Here is an interview about censorship and social media (this is the old Section 230 discussion that I, for a long time, could not make sense of). You have to get past a (pardon me) sexual organ joke in the prelude. The URL above skips all that.
It was perspective changing for me to watch. If this post is too long, and you want to focus one single thing – watch this interview please. I’ve watched it twice.
If you want to jump straight to the policy prescription, here is a good proposal.
In a (lot of) more detail:
Guest is Matt Stoller, a book author on monopolies. The problem, he says, is not that Facebook, Google, Twitter should ban speech – but that their business model, based on advertising, is causing siloes of like-minded people. He is interviewed on the Taibbi and Halper unedited podcast, Useful Idiots.
These companies derive revenue off sowing division in society – not unlike cable news deriving revenue off Anna Nicole Smith type stories, or Nancy Grace type shows.
Sen. Markey wants Facebook, Twitter, Google to chase after bad actors, and take down their accounts (when these actors are not political allies). Rather, this should be a story of monopolies and advertising models encouraging worst tendencies, while deriving revenue from it.
Four years ago Trump was getting free cable news coverage for saying outrageous things. He got elected – and cable news made bundles in advertising.
Jeff Zucker had been producer for The Apprentice, then oversaw CNN, as president. SNL was happy to host Trump, mere days after he attacked Hispanic immigrants as rapists and murderers. That episode drew the best ratings in years.
Since Trump was silenced, cable news advertising revenue has dropped in half.
It was known since a year ago that advertising algorithms polarize users. Facebook had internal research looking into that.
It is instructive to read Mark Zuckerberg’s opening testimony in Congress on Mar 25th. Facebook attempted to address this polarization – with an oversight board, a private Supreme Court of sorts, that directs advertising behavior. But they can’t really do it. They are captive to their own business model.
Also read Glenn Greenwald’s opening testimony from March 12th. I’m quoting a point he’s making, because it’s counterintuitive (but, I think, he’s right about this):
“[Glenn Greenwald:] Critics of Silicon Valley power over political discourse for years have heard the same refrain: if you don’t like how they are moderating content and policing discourse, you can go start your own social media platform that is more permissive. Leaving aside the centuries-old recognition that it is impossible, by definition, to effectively compete with monopolies, we now have an incident vividly proving how inadequate that alternative is.
“Several individuals who primarily identify as libertarians heard this argument from Silicon Valley’s defenders and took it seriously. They set out to create a social media competitor to Twitter and Facebook — one which would provide far broader free expression rights for users and, more importantly, would offer greater privacy protections than other Silicon Valley giants by refusing to track those users and commoditize them for advertisers. They called it Parler, and in early January, 2021, it was the single most-downloaded app in the Apple Play Store. This success story seemed to be a vindication for the claim that it was possible to create competitors to existing social media monopolies.
“But now, a mere two months after it ascended to the top of the charts, Parler barely exists. That is because several members of Congress with the largest and most influential social media platforms demanded that Apple and Google remove Parler from their stores and ban any further downloading of the app, and further demanded that Amazon, the dominant provider of web hosting services, cease hosting the site. Within forty-eight hours, those three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with those demands, rendering Parler inoperable and effectively removing it from the internet (See “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler,” Glenn Greenwald, Jan. 12, 2021).
“The justification of this collective banning was that Parler had hosted numerous advocates of and participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. But even if that were a justification for removing an entire platform from the internet, subsequent reporting demonstrated that far more planning and advocacy of that riot was done on other platforms, including Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (See The Washington Post, “Facebook’s Sandberg deflected blame for Capitol riot, but new evidence shows how platform played role,“ Jan. 13, 2021; Forbes, “Sheryl Sandberg Downplayed Facebook’s Role In The Capitol Hill Siege—Justice Department Files Tell A Very Different Story,” Feb. 7, 2021).
“Whatever else one might want to say about the destruction of Parler, it was a stark illustration of how these Silicon Valley giants could obliterate even a highly successful competitor overnight, with little effort, by uniting to do so. And it laid bare how inadequate is the claim that Silicon Valley’s monopolies can be challenged through competition.”
I don’t understand the point of algorithms. When I’m on Facebook, I want to be the one to choose what I want to see. If I like a page, then show me that page’s posts. If I don’t, then keep it out of my feed! Also, don’t choose my “top stories”; when I log onto FB I always reset the feed to show posts in the order in which they were posted.
The point of algorithms is to maximize digital ad revenue. These are sophisticated AI algorithms to determine the kinds of posts viewers are likely to be interested in – looking at past use statistics, and past revenue derived from ads posted in the stream. The tracking is done across an entire ecosystem, not just facebook.com or google.com.
Yes, each individual can choose to see only what they want to see. Users have agency.
However, statistically, vast majority of users are sucked in. The revenue model is customized to user behavior, and – more ominously – the user behavior becomes function of the revenue model.
I basically knew that. The above was mostly a rant.
I’ve been in the industry for as long as it’s existed. I understand the argument for “personalized advertising” on the web, and I understand that video advertising is effective.
I also know that AI has been a solution looking for a problem as long as there’s been AI. First it was going to be “natural language processing”, as a step towards “artificial consciousness”. I remember when Kendall Square was called “AI Alley”, and all sorts of “hot” startups headquartered there were going to be “dominators”. Remember “Thinking Machines Incorporated”? It never happened.
A small team of heretics working for another startup with a funny-sounding name figured out that brute force applied to well-understood tactics like indexing, multidimensional analysis, and classical statistics solved the “search engine” problem WAY BETTER than AI — and that was, at the time, the crown jewel of the natural language processing domain.
I write all this because I’m not sure that anybody has actually shown that “personalized advertising” is any more effective at generating revenue than much cruder brute-force approaches. Are you aware of any peer-reviewed research with suitable controls and normalization that shows that any of this actually DOES anything? I ask because I’m not.
There is, on the other hand, a raft of anecdotal evidence that misfires drive away a huge number of consumers. I don’t buy more than one mattress a decade. What marketing guru concluded that showing me advertising for mattresses after I’ve bought one does anything at all (other than alienating me)?
I don’t doubt that there is an auto-catalytic set of technology elements that causes individual technology providers (and people who work for them) to gain revenue from increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms. The producers charge more. Purchasing agents buy more, because marketing directors are sure that they work. Competitive pressures have a tendency to make media and advertising providers pay more attention to competitors than to consumers. The participants in the loop all make money until the bubble breaks. It isn’t that different from any other speculative bubble. I’m just not sure that there is any actual value created from all this churn — I’m not sure companies who pay through the nose for this “sophisticated” advertising get any more money in return than if they just forced a pre-roll of their stupid 15- or 30-second TV spot.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I went for walk along the beach at Lynn Shore Drive on a beautiful March Sunday. On our way home, we were stopped at a red-light next to a Popeye’s Chicken outlet. We commented to each other that if we hadn’t just had lunch, we might be interested because we both enjoy the fare when we’re looking for a guilty pleasure.
Two days later, both my wife and I were getting ads for Popeye’s Chicken in our web browsers on our PCs. That lasted for a few days and stopped.
That is just plain creepy. I KNOW that it isn’t possible to turn off the mics on our phones. I know that the audio feed collected by providers, processed, and the results passed on to their customers. I know that the GPS location of our phones is tracked. I know that advertising providers, including Google, use that location to “personalize” our ad feeds. I know that “dwell time” near a location is one of many proxies for helping identify “interest”. I’m therefore not really surprised by the episode.
We are LESS, rather than more, likely to patronize Popeye’s as a result.
While pollsters assure that are fully able to detect and compensate for people who always lie to them, our political polls are nevertheless notoriously bad at measuring the true level of support for candidates and parties like Donald Trump and the Trumpists — people lying to pollsters is a well-documented and often mentioned factor in those failures. I wonder if anybody actually measures the impact of consumer alienation from these increasingly intrusive and offensive practices.
We are allowing incredibly offensive and intrusive corporate predators to access our most private places and moments — and as far as I can tell, we gain little or nothing from it.
A few years ago, the MA legislature learned through media sources that a loophole in state privacy laws allowed voyeurs to use cameras to take “upskirt” videos of women in MA buses, subways, and trains without fear of legal consequences. It took the legislature less than a week (as I recall, a few hours) to meet in emergency session, pass legislation that closed the loophole, and have it instantly signed. I think it may well have been while Deval Patrick was governor.
I find it ironic that our elected officials are so quick to stop the invasion of privacy for the prurient purposes of men who like such things and are so completely powerless to do anything at all to an entire industry that uses the same devices to secretly and without consent record and sell the results of just as invasive material solely for mercenary purposes.
I join Christopher in wanting no part of all this. I don’t use Facebook or other social media. I don’t use Twitter. I did my best to find, install, and use software to stop my phone from spying on us — I gave up after a few weeks because it is tedious, causes many apps to fail, and absolutely kills battery life (for those who care, there are multiple operating systems on every phone. While user apps can turn the mic off, the OS has timers that turn it back on every few seconds. The battery consumption skyrockets because the app that turns off the battery has to run pretty much non-stop in order to keep the mic off.)
I apologize for my lengthy rant. I don’t pretend to know the right answer. I love technology and use it all the time. I’ve made a comfortable living from it.
I have, nevertheless, helped create a monster that is out of control. I don’t believe there are any simple answers. Our collective unwillingness to even talk about it is one of the reasons I think our political and economic system is badly broken.
This kind of stuff should be illegal and it isn’t. It won’t be any time soon.
I for one did NOT know that phone mics picked up and processed what you say even when you are not deliberately using them. I still use a flip phone that I mostly keep completely off so maybe that has its advantages. There should at least be a way for the user to turn that capability off, and such should be legally required.
FB isn’t even necessarily that good at tailoring ads to my interests. Today was one of those days where it seemed every other post was an ad. Some days I scroll past and other days I take the time to block them. I decided this time to click “Why am I seeing this ad?” for a product I was not at all interested in because I was curious as to what made someone think I was interested. The answer I got was that this particular ad had been set up to target men age 35+ living in the USA. Yes, that describes me along with millions of others, but not nearly specific enough to gauge interest in a product. I thought the algorithms were at least designed to react to posts you show interest in through engagement and thus show you similar pages. Also, why do I see ads from pages I already like? I just need to see the post once in the normal course, not repeatedly as an ad.
There is no other way for the phone to continuously listen for a “wake” phrase such as “Hey Siri”.
Similarly, all (so far as I know) Androids have a little “mic” button next to the search widget at the top of the “Maps” app. Clicking that immediately causes the phone to start listening for a place — there is no way to disable that control, and it does not require the user to separately turn on the mic. That tells me that the mic itself is always on. This must be true, because the mic is certainly needed for voice calls and for recording audio while using the video camera.
There is a control on each Android, buried deep within the system settings, that allows the “OK, Google” wake phrase to be turned off. This, however, only stops the “wake” processing — it does not turn off the mic.
There is essentially no regulation of what information these devices actually collect, what they store, what they report to others, and so on. These devices have storage measured in GB, they are certainly able to store data (such as mic input) locally for at least a little while. Each device has a radio that is able to communicate with, at a minimum, a local wifi gateway and a cellphone network. The advent of 5G network services means that for at least some devices, network bandwidth is essentially unlimited.
It is time for the federal government to set and enforce strict regulations on what data is gathered, who owns that data, who that data is shared with, and so on.
Yeah, I’m a bit behind the times, which I’m mostly OK with. I’m surprised so many people tolerate what you are describing. At least I’m assuming they do, otherwise the market would have corrected it by now.
Actually, the bigger problem is the reliance on advertising in general. This site does not have advertising, does not cost a significant amount to run I suspect, and in general is of higher quality than what people will find on a commercial site. While my personal site is neglected, at one time it had a decent following when I blogged regularly, and the information you will find there isn’t in very many other places, if any. (I really need to put back up my old writings).
Google is a national resource, imo. I remember the time before google when information was difficult to locate. The web freed up the ability for people to share valuable information, but it quickly became dominated by commercial advertising, cross branding, and the race to the bottom. These problems existed before the web arrived. The major networks profit the most from a confused and passionate electorate, as they suck up the vast majority of political spending. The last thing they want is careful and measured discussions on difficult issues and a vast consensus based on common information. The cash is in misinformation and confusion, following very much the insurance paradigm.
There is no easy way for the Truth to compete with the lies of commerciality, the delusions of the rich who can marshal forces and dominate media (think of Bloomberg’s campaign), or anyone with an axe to grind. Something like six men using paid radio time launched the recall of Newsom in California at $2000 a hour. My, how easy is it to overthrow democracy?
In general, everything we get for ‘free’ is very problematical. Free checking requires a nation in debt. Go on CNN.com and the paid advertisers are all part of the FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate). What are the odds that CNN will report on the failures of capitalism, the root cause of the attack of 9/11, or be a vocal advocate for economic or political reform? ZERO. Ted Turner being married to Jane Fonda and being liberal does not overrule the methodology it took for him to become a billionaire, which is the baseline of ‘normal.’ Just as the selling of clicks on facebook or google is normal. Yet, Craigslist is a company with @20 employees, and it totally destroyed paid classified advertising. For a while it struggled with ethical issues (anonymous sexual meetups, etc) and other apps have stepped in to pick up the void, but the promise of an intelligent, useful, and meaningful internet remains a possibility. The best definition of a computer is a “mistake amplifier.” It has certainly amplified the problems that advertising creates.
We all want and need free speech. Yet advertising is not really ‘free speech.’ I have been struggling with how to fix this problem for years, and I must admit that I have yet to crack this nut. We certainly have way too much. Broadcast media is almost entirely supported by the auto industry. For a product with a purchase cycle of 5 or more years, we get an insane amount of automobile advertising, and zero useful information. All that expense is reflected in the price of cars. Corporations don’t pay for anything. The consumer pays the profits for everyone in the supply chain. Paine wrote “we furnish the means by which we suffer,’ in regard to government, but it is equally true of advertising.
We really need a cultural change in the arena of advertising. The dumbing down of society has been going on for a long time, which is what has made the minions that go to sites like Parler possible. Somebody is cashing in on the traffic. We are shocked to see such idiocy on full display, but we always knew it existed whenever Jay Leno would do his man on the street interviews with random people. It’s scary how disconnected people are with history and their society around them. While censorship by corporate behemoths may sound scary, we should really be afraid most of how they earn their income, and how the FCC distributes monopolies without any significant responsibility requirements for the privilege. People will say what they are paid to say. There is no freedom in that. We are a nation of mercenaries or prostitutes, and we just don’t want to admit it to ourselves. It’s true in churches, politics, business. They all thrive only by saying what people want to hear, and promise some form of redemption in the exchange. We never resolved the dispute between Socrates vs the Sophists, and have gone to great lengths to avoid even discussing it.
The devil is in the details in a lot of those suggestions. Breaking up a powerful company does nothing to address what gave them the power or drove consolidation originally.
I do think we should have a lot more municipal services (light, internet, etc) but then I look at the roads and wonder if it will be better or worse than the “regulated monopoly.” I think what we really need is a quota system in many of these areas. You get given X amount monthly, and if you go over your allocation, then you get charged. It would encourage conservation and give a base of dignity for the poor. If you want to run 50,000 Christmas lights you still can, but the poor won’t have to worry about having their lights shut off. (Eventually there will be no poor, right?)
The problem with Amazon, and things like the Apple Music store originally (before streaming) was that you don’t need one guy selling everything just so he can skim off the top. The technology could be a government (or private) provided tech clearinghouse, where every business could list their goods for sale. Easy to find, easy to administer, etc. Craigslist does it with old stuff, but why not a more intelligent site for new stuff? Of course, the deeper issue is that pricing makes no sense and really needs to get fixed. You can buy the same item at six different places and pay six different prices. It is likely that the manufacturer is selling the same item at six different prices, too, and the one who gets it cheapest price (Walmart, Amazon) has a distinct advantage. That is how monopolies favor other monopolies, and maintains confusion in the marketplace, which we call ‘healthy competition.’ Such a farce.
If Facebook stopped selling advertising, and was a fee based service, then the Russian bots never would have had access to manipulating the election. The algorithms are all based on trying to exploit people for a purpose, whether political or financial (hardly a difference). The purpose always gets back to the pursuit of money and power. Checks and balances have obviously failed, and the corruption and cronyism spreads unchecked with significantly more powerful tools of communication and indoctrination. Ethics is not even discussed anymore. It is hardly a surprise that Trump won. He is an excellent promoter. His TV show was all about promoting pop-up events and shops. And, as contestants, he had celebrities that were all excellent at promotion, and he got to know them but also all their friends. Connections everywhere and all at the speed of business. How does a bunch of thoughtful ethical separated people with limited resources compete?
All of the issues raised in the original post are good and solid. But the issue of how to strike the root seems to be missing. Everywhere people believe in money and are ‘invested’ in their part of the system. We are all generating the volatility that is killing us, prefer security to sacrifice, blaming to responsibility, etc. Somehow we need to get the means and the ends to align.
It was actually Jimmy Carter who began the outright deregulation of the airwaves. Ronald Reagan doubled down on that, and the damage was done by the time Bill Clinton took office.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed by Bill Clinton – a major change in American telecommunication law – the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.. It enabled a handful of corporations to dominate airwaves to expand their power further….”Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few.”
But that’s what you can expect from a neoliberal.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was certainly significant. It is ironic that the provision most despised by the Trumpists is the one whose repeal offers the greatest leverage to correct today’s issues with social media. I refer to the provision that specifically excludes social media providers from the liability exposure that their hard-copy counterparts have always lived with.
As interesting as all this is, I’m just observing that the “consolidation of the media” that we agree is a bad thing began with Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan nor Bill Clinton.
It was Jimmy Carter who gutted the FCC. That led the way towards killing both the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time rule. It also went a LONG way towards removing the constraints on how large a portion of a local media market a single entity could own. Jimmy Carter was FAR more conservative than the Democrats who preceded him.
To the extent that Bill Clinton was a “neoliberal”, he followed in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter — after an intervening period of more than a decade of GOP control of the Oval Office.
American presidents turned towards the right in the mid-1970s because AMERICA turned towards the right in the mid-1970s. Ronald Reagan did not make “Family Ties” a top-rated show and did not make Alex Keaton a role model for millions of young American men.
Neither Ronald Reagan nor Bill Clinton caused the late Rush Limbaugh to become a top-rated media celebrity. His first syndicated radio show began in 1988, and he was a national celebrity by 1990 — two years before Bill Clinton was elected.
Rush Limbaugh made his career from Bill Clinton, not vice-versa.
America’s sharp rightward veer drove American politics towards the right. Media celebrities like Rush Limbaugh played a major role in accelerating that change, so much so that the incoming GOP freshmen class credited Rush Limbaugh with turning Congress to the GOP in 1994 (see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/12/us/republicans-get-a-pep-talk-from-rush-limbaugh.html).
It is a historical error of fact to blame Bill Clinton for the rightward shift of American society in general. In particular, it is incorrect to blame Bill Clinton for the consolidation of American media.
That was a fait accompli by the time Bill Clinton appeared on the national stage.
I’m not blaming Clinton alone for the rightward shift and I was fully aware of Carter’s role. I got caught up in all of this myself. I’ve learned the error of my ways and its time the party, all of it, learned as well. I have a glimmer of hope that President Biden will have the courage to get us back to the truth: The government can do great things.
We are on the same page about this.
We actually know a lot about monopolies, and also how to deal with them, through regulation and through restructuring.
Not all social media platforms are monopolies, though Facebook is, so this may not be the universal lens though which to view problems related to monetized disinformation. But monopoly is a part of the problem, and these remedies are part of the solution.