White House launches tool to report censorship on social media

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18626785/white-house-trump-censorsip-tool-twitter-instagram-facebook-conservative-bias-social-media

by unbroken • 7 years ago

75 100 7 years ago

theverge.com

JaimeThompson• 7 years ago

I am totally confident that they will handle reports of censorship by media that supports them completely and totally the same way as reports against media that doesn't.........

MarkMc• 7 years ago

I suspect that the primary purpose here is not to uncover bias or censorship on social media platforms - it's to get people to identify more strongly as Trump supporters.

This is the classic psychological 'consistency' principle at work. When someone takes the small step of "sharing their story with President Trump" it strengthens their self-image as a Trump supporter. This is then reinforced by receiving frequent emails "from President Trump" thanking them for their support to eliminate censorship. This makes the person more likely to get off the couch and vote for Trump in November 2020.

redleggedfrog• 7 years ago

This shows lighter in my browser, like it's voted down, but it's by far the most insightful comment.

Also, if you're a company and you have a platform like facebook and Twitter, and you're a private company, not the government, you can kick whomever you damned well please off your service, or delete their posts, or edit them to make them look stupid. It's not censorship if you're not the government. If facebook gets all progressive and the conservatives don't like it, let them make their own conservative platform. Too bad techies lean left, going to make that difficult.

Freaking 'merica's biggest political activity is now whining.

toasterlovin2• 7 years ago

FWIW, there is a precedent for treating monopolies differently than other companies. Utility companies, which are natural monopolies, are highly restricted in their ability to refuse service to customers, for instance. Social media companies seem to be natural monopolies.

jmull• 7 years ago

Uh oh, now you're greyed-out.

Better fire up that White House site and send in a report! /s

This is so beautiful.

iamnothere• 7 years ago

Also, if you're a company and you have a platform like facebook and Twitter, and you're a private company, not the government, you can kick whomever you damned well please off your service, or delete their posts, or edit them to make them look stupid.

According to at least some court decisions, this may not be true if you control enough of the public space to be effectively a "public square". This is what people are building their arguments around.

When the Constitution was written, there was a smaller population and towns had a clear center, so you could reach people effectively by standing on a soapbox on Main Street. That simply isn't possible anymore. Now that large corporate entities control both the physical public square (malls) and the virtual environment, there is nowhere left to set up a soapbox. This diminishes the natural right of free speech. There is an argument to be made that any entity large enough to constitute part of the public square should have to allow open access for people to stand on their soapbox.

Not an originalist take by any means, but that's not necessarily a disqualifier unless you're a strict constitutionalist.

creaghpatr• 7 years ago

I think it's because Twitter has shown they will reverse bans for cases that get too much negative publicity rather than adhere to a consistent policy. This is a logical counterreaction to aggregate and lobby for banned accounts, conservative or otherwise.

zaroth• 7 years ago

Or alternatively, after a sufficient public outcry, will reverse themselves after improperly banning an account when they actually screw up.

krapp3• 7 years ago

It also reinforces the narrative that Trump and his supporters are under constant persecution by the organized conspiracy of leftists and globalists controlling all media and purging and all non-leftist speech from social media en masse.

Nothing gets voters to the polls quite as effectively as a shared identity built around a persecution complex and the threat of an enemy at the gates.

giarc• 7 years ago

A later question asks the user what year the Declaration of Independence was signed “just to confirm you aren’t a robot.” This is an unorthodox anti-scripting technique, and a generally ineffective one, given the relative simplicity of automatically entering a number.

A twitter user reported that any 4 digit number will be verified.

scohesc• 7 years ago

Well yeah, it's literally a survey and it can be any answer you want. It's not to verify anything other than the guise of "if you don't know when it was signed then you're not an informed american and your opinion doesn't matter"

Balgair• 7 years ago

If you run the Big List of Naughty Strings against it, they almost all pass through.

I'd wager that a Jimmy Drop Tables would also be effective.

If it hasn't been black-hatted already, then someone will grey-hat it before Friday.

Honestly, it seems it was built by people that knew that it was pointless anyways. Just like with the FCC comments scandal, it's not going to be reflective any reality we live in. It's political red-meat for Sean and Donny to make up whatever they want to make up and attack with so many manila folders of blank paper.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

We are going to have the government deal with shitty Mods?

Back when I was a kid, if the Mods sucked, you'd stop going to that website.

Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

I stopped using Facebook and many subreddits. I have this self control.

Is there anyone here that cannot stop visiting bad websites?

sandworm101• 7 years ago

> We are going to have the government deal with shitty Mods?

Breitbart.

> Back when I was a kid, if the Mods sucked, you'd stop going to that website.

If websites existed when you were a kid, you are not the target market for this tool.

>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

That's how addiction works.

>I stopped using Facebook and many subreddits. I have this self control.

Then they have won. Every time a reasonable person disconnects, the ratio of unreasonable people on a platform increases. Unreasonableness, extremism, creates greater engagement, generating more add revenue.

> Is there anyone here that cannot stop visiting bad websites?

We are all here aren't we?

athroway4• 7 years ago

The platform shouldn't exist as a monopoly for discussion in the first place. If all people, when facing a website that sucked, just stopped using the damn website like GP and me, the platform wouldn't have this much power.

Seriously, what's so hard with not using social media? Aren't there plenty of offline stuff to do and people to talk to in meatspace? Is its prevalence a uniquely American thing?

cannonedhamster4• 7 years ago

I would hardly classify Hacker News as a bad website. My inflammatory comments are routinely downvoted as they should be. My good posts tend to be well received. This is quite frankly one of the least terrible places on the internet for discussion with a relatively wide viewpoint for the internet. We've got libertarians, liberals, conservatives and even a few greens and generally we agree to keep it mostly civil because that's why we're all here. There's no crappy memes, no quizzes. We're explicitly here for the comments.

grenoire• 7 years ago

Yes, many people, even (!) in Hacker News.

It's sometimes not about self-restraint, and that's an ongoing discussion here: What do you do when everybody else are on these services?

mcfunk• 7 years ago

>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

Many good convos have happened on this -- Facebook is de facto required for participating in some levels of society. I've heard of people being required to use Facebook to get information as vital as announcements about school for their kids. For those of us with poorly understood chronic illnesses, Facebook is the only place we can find people who share our condition and can trade information with. Many community events are only announced through Facebook events. Essentially, it's infiltrated so many aspects of life that it's become very difficult for many people to fully walk away from.

athroway4• 7 years ago

If Facebook disappeared overnight, my life and that of most of my social circle wouldn't change that much. I think the issue of Facebook penetrating everyone's aspects of life is perhaps unique to your side of the Atlantic. They only have the power people chose to give them. You could opt out any time you like, it's maybe not convenient but it's liberating. See Stallman on freedom etc.

mfatica• 7 years ago

Where do I go for a Twitter sized audience if they ban me from their platform? The only real competitor is gab and there's barely anyone using it. The problem right now is these platforms are basically monopolies and are aggressively censoring people on the right side of politics

krapp3• 7 years ago

Why do you need a Twitter sized audience?

People were able to organize and communicate effectively on the web before Twitter, Facebook, etc. Not being on one of the big social media silos isn't de facto censorship, it's just slightly less convenient than being on them.

But it's still entirely possible to build an audience elsewhere.

athroway4• 7 years ago

Nobody is entitled to a Twitter-sized audience. I agree monopolies are bad but the fact that right-wing tolerant platforms are shitshows and niche compared to more mainstream ones is perhaps not the fault of the left. Maybe, just maybe, there aren't that many people holding (and willing to listen to) the kind of opinions commonly posted on gab et al.

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

Isn't it a bit conceited to think you'll have access to that audience? I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people. If the message is strong enough and will get to that many people somehow, might as well start a blog.

UncleMeat• 7 years ago

Isn't the fact that gab is dominated by fascists and racists evidence that Twitter isn't banning people just for being conservative?

SpikeDad• 7 years ago

I wonder if you can use this to report censorship that the Trump administration is actively doing to scientific reports and scientists themselves who's results disagree with their business and extremist religious agenda?

smpetrey• 7 years ago

Not a good look for Typeform.

panarky• 7 years ago

What's worse?

Private companies making decisions about what appears on their privately funded platforms?

Or bureaucrats, ideologues and partisans using government power to influence what appears on private sites?

dx87• 7 years ago

Considering there's plenty of ideologues and partisans working at those private companies, I think it's pretty bad either way.

hedora2• 7 years ago

All of the above.

I wish it were easy enough to run a web server that everyone just hosted their own content. A Raspberry Pi is already overkill for most pages, and one could easily imagine a content-agnostic (encrypted?) cache service that would handle load spikes.

DeusExMachina• 7 years ago

A Twitter spokesperson responded to the new tool saying, “We enforce the Twitter Rules impartially for all users, regardless of their background or political affiliation. We are constantly working to improve our systems and will continue to be transparent in our efforts.”

In the discussion with Jack Dorsey on the Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Pool had a good point: some of the rules are intrinsically biased on one side of the political spectrum.

An good example is the rule against misgendering. Twitter forbids referring to a person using a different gender than the one that person choses. E.g., you have to refer to a male-to-female transgender as a "she".

But to conservatives, referring to someone using a gender other than their biological one is the definition of misgendering.

This is a purely ideological take, and Twitter chose the definition of one side over the other. Then they can apply it "impartially to all users", but its the rule itself that is not impartial.

techntoke• 7 years ago

Tim Pool and JRE are obnoxious. Twitter lets people call each other pedos with no evidence all day long and you think that they enforce calling someone a he/she when they go by the opposite gender? Get real.

athroway4• 7 years ago

In that case I guess it's up to Wheaton's law. It is much less distressing to accept designating people with pronouns one believes to be wrong, than to be designated with pronouns that mismatch one's inner identity. Purposefully distressing people is kind of being a dick, and the amount of dickishness should be curbed, so the conclusion naturally arises.

makomk• 7 years ago

There's an even stronger argument that Twitter's misgendering rule is ideological, I reckon. See, it used to be that all the right-thinking, connected feminist and feminist-adjacent folks thought that referring to people using anything other than their biological gender at birth was not just misgendering, but misogynistic and patriarchal - and even once this shifted somewhat, folks were expected to defend the people who still held those views until around 2016 or so. For instance, when Wordpress banned someone using wordpress.com to outright dox and harass every prominent trans woman out there, there was a successful campaign to unban her and no counter-campaign, because all the left-leaning groups fighting to make Internet sites ideologically correct supported this back then.

Twitter choosing to act against misgendering now isn't simply the result of some abstract belief about respecting people. It's a direct reflection of the changing views of activists in one particular slice of political spectrum.

hedora2• 7 years ago

I wonder if this is running afoul of campaign finance laws.

The Trump administration has been doing that a lot recently, and while this can easily be misconstrued as a “report to the government” tool, it is not hosted on a .gov site.

Will the executive branch be acting on the information posted here? That also seems legally dubious. [edit: because there are security issues involving using non-government computers for government business. I think Hillary had some problems with that; maybe Trump didn’t hear about it?]

KirinDave9• 7 years ago

It's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech and private moderation are the same as censorship.

But forcing a "fairness" doctrine onto the tech world is exactly what the current political parties, who feel like reporting for them has had insufficient deference and whatabout-ism, want to do. Uniformly across the center of the political spectrum most of the US government represents.

Speech Rules enacted democratically by small communities are fine. Speech Rules imposed top down by the owners of infrastructure for communication are not great, but at least customers can make choices about them and it's not so unimaginable to find alternatives. Speech Rules enacted top-down by the executive are impossible to argue with and ultimately one of the most dangerous kinds of authoritarianism. The infosec community can tell you they've been fighting a slow, losing battle against going to jail for saying something that is not illegal to say out loud for some time now.

int_19h5• 7 years ago

Private moderation is censorship. The definition of censorship is not restricted to government actors.

KirinDave9• 7 years ago

I regret to inform you the dictionary definition of censorship generally does not include tweets, so a literalist reading invalidates both our positions.

malvosenior5• 7 years ago

It's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech and private moderation are the same as censorship.

It's extremely dangerous to continue to erode the spirit and meaning of free speech by narrowly defining it as a government only concept. We're collectively losing our ability to tolerate different views and have a level playing field of discussion. We need to get back to "I may not agree with what you say but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it". Both in spirit and in law. Tech companies and political parties have been attacking the spirit of free speech.

KirinDave9• 7 years ago

It's extremely dangerous to continue to erode the spirit and meaning of free speech by narrowly defining it as a government only concept.

What spirit is that? No country in the world gives unrestricted speech as a right to citizens. That includes the US, which merely forbids government retaliation.

But what's more, this principle is applied very selectively. Why wasn't it free speech to be an openly gay scoutmaster in 2014? Well, for the same reason that Twitter can ban Nazi speech now: they own the platform and restrict membership as they see fit.

Similarly, you cannot demand the Washington Post print an arbitrary story. Nor can you force a radio station to broadcast your show. They get to make editorial and resourcing decisions for their content.

What's more, social media is not as restricted a space as these prior examples. It is a product. You can to buy it. You can elect to use Mindz and Gab if you want! YouTube is full of extremely bipartisan channels ranging from "Libertarian Socialist Rants" to its dual with "PragerU".

The only one attacking free speech is the folks who want to restrict editorial speech because it gets in the way of their ability to project their message onto people who don't want it. And being able to project yourself onto people actively avoiding you is not and will never be a reasonable definition of free speech.

IOT_Apprentice3• 7 years ago

No we don't. The meaning of free speech is clearly defined in the United States by the First Amendment. QED.

sehugg• 7 years ago

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/04/25/twitter-cant-ban-ra...

kprjo2• 7 years ago

That's what happens when "our country and people first" gets classified as white supremacism.

caseyohara• 7 years ago

Phrases like "our country and people first" get classified as white supremacy because they are used as dog whistles by white supremacists.

elipsey• 7 years ago

The phrase "America First" has some... historical baggage.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dr+suess+america+first+comic&iax=i...

If you're aware of this and comfortable with it, more power to you, but sometimes it seems like not everyone saying it knows about this.

Normally I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole, but in this case I genuinely wish to be helpful. Best.

Nadya• 7 years ago

As we all know, algorithmic classification has zero issues [0] and is 100% accurate. Even Twitter's anti-ISIS classification banned a bunch of ISIS watchdog accounts but it was deemed that the collateral damage was worth it. In this case, the possible collateral damage of banning non-racist, non-white supremacists is too damaging to Twitter's reputation among a large portion of their users.

The non-politically charged answer to this is that the algorithm isn't (and likely could never) be perfect and so the statement that it would be politically bad due to collateral damage, exactly as the employee from Twitter said, is accurate. Without all the "nudge nudge, wink wink Racists=Right amiright?" rhetoric provided by the media outlets that reported on it.

Going back to the algorithm, how would one even train it? At one end it would likely be useless and at the other it would be far too inaccurate.

Would it ban for use of the OK hand emoji? How about for saying "it's okay to be white?" Would it judge someone as a white supremacist for pro-white speech or only for anti-POC speech? How about people who tweet about or quote Hitler and how would it know the context? Since "retweets aren't necessarily endorsement" would it ban for retweeting white supremacist speech to draw attention to it/call it out? Would it attempt to do classification and then ban anyone who's mostly followed by or tweets towards/is tweeted at by people classified as white supremacists? Would it ban for racial rhetoric? Being against immigration?

Even assuming it could accurately classify - it quickly becomes a measure of "who's definition are you using" and "how far is far enough and how far is too far?"

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8880363/google-apologizes-...

isk517• 7 years ago

I find it kind of amusing that the same political party that believes internet service providers do not have obligation to neutrality believe internet content providers do.

Edit: spelling mistake fixed

luckylion5• 7 years ago

True, that's a weird thing. One side wants ISPs to be neutral, the other wants platforms to be neutral, but neither really want both to be neutral.

katabasis• 7 years ago

So Net Neutrality constitutes unwelcome government interference in the internet, but it's okay to force private companies to tolerate extreme right-wing views? This is ridiculous.

1f60c• 7 years ago

It's outrageous. People think this is a good idea?

andygates• 7 years ago

That's not creepy and McCarthyite at all. No sir.

thex10• 7 years ago

It's only for social media censorship against USians. The form kicks you out once you tell it you're not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. https://twitter.com/typeform/status/1128993614250553344

SlowRobotAhead3• 7 years ago

I'm interested in the dichotomy of comments here between when Trump Admin releases a tool to report censorship and when Elizabeth Warren talks about how we need to break up Big Tech.

Also, it's fascinating how many of the negative reaction comments want to pretend like there are actual alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon Marketplace. If the argument comes down to "it's a private business, do whatever you want"... Well, let's be at least partially honest this is a new problem and these are effective-monopolies.

bediger40003• 7 years ago

Why? Censorship is quite a different issue from anti-trust. Censorship in the USA applies to the government, not to individuals (real humans or corporations), basically because the idea is that nobody wants to pay for someone else's sub-moronic "free speach".

Anti-trust, in the USA, is related to harmful effects to consumers. Monopolies can charge monopoly rents, or slow innovations or change in the monopolized market.

Absolutely two different issues.

Also, lots of folks pretended there were actual alternatives to Microsoft in 2000. It's not a new problem.

SlowRobotAhead3• 7 years ago

Why? Censorship is quite a different issue from anti-trust.

Is it in this case? The censorship here is only effective because of the failures in anti-trust to adapt to the modern internet tech giants. If you are pretending that these companies aren't monopolies in search, video delivery, messaging, and social media... Well, I disagree.

So I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend Microsoft in 2000 was larger than Google or Facebook is now.

The issue is that these companies are clearly pretending to be PLATFORM when it suits them, and PUBLISHER when it suits them.

olliej3• 7 years ago

I can’t help but feel the GOP wouldn’t be running into this if they didn’t keep posting attacks on minorities.

If you are saying some set of people don’t deserve the same basic rights as other people, simply because they exist, and are different, it’s hate speech. And if your platform is deliberately based on intolerance then there is not requirement for others to tolerate you. This isn’t a paradox - bigots love trying to say it is, but it’s not.

White House launches tool to report censorship on social media

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