Who Will Fix Facebook?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
27 November 18
In its effort to clamp down on fake news, Russian trolls and Nazis, the social
media giant has also started banning innocent people, proving again it can’t be
trusted to regulate itself
James Reader tried to do everything right. No fake news, no sloppiness, no
spam. The 54-year-old teamster and San Diego resident with a progressive bent
had a history of activism, but itched to get more involved. So a few years ago
he tinkered with a blog called the Everlasting GOP Stoppers, and it did well
enough to persuade some friends and investors to take a bigger step.
“We got together and became Reverb Press,” he recalls. “I didn’t start it for
the money. I did it because I care about my country.”
In 2014, he launched Reverb, a site that shared news from a pro-Democratic
stance but also, Reader says, took great care to be correct and factual. The
independent watchdog site mediabiasfactcheck.com would declare it strongly
slanted left but rated it “high for factual reporting, as all news is sourced
to credible media outlets.”
The site took off, especially during the 2015-16 election season. “We had 30
writers contributing, four full-time editors and an IT worker,” Reader says.
“At our peak, we had 4 million to 5 million unique visitors a month.”
Through Facebook and social media, Reader estimates, as many as 13 million
people a week were seeing Reverb stories. Much of the content was aggregated or
had titles like “36 Scariest Quotes From the 2015 GOP Presidential Debates.”
But Reverb also did original reporting, like a first-person account of Catholic
Church abuse in New Jersey that was picked up by mainstream outlets.
Like most independent publishers, he relied heavily on a Facebook page to drive
traffic and used Facebook tools to help boost his readership. “We were pouring
between $2,000 and $6,000 a month into Facebook, to grow the page,” Reader
says. “We tried to do everything they suggested.”
Publishers like Reader jumped to it every time Facebook sent hints about
changes to its algorithm. When it emphasized video, he moved to develop video
content. Reader viewed Facebook as an essential tool for independent media.
“Small blogs cannot exist without Facebook,” he says. “At the same time, it was
really small blogs that helped Facebook explode in the first place.”
But Reader began noticing a problem. Starting with the 2016 election, he would
post articles that would end up in right-wing Facebook groups, whose followers
would pelt his material with negative comments. He also suspected they were
mass-reporting his stories to Facebook as spam.
Ironically, Reader, whose site regularly covered Russia-gate stories, suspected
his business was being impacted by everyone from Republican operatives to
MAGA-hat wearers and Russian trolls anxious to dent his pro-Democratic content.
“It could have been Russians,” he says. “It could have been domestic groups.
But it really seemed to be some kind of manipulation.”
Reader saw drops in traffic. Soon, ad sales declined and he couldn’t afford to
invest in Facebook’s boosting tools anymore, and even when he did, they weren’t
working in the same way. “It was like crack-dealing,” he says. “The first hits
are free, but pretty soon you have to spend more and more just to keep from
losing ground.”
He went to Facebook to complain, but Reader had a difficult time finding a
human being at the company to discuss his problems. Many sources contacted for
this story describe a similar Kafka’s Castle-type experience of dealing with
Facebook. After months of no response, Reader finally reached an acquaintance
at Facebook and was told the best he could do was fill out another form. “The
guy says to me, ‘It’s about scale, bro,’ ” he recalls. In other words, in a
Facebook ecosystem with more than 2 billion users, if you’re too small, you
don’t matter enough for individual attention.
After all this, on October 11th this year, Reader was hit with a shock. “I was
driving home in San Diego when people started to call with bad news,” he says.
They said Reverb had been taken offline. He got home and clicked on his
computer:
“Facebook Purged Over 800 Accounts and Pages for Pushing Political Spam,” a
Washington Post headline read.
The story described an ongoing effort against “coordinated inauthentic
behavior” and specifically named just a few sites, including Reverb, that were
being removed. The Facebook announcement mentioned “timing ahead of the U.S.
midterm elections,” implying that the deletions had been undertaken to preserve
the integrity of American democracy — from people like James Reader.
Reader wasn’t alone. He was one of hundreds of small publishers to get the ax
in Facebook’s October 11th sweep, which quickly became known as “the Purge” in
alternative-media circles. After more minor sweeps of ostensibly fake foreign
accounts over the summer, the October 11th deletions represented something new:
the removal of demonstrably real American media figures with significant
followings. Another round of such sites would be removed in the days before the
midterms, this time without an announcement. Many of these sites would also be
removed from other platforms like Twitter virtually simultaneously.
“All this happens on the same day?” Reader asks. “There’s no way it’s not
connected.”
The sites were all over the map politically. Some, like the Trump-supporting
Nation in Distress, had claimed Obama would declare martial law if Trump won in
2016. Others, like Reverb and Blue State Daily, were straight-up,
Democrat-talking-point sites that ripped Trump and cheered the blues.
Many others, like the L.A.-based Free Thought Project and Anti-Media, were
anti-war, focused on police brutality or drug laws, and dismissive of
establishment politics in general. Targeting the latter sites to prevent
election meddling seemed odd, since they were openly disinterested in
elections. “If anything, we try to get people to think beyond the two parties,”
says Jason Bassler, a 37-year-old activist who runs the Free Thought Project.
Reader tried to access his sites. The Facebook page for Reverb had been
unpublished. Same for his old Everlasting GOP Stoppers blog. Even a newer page
of his called America Against Trump, with 225,000 followers, was unpublished.
“Everything I’d worked for all those years was dead,” he says.
Reader seethed about being lumped in with Russian election meddlers. But
somehow worse was Facebook’s public description of his site as being among
“largely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spam tactics to
drive users to websites where they could target them with ads.”
This grated, since he felt that Facebook’s programs were themselves designed to
make sure that news audiences stayed in-house to consume Facebook advertising.
“This is all about money,” Reader says. “It’s a giant company trying to
monopolize all behavior on the Internet. Anything that can happen, they only
want it to happen on Facebook.”
***
AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected in 2016, Facebook — and Silicon Valley in
general — faced a lot of heat. There was understandable panic that fake news —
be it the work of Russian ad farms, or false stories spread about Barack Obama
by Macedonian trolls, or insane conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and
“Pizzagate” — was having a destructive impact, responsible for everything from
Brexit to the election of our Mad Hatter president.
Everyone from journalism professors to sociologists to former Facebook
employees blamed the social network for rises in conspiracism, Russian meddling
and hate speech. “News feed optimizes engagement,” said former Facebook
designer Bobby Goodlatte. “Bullshit is highly engaging.”
Politicians began calling for increased regulation, but Facebook scoffed at the
idea that it was responsible for Trump, or anything else. Moreover, at least
publicly, the firm had always been resistant to sifting out more than porn,
threats and beheading videos. Its leaders insisted they were about “bringing
people together,” not editing content. “We are a tech company, not a media
company,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in 2016, after visiting with the pope.
Facebook’s touchy-feely vibing about togetherness and “friends” was probably
part true, part thin veil for a voracious business plan: get as many humans
herded in-site as possible, so they can have truckloads of ads shoved through
their eyeballs. Restricting speech was a problem because it meant restricting
speakers, which meant restricting cash flow.
To keep regulatory wolves at bay, Facebook had one thing to bargain with: its
own unused political might. By 2017, 45 percent of Americans were getting news
from Facebook, making it by far the largest social media news source in the
country. A handful of executives could now offer governments (including our
own) a devil’s bargain: increased control over information flow in exchange for
free rein to do their booming eyeball-selling business.
We could have responded to the fake-news problem in a hundred different ways.
We could have used European-style laws to go after Silicon Valley’s rapacious
data-collection schemes that incentivize clickbait and hyper-partisanship. We
could have used anti-trust laws to tackle monopolistic companies that wield too
much electoral influence. We could have recognized de facto mega-distributors
as public utilities, making algorithms for things like Google searches and
Facebook news feeds transparent, allowing legitimate media outlets to know how
they’re being regulated, and why.
Instead, this story may be turning into one of the oldest narratives in
politics: the misuse of a public emergency to suspend civil rights and
concentrate power. One recurring theme of the fake-news controversy has been a
willingness of those in power to use the influence of platforms like Facebook,
rather than curtail or correct them. Accused of being an irresponsible steward
of information, Facebook is now being asked to exercise potentially vast and
opaque new powers.
The accumulation of all these scandals has taken a toll on the company. A
recent Pew survey found that 44 percent of users between ages 18 and 29 deleted
Facebook from their phones in the past year.
Now there’s this. You thought you didn’t like Facebook before? Wait until you
see it in its new role as Big Brother.
***
THE IRONY IS, Facebook’s business model once rested on partisanship,
divisiveness and clickbait. One of the many reasons Trump won, as former
Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez described in Wired, was the
campaign’s expert use of Facebook’s ads auction, which rewarded ad developers
for efficiently stoking lizard-brain responses. The company, García Martínez
wrote, “uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid
as well as how good a piece of clickbait . . . the corresponding ad is.”
A canny marketer, García Martínez wrote, could “goose” purchasing power if
Facebook’s estimation of its “clickbaitness” was high. The Trump campaign’s
superior grip on this dynamic allowed it to buy choice ad space at bargain
prices, while the reverse was true for Clinton.
In other words, the same company that rewarded the red-meatiest content and
hyperpartisan drivel that political lunatics like alleged MAGA Bomber Cesar
Sayoc devoured was now publicly denouncing sites like Reverb News for . . .
clickbait.
Reader wondered why his site had been chosen. He admits to using multiple
backup profiles, which is a technical violation, but he insists this would have
previously earned a slap on the wrist. Several of the other deleted sites were
right-wing or libertarian (although Facebook hasn’t released a full list of the
purged sites). Reader wondered if Facebook — as it reportedly did after a
Gizmodo piece in 2016 claimed Facebook suppressed conservatives — was
attempting to overcompensate by targeting a blue-leaning operation.
Tiffany Willis Clark, whose page for her site Liberal America was taken down on
November 2nd, is similarly baffled as to why. A self-described “Christian left”
publisher from Texas who pushes a Democratic line, she says Liberal America,
with its 750,000 followers, is a “lifestyle site” about “raising conscious kids
who are aware of the suffering of others.” She insists she’s never engaged in
any banned Facebook behaviors and is careful to source everything to reputable
news organizations. An example of her content is a listicle, “87 Things Only
Poor Kids Know and Conservatives Couldn’t Care Less About,” that contains lines
like “We go to the doctor when we’re sick, but mom doesn’t.”
Clark created the site for political and spiritual reasons, and believes she
has helped reach people with her down-to-earth approach. “I’ve had people tell
me they’ve switched parties because of us,” Clark says. “We didn’t do this for
the money. That was a happy accident.”
She was surprised to see traffic take off after launching in 2013, and began
investing in the site as a business. Clark estimates that she has spent
$150,000 on Facebook boosting tools since 2014. “I basically put my life
savings into this, and it’s gone,” she says. Like many of the people contacted
for this story, she regrets having built a business around an Internet platform
with a constantly shifting set of standards.
“Facebook seems to be redefining its mission minute to minute,” she says. “They
started with fake news, moved to Alex Jones, and now it seems to be anything
that’s not mainstream media.”
The belief that the recent deletions represent the start of a campaign against
alternative media in general have been stoked by the fact that in its efforts
to police fake news, Facebook recently began working with a comical cross
section of shadowy officialdom: meeting with the Foreign Influence Task Force
at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security; partnering with the
Atlantic Council, a NATO-connected organization featuring at least six former
CIA heads on its board; and working with a pair of nonprofits associated with
the major political parties, the National Democratic Institute and the
International Republican Institute.
“It’s a blatant attack on independent media in advance of the election,” says
Sean Conners of Blue State Daily.
“This is a real thing,” says Bobby Rodrigo, a member of the Georgia Society of
Professional Journalists and an admin to more than a hundred social media
accounts for independent media and charity sites. “Lots of people I know have
been affected. And not enough reporters are paying attention.”
NEWS FLASH: There’s always been weird shit on the Internet. Not long ago,
that’s even what a lot of us liked about the medium. Everything was on the Net,
from goat sex to “Thirteen Bizarre Stipulations in Wills” to all the evidence
you needed if you wanted to prove Sasquatch is real. None of this was ever
regulated in any serious way, in keeping with a historically very permissive
attitude toward speech.
We’ve traditionally tolerated fakes (the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the
Worlds reportedly scared one in 12 listeners into believing Earth had been
invaded by Mars) and conspiracy kooks like the LaRouchians. In modern history,
we’ve mostly relied upon libel laws, market forces and occasional interventions
from the Federal Communications Commission to regulate speech.
Obviously, no one has a constitutional right to a Facebook page or a Twitter
account. As ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner points out, there’s no First Amendment issue
here. “To the extent First Amendment rights figure in at all, they’re enjoyed
by the companies, who get to decide what does and does not go on their
platforms,” he says. But the fact that removals are probably legal does not
mean they’re not worrisome. If a handful of companies are making coordinated
decisions about content, especially in conjunction with official or
quasi-official bodies, this has far-reaching implications for the press.
Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law calls the problem
“soft censorship,” adding, “We’re seeing removal of content that isn’t illegal
but the government doesn’t like. It’s a backdoor form of censorship.”
Once viewed as a revolutionary tool for democratization and personal
empowerment, the Internet always had awesome potential as a lever for social
control, as we’ve already seen overseas.
When it comes to Internet companies working with governments, there are two
main dangers.
In the first, a repressive government uses an Internet platform to accelerate
human-rights abuses. The worst example of this is in Myanmar, where the U.N.
recently concluded Facebook may have been key in helping incite
government-sponsored genocide against that nation’s Rohingya Muslim minority.
The campaign against the Rohingya led to mass murder, arson and rape, and
caused 700,000 to flee abroad and left thousands dead. The attackers were egged
on by Myanmar officials and descended upon Rohingya settlements in a murderous
rage.
A series of posts on Facebook in the Buddhist-majority country called Muslim
minorities maggots, dogs and rapists, and said things like, “We must fight them
the way Hitler did the Jews.” Facebook at the time had only a handful of
Burmese speakers on staff reviewing this content, and the U.N. concluded that
the platform had “turned into a beast.”
Facebook has since deleted accounts of Myanmar military figures accused of
inciting violence, citing the same offense it applied to the likes of James
Reader: “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The flip side of being too little engaged is to have intimate relationships
between foreign governments and companies involved in speech regulation.
In March this year, for instance, after the company had unknowingly helped
spread a campaign of murder, rape and arson in Myanmar, Facebook unpublished
the popular Palestinian news site SAFA, which had 1.3 million followers.
SAFA had something like official status, an online answer to the Palestine
Authority’s WAFA news agency. (SAFA has been reported to be sympathetic to
Hamas, which the publication denies.) Its operators say they also weren’t given
any reason for the removal. “They didn’t even send us a message,” says Anas
Malek, SAFA’s social media coordinator. “We were shocked.”
The yanking of SAFA took place just ahead of a much-publicized protest in the
region: the March 30th March of the Great Return, in which Gaza Strip residents
were to try to return to their home villages in Israel; it resulted in six
months of violent conflict. Malek and his colleagues felt certain SAFA’s
removal from Facebook was timed to the march. “This is a direct targeting of an
effective Palestinian social media voice at a very critical time,” he says.
Israel has one of the most openly cooperative relationships with Facebook: The
Justice Ministry in 2016 boasted that Facebook had fulfilled “95 percent” of
its requests to delete content. The ministry even proposed a “Facebook bill”
that would give the government power to remove content from Internet platforms
under the broad umbrella of “incitement.” Although it ultimately failed, an
informal arrangement already exists, as became clear this October.
That month, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate announced that Facebook was
removing “thousands” of accounts ahead of municipal elections. Jordana Cutler,
Facebook’s head of policy in Israel — and a former adviser to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu — said the company was merely following suggestions. “We
receive requests from the government but are not committed to them,” Cutler
said.
This template should worry Americans. The First Amendment prevents the
government from ordering platforms to take down content. But as is clear in
places like Israel, sometimes a suggestion is more than just a suggestion. “If
they say they’re ‘not obligated,’ that should come with an asterisk,” says
Goldman.
The most troubling example of private-public cooperation is probably the
relationship between Google and China. The company whose motto was once “Don’t
Be Evil” is reportedly going ahead with plans for a censor-friendly “Dragonfly”
search engine. The site could eliminate search terms like “human rights” and
“Nobel prize” for more than a billion people.
The lack of press interest here is remarkable. Had an American company on the
scale of Google helped the Soviets develop a censorship tool, the story would
have dominated the press, but it has barely made headlines in the States.
Somewhere between the Myanmar and Israel models is the experience of Germany,
which last year passed a broad Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) requiring
deletion of illegal content that violates German law against incitement to
crime, hatred or the use of banned political symbols. Facebook tried to keep up
with the NetzDG by hiring thousands to work in “deletion centers” in Essen and
Berlin. But this year a German court ruled Facebook cannot take down content
that is not illegal, which some believe may force the company to allow things
like nude pictures. “This will get really interesting,” is how one European
tech-policy researcher put it.
If content removal is messy in Germany, which has clear and coherent laws
against certain kinds of speech, how would such an effort play out in America,
which has a far more permissive legal tradition?
We would soon find out.
Just more than a year ago, on October 31st, a subcommittee of U.S. senators
held a hearing to question representatives of Google, Facebook and Twitter. The
subject was “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working With
Tech to Find Solutions.” The grilling took place during the peak of public
outrage about fake news. Facebook had just announced it would be turning over
about 3,000 ads created by a Russian “Internet Research Agency.”
For the hearing, the tech firms sent lawyers to take abuse. The two chief
counsels present — Colin Stretch of Facebook and Sean Edgett of Twitter, plus
Richard Salgado, law enforcement director at Google — looked pained throughout,
as though awaiting colonoscopies.
Although the ostensible purpose of the event was to ask the platforms to help
prevent foreign interference in elections, it soon became clear that Senate
partisans were bent on pushing pet concerns.
Republican Chuck Grassley, for instance, pointed to ads targeting Baltimore,
Cleveland and Ferguson, Missouri, which he said “spread stories about abuse of
black Americans by law enforcement. These ads are clearly intended to worsen
racial tensions.”
Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono insisted that the Russian ads had affected the
election and asked the Silicon Valley reps to come up with a “mission
statement” to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”
When Stretch tried to offer a hedging answer about Facebook’s mission being the
promotion of community (translation: “We already have a good enough mission”),
Hirono cut him off and reminded him of a word he had used earlier.
“Authenticity,” she said. “I kind of like that as a mission statement.”
Even if one stipulates every concern about foreign meddling is true, Hirono was
playing with fire. Tightening oversight to clamp down on illegal foreign
propaganda is one thing. Asking the world’s most powerful media companies to
create vague new missions in search of “authenticity” and the prevention of
“discord” is something else.
So how would the Senate make Facebook bend the knee? We got a clue in July,
when Sen. Mark Warner released a white paper waving a regulatory leash at
Silicon Valley. Warner proposed legislation requiring “first-party consent for
data collection,” which would cut back on the unwanted use of personal data.
This was a gun to the head of the industry, given that most of the platforms
depend on the insatiable collection of such data for advertising sales.
The companies by then had already made dramatic changes. Google made tweaks to
its normal, non-Chinese search engine in April 2017. Dubbed “Project Owl,” the
changes were designed to prevent fake news — Holocaust-denial sites were cited
as an example — from scoring too high in search results.
Although the campaign against fake news has often been described as necessary
to combat far-right disinformation, hate speech and, often, Trump’s own false
statements, some of the first sites to feel the sting of the new search
environment seemed to be of the opposite persuasion. And this is where it
becomes easy to wonder about the good faith of American efforts to rein in the
Internet.
After Google revised its search tool in 2017, a range of alternative news
operations — from the Intercept to Common Dreams to Amy Goodman’s Democracy
Now! — began experiencing precipitous drops in traffic.
One of the first was the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). According to reporter
Andre Damon, the agency performed tests to see how the site fared under the new
Google search. It found that in the old search, WSWS stories popped up very
high. A few months later, they were nowhere to be found. “If you entered
‘social inequality,’ we were the number-two story in April 2017,” says Damon.
“By August, we were out of the top 100 for the same search.”
Damon and others at WSWS, using data from the marketing analytic company
SEMRush and Google Webmaster, ran tests on a dozen other anti-war,
progressive-leaning sites. They found their own search traffic had dropped 67
percent, and estimated Alternet was down 63 percent, Wikileaks down 30 percent.
Every site they measured was down at least 19 percent. “Google pioneered this,”
says Damon. (Google stressed that rankings shift with any algorithmic update,
and the company says it does not single out sites by name.)
Facebook had also already made dramatic changes to its algorithm, and it wasn’t
just left-wing sites that were seeing the crunch. Kevin Roose of The New York
Times recently featured a Pennsylvania-based right-wing site called Mad World
News that, like Reader, had spent enormous sums on Facebook tools to build an
audience — a staggering half-million dollars, the site’s founders claimed. But
starting in 2017, the site’s traffic dropped from 20 million views a month to
almost nothing, especially after Facebook implemented its “Trusted Sources”
algorithm, which de-emphasized commercial sites in favor of more-familiar
“local” content.
“Have some integrity, give the money back” is what the Mad World founders told
Roose.
But soon, mere algorithmic changes wouldn’t be enough, and the age of outright
bans began. On May 17th, Facebook announced it would be working with the
Atlantic Council.
Often described by critics as the unofficial lobby group of NATO, the council
is a bipartisan rogues’ gallery of senior military leaders, neocons and
ex-spies. Former heads of the CIA on its board include Michael Hayden, R. James
Woolsey, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, who was in line to be Hillary
Clinton’s CIA chief.
The council is backed financially by weapons-makers like Raytheon, energy
titans like Exxon-Mobil and banks like JPMorgan Chase. It also accepts funds
from multiple foreign countries, some of them with less-than-sterling
reputations for human rights and — notably — press freedoms.
One of its biggest foreign donors is the United Arab Emirates, which this year
fell nine spots down, from 119th to 128th place, out of 180 countries listed in
the World Press Freedom Index.
When Rolling Stone asked the Atlantic Council about the apparent contradiction
of advising Facebook on press practices when it is funded by numerous
speech-squelching foreign governments, it replied that donors must submit in
writing to strict terms. The statement reads:
“[The] Atlantic Council is accepting the contribution on condition that the
Atlantic Council retains intellectual independence and control over any content
funded in whole or in part by the contribution.”
Around the same time the partnership was announced, Facebook made a donation to
the Atlantic Council between $500,000 and $999,000, placing it among the
biggest donors to the think tank.
The social media behemoth could easily have funded its own team of ex-spooks
and media experts for the fake-news project. But Facebook employees have
whispered to reporters that the council was brought in so that Facebook could
“outsource many of the most sensitive political decisions.” In other words,
Facebook wanted someone else to take the political hit for removing pages.
(Facebook did not respond to a question about having outsourced sensitive
political decisions, but it said it chose the Atlantic Council because the
council has “uniquely qualified experts on the issue of foreign interference.”)
Facebook announced its first round of deletions on July 31st, a day after
Warner’s white paper was made public. In this first incident, Facebook
unpublished 32 sites for “inauthentic behavior.” The accounts looked like
someone’s idea of a parody of agitprop. One, Black Elevation, shows the famous
photo of Huey Newton in a chair, holding a spear. Significantly, one event page
— announcing a counterprotest to an upcoming Unite the Right 2 neo-Nazi march —
turned out to be run by a real grassroots protest group called the Shut It Down
DC Coalition. These people were peeved to be described as “inauthentic” in the
news.
“This is a real protest in Washington, D.C.,” said spokeswoman Michelle
Styczynski. “It is not George Soros. It is not Russia. It is just us.”
But the news headlines did not read “Facebook Removes Some Clearly Bogus Memes
and One Real Domestic Protest Page.” Instead, the headlines were all gravitas:
“Facebook Pulls Fake Accounts That Mimicked Russian Tactics,” wrote The Wall
Street Journal; “Facebook Grapples With a Maturing Adversary in Election
Meddling” was the unironic New York Times headline.
About a week later, on August 6th, one of the biggest jackasses in American
public life was quieted. Four major tech firms — Apple, YouTube, Facebook and
Spotify — decided to either completely or partially remove Infowars conspiracy
lunatic Alex Jones. Twitter would soon follow suit.
Jones was infamous for, among other things, claiming the child victims of the
Sandy Hook shooting were fakes, and his ongoing trolling of grieving Sandy Hook
parents is one of the most revolting episodes in modern media. Jones is a
favorite of Trump, who once gave Infowars a White House press pass.
The axing of Jones by the tech platforms was cheered by almost everyone in the
mainstream press in “Ding-dong! The witch is dead” fashion.
“Finally,” exhaled Slate. “It’s about time,” said Media Matters. Even the
right-wing Weekly Standard saluted the move, saying, “There’s no reason for
conservatives to be defending this guy.”
Few observers raised an eyebrow at the implications of the Jones episode. The
objections were more about the “how?” — not the “who?”
“Nobody complains about Alex Jones [being removed], which you can understand,”
says David Chavern of the News Media Alliance. “But what rule did he violate?
How does what he did compare to what other people saying similar things did?
Nobody really knows.”
“I hate Alex Jones, I hate Infowars,” says the Georgia-based alternative
journalist Rodrigo. “But we all saw what was coming.”
Reverb’s James Reader was one of the voices cheering the demise of Jones. Now
conservatives are gloating over Reader’s removal from Facebook. “I have to take
my lumps on that,” he says. “I still contend we don’t make incitements to
violence or any of the bad things Jones does. But I should have been paying
attention to the larger story. We all should have.”
***
AFTER THE REMOVAL of Jones, media and tech-industry types alike wondered about
the “what next?” question. What about people who didn’t incite hate or commit
libel but were merely someone’s idea of “misleading” or “divisive”?
The Atlantic Council in September put out a paper insisting media producers had
a “duty of care” to not “carry the virus” of misinformation. Noting bitterly
“the democratization of technology has given individuals capabilities on par
with corporations,” the council warned that even domestic content that lacked
“context” or “undermines beliefs” could threaten “sovereignty.”
Healing could accelerate, the council argued, by pressuring the market
“gatekeepers” to better “filter the quality” of content. “This does not need to
be government driven,” it wrote. “Indeed it is better if it is not.”
What does it look like when corporate “gatekeepers” try to “filter” social
malcontents? Bassler of the Free Thought Project already had a pretty good
idea. Bassler is controversial. On the one hand, he’s one of the most extensive
recorders of law-enforcement misbehavior in America. His sites are essentially
a giant archive of police-brutality videos. But he has a clear fringe streak.
Sift through Free Thought headlines and you’ll find stories about everything
from chemtrails to studies that question the efficacy of vaccines.
Overall, the Free Thought Project is a bit like a more politicized,
Internet-era version of In Search Of: a mix of real news and the
conspiratorial. It aims to fill clear gaps in mainstream-media coverage but
also dabbles in themes that would make the Columbia Journalism Review cringe.
Like Reader, Bassler, he says, tried to comply with every Facebook request over
the years, because his business depended on it. “I’m not interested in just
building a circle jerk of people who agree with me,” says Bassler. “I’m trying
to make a difference, so I need Facebook. That’s where the normies are, you
know? That’s where you reach people.”
After 2016, Facebook made reaching the “normies” harder for smaller producers.
Long before it brought in partners like the Atlantic Council and the
International Republican Institute, Facebook invited mainstream-media partners
to help fact-check sites. Those included the Associated Press, PolitiFact,
FactCheck.org, Snopes and even The Weekly Standard.
Bassler did not do well in this process. Four Free Thought Project stories came
up factually wanting under reviews. This caused traffic to plummet in the past
two years, under a new Facebook policy algorithmically demoting “false news.”
The Free Thought Project may not be ProPublica, but Bassler is no Alex Jones.
In two cases, his “false” ratings were later overturned by PolitiFact and AP.
But his business still took the hit.
The panel-review system poses serious issues. There’s the obvious problem of
established media possibly being offered money from Facebook (reportedly as
much as $100,000 annually) to directly reduce the business of smaller
competitors.
A story by the Columbia Journalism Review about this process quoted unnamed
checkers who professed to be unsure of how Facebook was picking sites for
review. Some wondered why mainstream-media stories, like from Fox or MSNBC,
were being filtered out. Others wondered why Facebook wasn’t fact-checking paid
content.
Conspiracy theories aren’t always wrong, and people who have a conspiratorial
bent are for this reason often the first to see real problems. Some important
early reporting about the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, came from Zero
Hedge, a site now routinely dismissed as conspiratorial.
If the question of whether reporting of this type is or is not legit is left up
to panels of corporate media — who are often the targets of criticism from such
sites — then even legitimate journalism that “undermines beliefs” will soon
become rare. Especially when one considers that “reputable” media is often
itself an actor in larger political deceptions (the Iraq-WMD episode being the
most recent famous example of how terrible and lasting the consequences of
disinformation can be), there’s tremendous danger in removing sites willing to
play that challenging role.
Bassler’s Free Thought Project was eventually removed on October 11th. We can’t
make any assumptions about why. But the opacity of the sifting process makes it
hard not to wonder if such sites were chosen for something other than
legitimate reasons.
“Unless they make their methodology transparent, we can’t give them the benefit
of the doubt,” says Chavern. “Eventually, ‘Trust us’ isn’t going to be good
enough.”
***
THE NEW ERA of “content regulation” has been a mixed bag. Along with bans of
neo-Nazi Daily Stormer content from sites like Google, we’ve seen removals of
content like a picture of two women kissing or the banning of Arab-language
atheist pages in Muslim countries. Venezuela-based left-wing sites like TeleSUR
and VenezuelaAnalysis.com have been suspended or deleted from Facebook,
feminist cartoonists have seen content removed in India, and videos of
self-immolating Tibetan monks have been found to have violated Facebook
“community standards.”
Meanwhile, in smaller incidents, libertarians like Daniel MacAdams of the Ron
Paul Institute, progressive organizations like Occupy London and controversial
writers such as Australian Caitlin Johnstone — among numerous others — have all
been suspended from Twitter and other platforms.
Many of these cases involved suspensions triggered by user complaints, another
potential problem area. Since the scale of Internet operations is so vast —
billions of pieces of content a day are introduced on platforms like Facebook —
companies will always be forced to rely on users to flag problems. As the
motives for bans expand, we’ll see more and more people trying to mass-report
their online foes into suspensions or bans. Rolling Stone found examples on
both the left and the right. For Wizner of the ACLU, this feels key. “If you’re
going to have billions of users,” he says, “it’s always going to be
Whac-A-Mole. You can’t do it to scale.”
Whatever the democratic cure for what ails us, what we’re doing now is surely
the opposite of it. We’ve empowered a small cadre of ex-spooks, tech
executives, Senate advisers, autocratic foreign donors and mainstream-media
panels to create an unaccountable system of star-chamber content reviews —
which unsurprisingly seem so far to have mostly targeted their harshest critics.
“What government doesn’t want to control what news you see?” says Goldman, the
law professor.
This is power that would tempt the best and most honest politicians. We’ve
already proved that we’re capable of electing the worst and least-honest
politicians imaginable. Is this a tool we want such people to have?
On his run to the White House, Donald Trump mined public anxiety and defamed
our democracy, but that was just a prelude to selling authoritarianism. On some
level, he understood that people make bad decisions when they’re afraid. And
he’s succeeded in his short reign in bringing everyone down to his level of
nonthinking.
This secretive campaign against fake news may not be Trump’s idea. But it’s a
Trump-like idea, something we would never contemplate in a less-frenzied era.
We’re scared. We’re not thinking. And this could go wrong in so many ways. For
some, it has already.
“It’s Reverb Press today,” says Reader. “It could be you tomorrow.”
