Platforms

An Oct 23 interview with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA).

Twitter deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in the 2018 midterm election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.  “We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman said. The removals took place in late Sept and early Oct. Twitter removed more than 10,000 accounts, according to three sources familiar with the Democrats’ effort.

A mass murderer shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (PA) on Oct 27, in what is believed to be the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in the United States, ever. The mass shooting followed a week of reporting on a series of bombs sent by a FL terrorist to prominent Democrats, George Soros, and CNN. Both men posted violent, hateful content online, including politically extremist views on immigration. The events tragically bring into focus, again, the very-real danger of hateful political rhetoric.

We have learned a lot about online disinformation — and we are doing nothing.  For these same distorting techniques are still in operation. They will affect the midterm elections. They continue to shape political debate in many countries around the world. They are being used not just by Russians, but by people in the countries they seek to influence. These campaigners, often hiding behind fake accounts, continue to act with impunity, promoting false narratives and relying on the main platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, and especially YouTube — to amplify their messages.

What does the law say about hate speech online? The First Amendment provides broad protection to speech that demeans a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or similar grounds.

There’s even more phony or misleading political news circulating on social media than there was in 2016, according to a new University of Oxford report that casts doubt on tech companies’ attempts to crack down on disinformation ahead of the midterms. The report also found that social media users were more apt to share “junk news” than what researchers considered “professional content,” which includes news from established media outlets and information from the government, academics or political candidates.

Facebook’s ads have been a source of frustration for lawmakers for years, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 elections when it was discovered that Russian influence agents were able to place political ads involving US politics on the platform. Bills have been introduced to hold these platforms accountable, such as the Honest Ads Act, and federal agencies have launched investigations, but everything so far has fallen flat.

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.