Month: May 2021

FW: On Tech: Facebook takes on superspreaders

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Internet companies are making it harder for those with big followings to spread misinformation. Finally!

Technology

May 28, 2021

Facebook takes on superspreaders
Jinhwa Oh

Hello, friends! On Tech will not publish on Monday for the Memorial Day holiday.

Big internet companies are finally taking misinformation “superspreaders” seriously. (All it took was a global health crisis and the great lie of a rigged election.)

I’ve written about influential people, including former President Donald J. Trump, who have been instrumental in spreading false information online about important topics like election integrity and vaccine safety. Some of those same people have repeatedly twisted our beliefs — and internet companies have largely given them a pass.

Let’s dig into why habitual misinformation peddlers matter and how internet companies have begun to focus on them — including the new rules put in place by Facebook this week.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube deserve credit for beginning to target repeat misinformation offenders. But I also want people to be aware of the limits of the companies’ actions and to understand the challenge of applying these policies fairly and transparently.

How big of a problem are people who repeatedly post untrue things?

A lot of stuff that people say online isn’t necessarily true or untrue. We want room for the messy middle. The concern is when information is outright false, and we know that some of the same people are responsible for amplifying that misinformation again and again.

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Last fall, a coalition of misinformation researchers found that about half of all retweets related to multiple and widely spread false claims of election interference could be traced back to just 35 Twitter accounts, including those of Mr. Trump and the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. A research group recently identified the accounts of about a dozen people, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who repeatedly — sometimes for years — pushed discredited information about vaccines or, more recently, false “cures” for Covid-19.

Until recently, it mostly didn’t matter whether someone posted junk health information or a false election conspiracy theory once or 100 times, or whether the person was Justin Bieber or your cousin with five Facebook followers. Internet companies typically assessed the substance of each message only in isolation. That made no sense.

How policies are starting to focus on these habitual offenders

The riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 showed the danger of falsehoods repeatedly uttered to a public inclined to believe them. Internet companies began to address the outsize influence of people with large followings who habitually spread false information.

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Facebook on Wednesday said that it would apply stricter punishments on individual accounts that repeatedly post things that the company’s fact checkers have deemed misleading or untrue. Posts from habitual offenders will be circulated less in Facebook’s news feed, which means that others are less likely to see them. In March, it enacted a similar policy for Facebook groups.

Twitter a couple of months ago created a “five strikes” system in which it escalates punishments for those who tweet misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. Internet companies have suspended accounts of some of the repeat offenders, including Kennedy’s.

It’s too soon to assess whether these policies are effectively reducing the spread of some outright false information, But it’s worthwhile to end the impunity for people who habitually peddle discredited information.

Here’s where it gets tricky

Determining fact from fiction can be challenging. Facebook had barred people from posting about the theory that Covid-19 might have originated in a Chinese laboratory. That idea, once considered a conspiracy theory, is now being taken more seriously. Facebook reversed course this week and said that it would no longer delete posts making that claim.

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Putting in place special rules to keep people with big accounts from misleading the public on topics that are heated and complicated is not easy. But as the Capitol riot shows, the sites have to figure this out.

Even when internet companies decide to intervene, the messy questions continue: How do they enforce the rules? Are they applied fairly? (YouTube has long had a “three strikes” policy for accounts that repeatedly break its rules, but it seems as if some people get infinity strikes and others don’t know why they ran afoul of the site’s policies.)

Internet companies aren’t responsible for the ugliness of humanity. But Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for too long didn’t take seriously enough the impact of people with influence repeatedly blaring dangerous misinformation. We should be glad that they’re finally taking stronger action.

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Before we go …
  • Cyberattacks are everywhere: Hackers linked to Russia’s main intelligence agency appear to have taken over an email system used by the State Department’s international aid agency to tunnel into the computer networks of organizations that have been critical of President Vladimir Putin. My colleagues David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth reported that the attack was “particularly bold.”
  • “Don’t stop mentioning reward for the next seven minutes.” Vice News goes inside Citizen, the crime alert app company, where staffers cheered on a public hunt for a man believed to have started a wildfire in Los Angeles and offered a reward for app users to find him. It turned out that the man was innocent. (There is profane language in the article.)
  • Give us iPhone FREEDOM: You can’t replace Siri as the voice assistant on iPhones. Data can’t be backed up to anything other than Apple’s iCloud. And you can’t buy a Kindle book directly from an app. A Washington Post columnist writes that Apple’s rigid lockdowns of iPhones have outlived their usefulness.

Hugs to this

During the pandemic, Frank Maglio started posting videos of himself playing classic rock songs, with his parrot named Tico “singing” along. These two are very talented. There’s more on YouTube. (Thanks to our DealBook editor, Jason Karaian, for spotting this duo.)

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com.

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NYTimes.com: Is Wokeness ‘Kryptonite for Democrats’?

Is Wokeness ‘Kryptonite for Democrats’?

Republicans sure seem to think so. They are not alone. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/opinion/democrats-republicans-wokeness-cancel-culture.html?smid=em-share

I asked Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings and the author of the new book “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth,” about the lack of pushback, and he suggested a series of factors:

·        “The younger generation (wrongly) perceives free speech as hazardous to minority rights.”

·        “The purist side has had more passion, focus and organization than the pluralist side.”

·        “Universities are consumeristic these days and very image-conscious, and so they have trouble withstanding pressure from their ‘customers,’ e.g., activist students.”

·        “The use of social pressure to manipulate opinion is a powerful and sophisticated form of information warfare. Anyone can be dogpiled in minutes for any reason, or no reason.”

·        “Activists have figured out that they can have disproportionate influence by claiming to be physically endangered and psychologically traumatized by speech that offends them.”

 

NYTimes: Foucault’s Realignment

Foucault’s Realignment nyti.ms/3fLRrWj

Pronounced  –  F OO k oh
fan food key so

OPINION

ROSS DOUTHAT

How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

One of the strange things about the last year in Western political debate is how rarely the name of the departed philosopher Michel Foucault came up — and not for want of opportunity. One of Foucault’s key concepts, “biopolitics,” an account of the way that modern state power involves itself in the biological life of its citizens, was amply illustrated by the various governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. The left-wing academic culture in which his work has long been dominant suddenly found its own influence extending all the way to corporate boardrooms and the halls of the C.I.A. A new volume of his work was published in English: “Confessions of the Flesh,” an exegesis of early Christian sexual morality.

There was even a Foucault scandal, an accusation that he paid for sex with Tunisian boys in the 1960s — just the sort of claim, you might think, that would prompt a pan-ideological debate about whether the shaven-skulled icon of postmodernism should face some sort of cancellation.

But when I search the pages of this newspaper (a decent barometer of prominence and influence) for the past 12 months, Foucault’s ideas and scandals merited at most a passing mention here and there. On Google Scholar, a different sort of barometer of influence, his citations actually dropped modestly in 2020. In debates about lockdowns, quarantines and other subjects associated with his historical and philosophical work, he was largely absent from liberal and left-wing discourse. You were more likely to hear his ideas invoked in conservative arguments, cited with a strange right-wing respect.

The place of Foucault in 2021 is not just a matter of academic interest; his changing position tells us a great deal about recent evolutions of both the left and the right. The best guide to this change is a New York University lecturer named Geoff Shullenberger, who has written a pair of essays exploring the political valence of Foucauldian ideas. They are best read in reverse chronological order: Start with his long piece in the latest issue of American Affairs, “How We Forgot Foucault,” which takes up the philosopher’s peculiar absence from the pandemic debates, and then turn to his earlier essay, “Theorycels in Trumpworld,” on the flowering of postmodern theories and themes among Trumpist figures on the right….