putting it in libertarian terms - instituting a demarcation point such that users' electronic data and identities actually belong to the users.
Personally I think the real answer is that we need to self actualize and move away from these surveillance companies, period. And in that context yes it is a worry that regulations could be applied to harass down Free software. But given that we're staring down a much worse censorship regime, from both de jure and de facto governments (eg payment processors), I think we're likely to end up needing to avoid packet censorship anyway. A few additional business-consumer regulations aren't going to appreciably worsen that burden.
I would say that indeed, we will end up with the lowest common denominator of services, because the services are all different. Also, have you thought about how giving all these companies more access to data would impact the whole problem? Regardless, my argument is more that I see no clause in the Constitution that justifies such an action, and certainly see no justification in morality.
Lastly, why are you writing in such a manner? It's clear you're trying to sound smart, but it just comes across as pompous. Just make good points. There's enough jargon on this site without people deliberately adding more. Also, a "demarcation point" does not convey what I think you wanted to ("law"). Furthermore, you cannot "harrass down" anything; that's bad English. Based on a quoted search, it looks like a piece of jargon specific to League of Ledgends gamers. I wouldn't pick on such things but for the insufferable tone. You've got some nice phrases, they're just in the wrong sentences.
Responding substantively, the difference between a "government" and a corporation to which everybody has involuntarily contracted is in name only. In fact, much of the government overreach in the US isn't based on pure mandate, but rather justified by needing to "opt in" in some way - eg license plates are justified with the fiction that you're choosing to drive on government-administered roads.
We don't say that just because you have the choice to move out of state, individual states are libertarian-justified in making whatever laws they'd like. "Migrating" between online services today feels akin to the friction of moving between states - moving away from your social circle. And similar to how the states generally follow national leads, major online services have begin acting in concert like this current censorship push.
As I acknowledged, the productive libertarian answer is to seek to change the conditions that give rise to unnecessary power structures in the first place. But when addressing the situation as it stands, giving corporate power a pass is ultimately just deprecating individual freedom. This sector's companies are in the process of mingling with governments regardless (government gives regulatory capture, companies give enforcement legibility), whether or not the interests of the Individual are represented.
> you would be requiring social media sites to replicate each other's functionality.
This is ironic, considering Facebook's Instagram has already copied Snapchat's funcionality wholesale without government intervention!
Do they ban SNL impersonations too, Latenight TV mashups? No more Dana Carvey or Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey. Is that what they want?
Would labeling this on FB as parody be sufficient? Should raw footage be labeled as such. What about taking quotes out of context?
What about news which edits and editorializes? What about political campaigns which either only pull out the bad on an opponent and only highlights the good in another?
What about news orgs highlighting something as problem when it isn’t. Maybe animal content in food, but in actuality it’s within regulatory range and isn’t a threat to public health. Or what if they highlight the plight of a particular political prisoner but in general that country treats people well and doesn’t otherwise have political prisoners but the regime slighted the news org so they decide on a “smear” campaign.
Where do we draw the line? Especially with regards to political discourse, we ought to grant wide berth.
If the video would have been right at home on late night television, it should be right at home on Facebook.
Do you think the late night shows aren’t being used to convince people to feel a certain way about Trump?
This is the shoe on the other foot, and if doesn’t feel so right, the wrong lesson is to blame the foot.
Facebook has a mix of real news, fake news and propaganda videos it isn’t nearly as clear.
Not as a communication platform.
They already have that power - they've had it for a while. All that's being debated is how they should use it.
I rarely use Facebook anymore anyway, most of my chat happens in private groups or on scuttlebutt because at least there I have some control over what I see.
The US has truth-in-advertising laws, which forbid advertisers to make certain kinds of deceptive claims. I'm not sure whether the Supreme Court has explicitly considered whether they're constitutional, but it's certainly heard plenty of cases related to those laws and never taken the opportunity to say "oh, and by the way, laws against false advertising are unconstitutional".
If there's some reason why a law forbidding the use of faked/manipulated videos for political propaganda would be more inconsistent with the First Amendment than those, I'm not seeing it at all.
Political propaganda on the other hand is entirely protected by the first amendment. The term propaganda covers nearly all forms of political speech.
you might SAY that it’s a slippery slope but i’d argue that it’s likely (not that i know for certain) that there would have been just as much angst about these limits that are not only seen as common sense these days, but necessary
The new trend is that someone with a few thousand dollars can tell 10 million people that the Pope has endorsed a particular politician and a million people will believe it. I'd like to think that we are not so easily influenced, but then I find myself clicking on a screenshot I created just 30 seconds earlier and I realise the human brain just isn't designed to be constantly alert to fakery.
I don't think there is any consent for this.
It it because Facebook makes it much easier to share something with a wide audience? Is it because "the algorithm" means Facebook has more responsibility than if it were a simple chronological feed?
Why are we focusing on the platform anyway? We know who doctored the video, we know who published it to facebook... why are we not punishing the real origin?
On top of that a phone call and an sms are 1 to few (mostly 1 to 1), facebook posts are 1 to many, this makes the damage exponentially greater...
>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The party who publishes the content is liable, not the service that distributes it.
Often not discussed when this law comes up, is that it has a Good Samaritan clause:
>any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
The question is whether Facebook, etc... are publishers of content, or mere distributors of content that others publish. Facebook will tell you that they are distributors of content. Their opponents will tell you that the editorial control they exert over their platforms is beyond the scope of the Good Samaritan clause of the law.
You dobn't have to remove the content either, lower the priority of that content dramatically compared to content about family updates. If Facebook is supposed to be about connecting people, stop the radical from using it as a cheap publishing outlet. If Facebook is a news publishing platform Mark Zuckergberg is the editor in charge. He has to pick a side because it's clear this is not sustainable.
Facebook (and Youtube et al) have chosen not to be content-agnostic distribution platforms (unlike the postal service and SMS). They perform a variety of editorial functions to curate content and provide recommendations with the objective of maximizing engagement and hence advertising impressions that they can sell. This is popularly known as "the algorithm".
Given that these platforms have chosen to selectively display content for profit, many people believe that they should have some sort of responsibility for the editorial decisions they make.
That this story is driven only by an advanced self-adjusting Skinner box to maximize advertiser revenue, is very weird. You never expect sci-fi to be so mundane when it becomes reality, but it always is.
Regardless, the selection of the algorithm is not impartial. Content is pushed up or down to maximize engagement or whatever metric Facebook has decided it wants to maximize.
It's the establishment and the media/news companies that are demanding facebook censor according to their liking.
And what of "dirty tricks". There are "dirty tricks" in political ads/content all over TV, newspapers, radio, etc. Hell, CNN/NYTimes and much of the media outright colluded with Hillary and the Democratic party. Foxnews backed Trump.
If "dirty tricks" is this upsetting, then we might as well shut down all media.
The whole discussion is moot, at least not without a significant reinterpretation of the fist amendment. Remember, the first amendment also protects against compelled speech. The government cannot mandate people or companies to make speech it does not want to. There's some talk about whether making these social media platforms utilities could allow the government to compel speech, but that seems far fetched at the moment.
I’m more of the opinion that Facebook should be punished as an example. Don’t grow so big that your unilateral action could have devastating effects on society. Don’t do things with peoples data that remotely rises to the 1984 totalitarian level. See how fast we have publicly owned holdings companies of regional wellsfargo/BoA type banks, facebooks, credit reporting agencies, etc. It’s inline with concepts of having different forms of government at the local, regional, and federal levels.
Still illegal as per the First Amendment. The government cannot compel speech, regardless of company size.
> I’m more of the opinion that Facebook should be punished as an example. Don’t grow so big that your unilateral action could have devastating effects on society. Don’t do things with peoples data that remotely rises to the 1984 totalitarian level. See how fast we have publicly owned holdings companies of regional wellsfargo/BoA type banks, facebooks, credit reporting agencies, etc. It’s inline with concepts of having different forms of government at the local, regional, and federal levels.
I'm not sure how any of this has to do with content moderation.
Edit-I think they could also tie a temporal component and per instance cost of storing someone’s “PI”. That value could then be a basis to tax the corporation- create an incentive to “forget”.
Edit2-make a persons likeness and social media posts part of this “PI.” This would give Pelosi the legal right to the doctored content.
The United States Government can't; however, the U.S. tends to have stronger free-speech laws than other countries, and as we've seen with GDPR, other governments (including some democratic governments) may choose to legislate additional restrictions that Facebook might end up just deploying everywhere. Not saying that this would necessarily be a good outcome.
They do their best to document this: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/
The simple reality I see is that Facebook has to please the majority of people, but people are reluctant to confront the fact that some of their views are significantly out of line with the majority. So people react negatively when their own content is banned, and also when content they think should be banned is allowed.
That and an either an unwillingness to accept or understand the limitations of automated content moderation. There was a post on the front page of Reddit about an artist who got their Facebook page taken down for making KKK-style MAGA hats, and nazi-style MAGA armbands (crucially, with a swatstika). It's unambiguously anti-Trump in context, but of course it's going to get automatically flagged when it prominently features items strongly aligned with hate speech.
Word "every" implies that there are a lot of them in more or less equal competition, but there aren't. The issue here is monopoly: Facebook and Twitter have too much influence.
Social media should go through process of federalisation and become like email and websites, so that every user can consume content hosted by different companies and each of those companies can determine it's own rules on it.
It would be great if we could allow parodies and jokes as long as a reasonable person can tell that this is indeed a joke. But that won't work since people disagree about what's "reasonable".
I guess we can require that parodies and jokes are tagged as such, so people don't confuse them with real stuff. Is that too overbearing?
Are there any better solutions that have been proposed?
The prior art I'm aware of comes from the copyright, trademark, and defamation laws, but the definitions developed there are so vague that it can take a few months in court (and thousands of dollars) to decide whether something is a parody / satire. Here we need a rule that can applied within hours, at a very low cost. So I'm not sure how we can adapt existing legal definitions to banning videos on the internet.
Could you describe in a bit more detail what exactly you propose?
Facebook is too popular? I agree, but that is something everyone has to decide for themselves.
I do think people who are frustrated about current global politics want to restrict the net in the hopes that people adopt "correct" positions.
Yes, from time to time I might disagree with Facebook about the accuracy or intent of a video, but it would be an improvement on the status quo.
Such lawsuits can be numerous and costly enough to kill the entire concept of hosting user uploaded videos. How to avoid this?
Maybe it's better to drop the intent thing and just ban any videos that look real but aren't? Even if it means banning some parodies such as this https://youtu.be/cQ54GDm1eL0 Even then we'll need to figure out how do it at scale, since a human reviewer will often not know if it's real.
I don't think we can limit the ban to videos where you can see people's faces; you can create quite bad misinformation by showing a military boat of some country sinking a civilian ship etc.
This is part of a larger trend in MSM to pry eyeballs away from social media and back to traditional one way media.
On the other hand, there was a super-viral video about this on Twitter that was really obviously doctored. It "proved" that parts had been sped up by overlaying the video on a 7-frame-behind version of the original. Unless you paused the video this desync was only noticable in faster-moving sections, creating the illusion those sections were sped up. Not one news reporter spotted this. People like Captain Disillusionment happily spread it as fact.
If we based our decisions about what's doctored and should be blocked from spreading and what isn't on the media reporting, it'd mean treating truth as lies and lies as truth.
[1] Seriously. You can replicate the incredibly simple frame rate conversion (just blending the frames on either side) in a few lines of Python and get every single one of those artifacts out: https://www.makomk.com/2018/11/16/recreating-that-white-hous... From what I can tell this is the default setting in Sony Vegas, which is what the guy used.
The genie is out of the bottle. Unless you want a 1984 style propaganda you have to accept that media is different from 10 years ago and it'll never be the same.
Indifference to privacy becoming vogue often doesn't have immediate and noticeable consequences. Many on HN have the experience and technical knowledge to see the consequences, but they're an exception among the general population. But it's easy to notice when a friend or family member repeats a lie they saw on Facebook.
I'll assume people are reacting to immediate and "obviously bad" consequences. A little more evidence is needed before I go with "hypocritical ulterior motive."
Why is Fb not investigating the original sources and propagators of that video?
Meanwhile the president can appear on any video saying whatever doctored or not and it won't matter one bit
E.g. NYT, the DNC, Pelosi's own site, etc., would flag a hash of a file as valid. Those sites would be aggregated into a web of trust. Users subscribe to nodes of that web, e.g. I trust reporter A, celebrity B, newspaper C, advocacy group D ... and their trust webs out to a depth of X.
Is there anything like this in the works? Kind of a DNS service for propagating networks of trust ratings?
The core issue I've come across is that it would make cults happen more easily.
Memoization might help although if it’s to the millisecond maybe not.
Or is the idea that only when there is enough public pressure to take down a particularly popular and deceptive video ... then it should be removed?
It seems sort of ridiculous that we should engage in across-the-board censorship of anything mis-representing reality in any way. OTOH removing things only as they become popular enough to go viral and meet some agreed upon definition of "fake" enough seems like it would establish a permanent, weird shouting match with no clear rules.
Or is the idea that we should ban and penalize Facebook specifically? Because they're Facebook. I don't really get that, but okay. We could do that. I don't think it would solve the user-generated content problem or the fake news problem.
We could not allow any website with posts, images and comments that isn't filtered through a some sort of sacred guardian of truth/editorial board. That sounds like a pretty locked-down version internet.
As some other commenters mentioned, the fact that the President/right-wing seem into this sort of approach and that this video became popular in the first place is a separate, sad issue.
I'd love for the NYTimes to spell out what they're advocating FOR as the solution. If it's just "delete facebook" and read our comments section instead, well-played I guess.
Secondly, do you really want to make Facebook the great filter of political truth? Is this a role you want to give to a private company with its own agenda? Of course, for somebody working at The New York Times this kind of power is a dream scenario, where truth is simply whatever they write.
Criticism of the opinion article itself:
> Facebook decided to keep up a video deliberately and
> maliciously doctored to make it appear as if Speaker Nancy
> Pelosi was drunk or perhaps crazy.
Interesting wording, did Facebook decide to keep the video up or did it not decide to take it down? An assumption of malice is a dangerous place to start.
> The social media giant deemed the video a hoax and demoted
> its distribution, but the half-measure clearly didn’t
> work.
This is the truth of their opinion, only wiping all traces of problematic material from the internet is an acceptable solution, anything else is a half-measure. What if this video was a piece of art, a political statement, a meme? Is there anyone who we can trust to make the decision without asserting their own bias?
> “We think it’s important for people to make their own
> informed choice for what to believe,” [..] This is
> ridiculous.
When did a company passing the responsibility of interpretation to the viewers become controversial? Why is it ridiculous to think of content consumers as having the ability to decide what is real and what is not?
> Would a broadcast network air this? Never. Would a
> newspaper publish it? Not without serious repercussions.
> Would a marketing campaign like this ever pass muster?
> False advertising.
Newspapers and serious repercussions? You mean a (comparatively) small monetary fine at most? The biggest consequence of bad journalism I've ever seen was the phone hacking scandal for News of the World, where Rupert Murdoch was basically told to reorganize his assets and make the name "News of the World" disappear [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDOo5nDJwgA
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
Interesting that a journalist thinks that Facebook is optimized for what "looks good" rather than what drives eyeballs. Facebook is just giving the people what they want. (To say nothing of how self-congratulatory that sentence is)
As said in other comments pushing for more self policing is the worst thing that could happen for democracy and free-speech. The last thing I want is for a small clique of silicon valley tech execs to decide what I should or should not see on my feed.
I see two solutions on this:
- Censorship is coming from an elected government body
- No censorship and we let people decide what is news and what is fake news.
But having Zuck and his team manipulate newsfeed to push a political or social agenda is a terrible idea. This article is a shame.
Truth matters. News distributers are expected to fact check and should be held accountable when spreading falsehoods.
Removing provably false manipulated media is not itself a manipulation. It is a correction.
Facebook is a non-government entity. They're "people," too. They can totally decide to stop sharing junk when they notice it. And other people, like the article's author, can ask them to do just that.
Then you have one of the most influential venues (which has taken over much of the use cases of the original open Web and Internet) having to answer to politicians about what speech it should censor.
I remember some years ago that when papers wrote articles about how they will keep being critical on Facebook, despite their cooperation. That was sad to read.
Meanwhile several major media sites are claiming the video Trump shared was this same doctored video, when it was merely a montage of regular video clips.
We can’t even begin to have a conversation about censoring private companies without it immediately being used as a political weapon.
do we have to discuss if ageism is worse (more evil) than racism or vice versa? who will be the judge? isn't a spade a spade and "toxic" is simply toxic?
>“I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.”
Ah yes, the very common good faith nazi. You seriously have to wonder if Mark Zuckerberg would have such nonchalant views about speech and misinformation if he didn't have a tail of private security and a fenced in mansion.
What's the Muslim store owner in Myanmar going to do when the mob comes knocking on the door after some lie about him got the local village riled up? The degree to which these people live in an alternate reality isn't even funny any more. Nothing has consequences for Zuckerberg et al and it has distorted their worldview.
I'm understanding you correctly, you believe that Zuckerberg should be held liable for untruthful content hosted on its platform, but you also believe that Zuckerberg should not be allowed to choose what content is hosted on its platform.
How do you harmonize those two fundamentally contradictory viewpoints? Or do you feel that the only "correct" way forward is to excise Facebook in its entirety?
I don't think the platform needs to go entirely, I just think it needs to get an incentive, financially for starters, if it fails to adhere to standards set by legislators.
If no: Facebook is being fined for not taking an action that it is not allowed to take, which I can't imagine you are advocating for.
If yes: Facebook is now the arbiter of what information gets to be seen (on Facebook), which you didn't want.
A third option, of course, would be to let the government (all governments?) decide when something should be removed from Facebook, but frankly I think this is the worst option of the three.
I suspect that you meant liability in cases when something is "clearly" untrue, so my comments likely come off as pedantry. In cases like this video it's very easy to make that determination. But when it isn't so clear cut, there will have to be judgement calls, and if we're talking actual liability then someone has to be empowered make them. Who gets to make these judgement calls? Either Facebook, the US Government, any government including the ones that you don't like, or maybe some supposedly non-biased third party. None of these options sound at all good to me. I don't know what the answer is, I just want to point out that whatever it is, if it even exists, it isn't as simple as that.
You can avoid cognitive dissonance if you assume you have the "right" perspective on how to bucket content into two groups, acceptable and unacceptable, and that the bucketing made by regulators will be identical to yours, since it's clearly the only objectively correct one. Of course, this is so far from reality if such a thing were to be implemented that it's not worth taking seriously.
Quite an ironic comment in a thread about doctored video.
(The other day, someone on Reddit reminded that in Russia it’s illegal to repost the Putin gay clown meme [1]. And of course there is the famous Chinese ban of Winnie-the-Pooh images. Is this in any way worse than removing the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi would have been?)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/05...
Average FB user probably couldn't tell you if Panama papers were authentic or not, so should those be banned from dissemination as "fake news"? Plenty of people would like to make those go away as slander, I'm sure.
$16,450 to her in particular for those interested
https://www.copyrightcontentplatforms.com/2019/03/the-scope-...
Widespread availability of high quality media capture and technologies such as facial manipulation will inevitably lead to a future with many, many unverifiable snippets that go viral. This video is unique in that verification is possible, but the future will likely hold far more unverifiable content than otherwise. It is more positive to expect that humans will gain the ability to balance disinformation in the face of further information than to expect that benign dictators will censor perfect knowledge into cognisance.