Platforms

Gab has become the most visible of a collection of services catering to people mainstream companies such as Twitter and Facebook have rejected as too hateful, extreme or threatening in their posts as part of a crackdown on extremism.

This blog post addresses how the business side of journalism needs to evolve to maintain sustainable news production necessary for a healthy democracy. I discuss the basic business models for supporting journalism that have endured throughout the last few centuries of technological change, how these may be successfully adapted to the 21st Century, and what policies would facilitate the transition to these new models.

Although hate continues to flourish on social media, experts say the situation is not hopeless. Among the recommendations are allowing broader reporting of hate speech, offering a similar reporting system across different social networks, and putting content moderation on par with finding bugs in code. "It’s common for a bounty to be paid for reporting code issues to a company — companies should do the same with content moderation," said Newhouse School of Public Communications professor Jennifer Grygiel. "The public, researchers, experts etc.

As mainstream social-media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit try to push racist commentary and hate speech off their platforms, those conversations are finding homes in other corners of the web. They are happening on Discord, a chat service for videogamers, and message boards such as 4chan. Gab was founded explicitly to be a haven for free commentary, no holds barred. Discord says its rules prohibit harassment, threatening messages and calls to violence, and it has shut down accounts over those issues. Grappling with such web speech is proving challenging.

In some corners of the internet, the tired hypothetical of free speech has been turned on its head: There isn’t one person yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, but a theater full of people yelling “Burn it down.” All of which complicates the situation for the big internet companies. Over the past 10 years, free speech has undergone a radical change in practice. Now nearly all significant speech runs through a corporate platform, be it a large hosting provider, WordPress, Facebook, or Twitter. Speech may be free by law, but attention is part of an economy.

Facebook announced that it had suspended 82 pages, groups and accounts that originated in Iran for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" and sharing divisive political messages, including opposition to President Donald Trump. The accounts -- some of which also had been removed from Facebook’s photo-sharing site, Instagram -- do not appear to have clear "ties to the Iranian government,” but Facebook could not say for certain who was behind them.

President Donald Trump accused Twitter of deleting large swaths of his followers from the social media platform, deriding the company for slow growth and accusing it of ideological bias despite providing little evidence for his claims. "Twitter has removed many people from my account and, more importantly, they have seemingly done something that makes it much harder to join - they have stifled growth to a point where it is obvious to all. A few weeks ago it was a Rocket Ship, now it is a Blimp! Total Bias?" the President tweeted. Twitter did not directly rebut President Trump’s claim.

Internet platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter use core algorithms to intentionally gather likeminded people and feed them self-validating content that elicits powerful reactions. Combine this with the platforms’ ability to finely target messaging and ads and you’ve created a potent formula for the virulent spread of disinformation, propaganda and hate. In response, more than three-dozen racial justice and civil rights organizations—including our group, Free Press—have spent more than a year evaluating the role of technology in fomenting hate.

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. 

Trained reporters play a critical role in identifying news events through following social media. When reporters have both professional training and experience with the organizers and actors on social media they can not only anticipate important news events, but they can also contextualize them for followers and authenticate the raw footage and real-time reporting. Even when considering the crisis of trust and generalized suspicion, it is important to distinguish the nuances.