Tag Archive for: They’re

Social Media Promised To Block Covid-19 Misinformation; But They’re Also Blocking Legit Info Too

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Sing it with me, folks: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Over the last few weeks, all of the big social media platforms have talked about their intense efforts to block misinformation about Covid-19. It appeared to be something of an all hands on deck situation for employees (mostly working from home) at these companies. Indeed, earlier this week, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube all released a joint statement about how they’re working together to fight Covid-19 misinformation, and hoping other platforms would join in.

However, battling misinformation is not always so easy — as Facebook discovered yesterday. Yesterday afternoon a bunch of folks started noticing that Facebook was blocking all sorts of perfectly normal content, including NY Times stories about Covid-19. Now, we can joke all we want about some of the poor NY Times reporting, but to argue that its reporting on Covid-19 is misinformation would be, well, misinformation itself. There was some speculation, a la YouTube’s warning that this could be due to content moderators being sent home — and not being allowed to do their content moderation duties over privacy concerns, but the company said that it was “a bug in an anti-spam system” and was “unrelated to any changes in our content moderation workforce.” Whether you buy that or not is your choice.

Still, it’s a reminder that any effort to block misinformation is going to be fraught with problems and mistakes, and trying to adapt rapidly, especially on a big (the biggest) news story with rapidly changing factors and new information (and misinformation) all the time, is going to run into some problems sooner or later.

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Senators Pretend That EARN IT Act Wouldn’t Be Used To Undermine Encryption; They’re Wrong

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On Wednesday, the Senate held a hearing about the EARN IT Act, the bill that is designed to undermine the internet and encryption in one single move — all in the name of “protecting the children” (something that it simply will not do). Pretty much the entire thing was infuriating, but I wanted to focus on one key aspect. Senators supporting the bill, including sponsor Richard Blumenthal — who has been attacking the internet since well before he was in the Senate and was just the Attorney General of Connecticut — kept trying to insist the bill had nothing to do with encryption and wouldn’t be used to undermine encryption. In response to a letter from Facebook, Blumenthal kept insisting that the bill is not about encryption, and also insisting (incorrectly) that if the internet companies just nerded harder, they could keep encryption while still giving law enforcement access.

“This bill says nothing about encryption,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal…, said at a hearing Wednesday to discuss the legislation…

[….]

“Strong law enforcement is compatible with strong encryption,” Blumenthal said. “I believe it, Big Tech knows it and either is Facebook is lying — and I think they’re telling us the truth when they say that law enforcement is consistent with strong encryption — or Big Tech is using encryption as a subterfuge to oppose this bill.”

No, the only one engaged in lying or subterfuge here is Blumenthal (alternatively, he’s so fucking ignorant that he should resign). “Strong” encryption is end-to-end encryption. Once you create a backdoor that lets law enforcement in, you’ve broken the encryption and it’s no longer stronger. Even worse, it’s very, very weak, and it puts everyone (even Senator Blumenthal and all his constituents) at risk. If you want to understand how this bill is very much about killing encryption, maybe listen to cryptographer Matthew Green explain it to you (he’s not working for “Big Tech,” Senator):

EARN IT works by revoking a type of liability called Section 230 that makes it possible for providers to operate on the Internet, by preventing the provider for being held responsible for what their customers do on a platform like Facebook. The new bill would make it financially impossible for providers like WhatsApp and Apple to operate services unless they conduct “best practices” for scanning their systems for CSAM.

Since there are no “best practices” in existence, and the techniques for doing this while preserving privacy are completely unknown, the bill creates a government-appointed committee that will tell technology providers what technology they have to use. The specific nature of the committee is byzantine and described within the bill itself. Needless to say, the makeup of the committee, which can include as few as zero data security experts, ensures that end-to-end encryption will almost certainly not be considered a best practice.

So in short: this bill is a backdoor way to allow the government to ban encryption on commercial services. And even more beautifully: it doesn’t come out and actually ban the use of encryption, it just makes encryption commercially infeasible for major providers to deploy, ensuring that they’ll go bankrupt if they try to disobey this committee’s recommendations.

It’s the kind of bill you’d come up with if you knew the thing you wanted to do was unconstitutional and highly unpopular, and you basically didn’t care.

Or listen to Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn explain how the bill’s real target is encryption. As she explains, the authors of the bill (including Blumenthal) had ample opportunity to put in language that would make it clear that it does not target encryption. They chose not to.

As for the “subterfuge” Blumenthal calls out, the only real “subterfuge” here is by Blumenthal and Graham in crafting this bill with the help of the DOJ. Remember, just the day before the DOJ flat out said that 230 should be conditioned on letting law enforcement into any encrypted communications. So if Blumenthal really means that this bill won’t impact encryption he should write it into the fucking bill. Because as it’s structured right now, in order to keep 230 protections, internet companies will have to follow a set of “best practices” put together by a panel headed by the Attorney General who has said multiple times that he doesn’t believe real encryption should be allowed on these services.

So if Blumenthal wants us to believe that his bill won’t undermine encryption, he should address it explicitly, rather than lying about it in a Senate hearing, while simultaneously claiming that Facebook (and every other company) can do the impossible in giving law enforcement backdoor access while keeping encrypted data secure.

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Why Is Fox News Acting As State Media, Announcing Trump’s Lawsuits Before They’re Filed And Failing To Point Out How Frivolous They Are?

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As we’ve been pointing out, the Trump campaign, with the help of lawyer Charles Harder, has been suing a list of media enemies over the past week. There was the NY Times, followed by the Washington Post and (probably not) finally, CNN. We’ve detailed why each lawsuit is frivolous, and how they appear to be playing to Trump’s base in a performative manner, attacking the credibility of the media which has done critical reporting on his Presidency, and doing so in a manner that potentially serves two purposes: gets his fans riled up about the media while simultaneously creating a chilling effect on fairly typical journalistic analysis of the Trump administration and campaign.

But I wanted to focus in on a separate point: the effective “state media” of Fox News reporting on these lawsuits in absolutely ridiculous ways. Reporter Gregg Re wrote about the NY Times case, and at least included a link to the filing and noted that “lawsuits for libel against media organizations by public figures must clear a high bar.” But the reporting on the next two lawsuits, done by reporters Brian Flood and Brooke Singman, were terrible. Both of them claimed that reporting on the filing of a federal lawsuit was a Fox News “exclusive.” That’s not what exclusive means, guys.

Also, while Fox News eventually added a link to the filing in the story about the CNN lawsuit and the NY Times one, it initially did not link to the CNN one, and as of this writing has still not linked to the Washington Post filing. Indeed, as you can see above, the reporters almost gloat over the fact that Fox News “obtained” access to the lawsuit — and then failed to provide it to their readers. And with the CNN lawsuit, a search of PACER a couple of hours after the Fox News article went live showed no evidence that the case had actually been filed yet. In other words, it’s likely that someone associated with the campaign or the lawsuit handed the complaint over to Fox News to “break” the “exclusive” story.

And perhaps that explains why the reporting by Flood and Singman is so, so bad. Unlike the story by Re regarding the NY Times lawsuit, this one makes no effort to explain why this lawsuit faces a huge barrier (known as the 1st Amendment). Even worse, it repeats a blatantly false statement from the campaign’s “legal adviser” Jenna Ellis:

“False statements are not protected under the U.S. Constitution; therefore, these suits will have no chilling effect on freedom of the press. If journalists are more accurate in their statements and reporting, that would be a positive development, but not why these suits were filed,” Ellis added.

There is some irony in this statement about false statements being false, but it is. There’s plenty of precedent here, including (most clearly) the United States v. Alvarez (a case we’ve been pointing to a lot lately), which says:

The Court has never endorsed the categorical rule the Government advances: that false statements receive no First Amendment protection.

A good reporter would perhaps point that out in response to Ellis. But it appears that Fox News is less interested in employing good reporters, and more interested in acting as state media, and boosting the President it supports.

This is especially sickening, given that these are attacks on the very 1st Amendment that protects Fox News — and its long history of misleading, inaccurate, and occasionally false statements, that the network is somewhat infamous for. You would think, if it wasn’t subsumed in cultish adherence to the President, that it would recognize the importance of actually continuing to defend the part of the Constitution that allows them to exist. At the very least, you might hope that its reporters would be careful enough to accurately report the law. Apparently that is too much to ask.

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They’re dead to us: The Ars Technica 2019 Deathwatch

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No one wants to celebrate a company going away, though these organizations certainly seem to be on a tenuous track.

Enlarge / No one wants to celebrate a company going away, though these organizations certainly seem to be on a tenuous track. (credit: Picture Post / Getty Images)

It’s come to this again: 2018 has passed, making the dumpster fire that was 2017 look a bit more like the glory days. Last year ended with the government partially shut down and the market in a deep slide. Tech companies seemed out to outdo each other as cautionary tales, with some of 2017’s biggest losers extending their death rolls and some of the biggest players in the industry seeming to deliberately set themselves on fire.

So, once again it’s time to call out the Deathwatch. If you’re stumbling across Ars’ Deathwatch for the first time, this is not a prediction of the actual demise of companies or technologies. It takes a lot to actually erase a company or a technology from the face of the Earth these days. Even the worst ideas and businesses often linger on through inertia or get absorbed by some other company and metastasize in new and horrific ways—for example, Yahoo. (We’ll get to them soon enough.)

Instead, Deathwatch is our annual way of identifying those entities facing a different sort of danger: economic, cultural, or legal peril that could render a company irrelevant, inconsequential, or (in some cases) chum for legal and market sharks. Some organizations that have been put on Deathwatch have died a thousand deaths—take RadioShack, for example (a 2014 Deathwatch alumnus… which died a second time after a 2017 reboot). Others, such as BlackBerry, have persisted but have changed so much that they are no longer recognizable as the entities they once were. And then there are others that have so much runway in their death spiral that they could persist as a cautionary tale for decades to come.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica