Abuse on social media platforms due to Silicon Valley companies inability (indifference?) to manage that responsibility. All of this so normalized in the three years since it first began to really manifest that we just assume now that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter will exacerbate political and social instability. Some thoughts on the technology used for abuse … and “monitoring” that abuse.
29 October 2018 (Palaiochora, Crete, Greece) – For the last 15+ years … since moving from the U.S. to Europe … I have kept a digital diary: dictating on a daily basis my thoughts into a digital recorder, but since graduating to a phone app.
NOTE: I now use Otter.ai (obviously used not just for my daily babbling) which is the holy grail for journalists who don’t want to do tedious transcription. It uses “Ambient Voice Intelligence” and while its natural language processing wasn’t perfect by any means … punctuation is missing, words are misunderstood, speakers are sometimes misidentified … it’s remarkably close, especially considering its speed. And I can quickly create a Word transcript. And share it for comment. But search is the best feature. Once the recording is finished, the app’s machine learning automatically creates about 10 keywords. And you can start searching the full text right away. Also useful is that once you hone in on a keyword, you can hit the play button to listen to the exact section(s) of that audio where it occurred. Or across all your audio clips. So I can easily scan the last 15 years (I also use Bear) of my thoughts and observations. Screw you, Alexa!
I went through that introduction because I realized it’s been a decade … a decade!! … since I first observed there was something changing about the way we interacted with the internet. Over the weekend on his blog, Ryan Broderick (a writer for BuzzFeed News) noted it was 2010 when 4chan trolls were trying to take down the website Gawker via “a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack”. I went back through my diary. There it was. In a 2010 entry. “DOS”. The first time I had heard the phrase. As well as “shitposting.” It was the beginning of an era where our old ideas about information, privacy, politics, and culture were beginning to warp. Little did we know. Thanks to writers like Ryan I have followed that dark evolution of internet culture since 2016.
The big picture
There is, of course, a much bigger picture here … beyond the scope of this post but I want to mention it. It is the way the world is using their phones, almost completely dominated by a few Silicon Valley companies. The abuse that is happening is due to the inability of those SV companies to manage that responsibility. All of this has become so normalized in the three years since it first began to really manifest that we just assume now that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter will exacerbate political and social instability. We expect they will be abused by ultranationalist trolls. We know they will be exploited by data firms. We just wait for them to help launch the careers of populist leaders.
To be sure, populism, nationalism, and information warfare existed long before the internet. The arc of history does not always bend toward what we think of as progress. Societies regress. The difference now is that all of this is being hosted almost entirely by a handful of corporations. Why is an American company like Facebook placing ads in newspapers in countries like India, Italy, Mexico, and Brazil, explaining to local internet users how to look out for abuse and misinformation? Because our lives, societies, and governments have been tied to invisible feedback loops, online and off. And there’s no clear way to untangle ourselves.
The Twitter/Facebook hellscape
Yesterday a person Tweeted a false meme claiming that George Soros was a Nazi. But it was not him. It received 6.5k ReTweets. The Auschwitz Memorial account attempted to debunk it. It received 1,000 Retweets. The account was reported but that’s not an option for trying to stop the spreading of false news.
So the account and Tweet stayed up and only came down when journalists noticed it, made it public and they generated 3,000+ Tweets attacking Twitter. That is a typical Twitter response: only when an issue becomes “mega public” do they act.
The backstory on the above? The person spreading this meme has been suspended at least 5x and just adds a digit onto their handle. That’s how clever you need to be to evade Twitter:
@MichelleMayber1 (suspended)
@MichelleMayber2 (suspended)
@MichelleMayber3 (suspended)
@MichelleMayber4 (limited activity)
@MichelleMayber5 (limited activity)
@MichelleMayber6 (suspended)
@MichelleMayber7 (suspended)
@MichelleMayber8
@MichelleMayber9 (limited activity)
NOTE: I am indebted to Geoff Golberg, a co-founder of Elementus, who has run me through the crypto analysis of social media.
Could not someone just create some kind of a bot to register all the MichelleMayber[N] accounts? Yes, and based on her Tweets, it would probably take just a short while for her to realize what was up. Or perhaps an excellent, efficient algorithm to take down defamatory anti-Semitic memes, too? What with the millions of dollars Twitter spends on software engineers? Well, yes, of course. If there was the political will. But there really is no way to prevent this: if you have an email address you can get a Twitter account. And run wild. One thought was to ban logins from known VPN or Tor IP addresses. But then the site would also lose many legitimate users in that case.
Why would they lose legitimate users? Because a lot of people use VPNs to prevent ISP data collection since legislation was passed last year reversing Obama-era privacy protections, or on public WiFi to prevent nefarious MitM interception of e-mail passwords and similar data. Some of these people are also Twitter users.
As Clive Holden of BrandWatch told me (he monitors “dark social traffic”):
Typically, large right-wing news channels or conservative tabloids will take these stories going viral on Facebook and repackage them for older, mainstream audiences. Depending on your country’s media landscape, the far-right trolls and influencers may try to hijack this social-media-to-newspaper-to-television pipeline. Which then creates more content to screenshot, meme, and share. It’s a feedback loop.
In most countries, reliable publications are going behind paywalls. More services like Amazon Prime and Netflix are locking premium entertainment behind subscriptions. Which means all of this — the trolls, the abuse, the fake news, the conspiracy videos, the data leaks, the propaganda — will eventually stop being a problem for people who can afford it. I have written this before. Data privacy and non-abuse will become only for the rich.
Which will most likely leave the poor, the old, and the young to fall into an information divide. This is already happening. A study released this month from the UK found that poorer British readers got less, worse news than wealthier readers. And according to a new study by Pew Research Center, only 17% of people over the age of 65 were able to identify fact from opinion. Teenage Instagram wellness communities are already transforming into mini Infowars-style snake oil empires.
There are deserts of information where normal people are algorithmically served memes, poorly aggregated news articles, and YouTube videos without any editorial oversight or regulation. Story after story after story reports that the majority of people only believe what their friends and family send them on WhatsApp or other social media … fed to them.
This sort of American ransacking in the name of technological progress isn’t particularly new. But America built it.
I am, to say the least, a pessimistic sort. The social media dystopia happening all over the world right now probably won’t last. But the damage these companies (and their technology) have caused probably will. The democracies they destabilize, the people they radicalize, and the violence they inspire will most likely have a long tail. I imagine it will take us a hundred years or more to try to actually rebuild functioning societies after the corporations have moved on. Assuming we can.