There have been many candidates including pressure from policy-makers and regulators, but thus far no end of congressional hearings or EU fines have done more than dent the stock price. Calls from organisations like Amnesty International and United Nations to Tech to stop supporting genocide and doing mass-surveillance have failed to convince Silicon Valleys’ superstars to clean up their services. Staff protests in the form of “walk-outs” have not changed the direction. The consumer power that is “only one click away” is an illusion. What is left?

This writer can think of two last resorts, one is the advertisers who are the real customers in the world of freenomics. The other would be the investors. Not sure if we should expect Wall Street to put things like democracy, peace, life, health and freedom before the profits, though. But now at last, the ad boycott method has been attempted. Let’s take a look!

Ad-pocalypse Redux

Many big-name advertisers have joined the #StopHateforProfit campaign, receiving attention and applause. In fact, so many that CNN has made a special page with the list of companies. Well-known consumer brands. Will this have an impact on the platforms? A small impact on the stock price has been recorded, but longer term it may have more of a symbolic than financial effect. This Wall Street Journal infographic gives a hint: the top 8 boycotters yearly ad spend (all channels) is only 1% of Facebook’s total annual advertising revenue.

I have written about Metcalfe’s law before, but it might help explain this. The law describes the value of a network, say of fax machines. If two people have fax machines, they can telefax each other. If four people have them, there are not twice but four times as many connections. The value of the network is exponential. 100 Million users are not worth ten times more than 10 Million users, but 100 times more. This is the logic that drives the platforms to dominate their respective niches and makes competition irrelevant. (Why would anyone start a competing auction service? Or search? Or video?)

But Metcalfe’s law not only explains the user side of the market, but also applies to the advertiser side. Sure, big name brands can afford to go to alternative channels like television or billboards or something completely different. But the Millions of small businesses have few or no options. Facebook advertising is how they access the customers. Maybe if they want to reach the millennials rather than the boomers, advertisers can go via Instagram, but that is still Facebook. YouTube is the gatekeeper for video. In practice, there is no place else to go. The platforms control both sides of the market. You can’t argue with Metcalfe.

The #StopHateforProfit is a great initiative and of course it’s better to do something than nothing. But it will not be what turns the tide on tech platforms, who seem to put their efforts into pushing for more exceptions from liability rather than facing up to their responsibility as dominant players.

This is Netopia’s newsletter July 9 2020

As has been widely reported, last week Twitter marked two of President Trump’s tweets with a fact-checking label, effectively saying that the US President did not speak the truth. (Perhaps no news; “alternative facts” was a term that arrived early in the Trump presidency.)

Good for Twitter. By contrast, Facebook predictably refused to act, once again badly misjudging the historical moment. They are now facing growing criticism and anger in the US for their refusal to be accountable for how their users abuse their platform. Indeed, current employees staged a virtual protest, and more than thirty of Facebook’s earliest former employees posted an open letter lambasting the company for its moral decay.

President Trump responded to Twitter’s actions by issuing an executive order targeting the (in)famous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Why this particular law?

According to Big Tech, the internet wouldn’t exist without CDA 230’s liability protections for content posted by users – no matter how vile. And given the ever-increasing pressure in the US to reform CDA 230, Silicon Valley is desperate to export it to other places so as to complicate efforts to amend it domestically. For instance, they successfully included it in the US-Mexico-Canada-free trade agreement and are eager to see it incorporated into European policy.

The law’s appeal is clear; CDA 230, on the one hand, gives internet intermediaries an exemption from liability for what users do:

(1) Treaty of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

… and on the other hand, gives them freedom from liability when they do take action (“good Samaritan”):

(2)Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A)

any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B)

any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1). [1]

Blessed if you do, blessed if you don’t. Untouchable. Keep doing whatever you’re doing and don’t mind anyone else. What’s not to like?

Of course, President Trump’s Executive Order appears to be illegal on its face. Twitter did not abuse President Trump’s freedom of speech by adding the fact-check labels; rather, Twitter was exercising its own freedom of speech in doing so. That right is guaranteed by the US Constitution’s First Amendment, not CDA 230. And that’s great—if there is one thing Netopia would like to see more of it is intermediary action (that is the topic of almost every post on this blog!). Twitter is a big part of the problem in terms of hate speech, propaganda, threats, and more, but a pat on the back is deserved for doing something.

If anything, Trump’s EO is a distraction from real and legitimate debates about how CDA 230’s overbroad liability shield is a root cause of many of the internet’s most intractable problems—it’s the same law Google argued against amending despite child-trafficking website Backpage.com’s reliance on it’s safe harbour. And the growing CDA 230 reformer movement in the US is understandably concerned that Trump’s executive order is a distraction from their cause.

Presidential executive orders are not the answer to fixing the internet. CDA 230 is also not the answer. Until Big Tech voluntarily faces up to “do the right thing,” we must keep looking. Suggestions welcome.

Pressure on Facebook shows no sign of decrease. The first line of defense – “we’re just a tech company” – did not hold. The second line – “we will hire thousands of moderators” – also failed. The latest attempt – “oversight board” – is a step in the right direction but will not be enough. Here’s why:

THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Facebook accepting some degree of responsibility for the content is welcome. A generous interpretation of the oversight board could be a statement like “we think this is difficult and need some help”. Such an approach deserves some sympathy or at least the benefit of the doubt. Thorny issues of freedom of opinion clashing with hate speech. The climate movement and #metoo have benefitted from Facebook and other platforms, but so have white supremacists and Russian election intervention. To humbly ask for help is a good idea, but only if the request is honest.

THE PROBLEM

This balancing act is nothing new. Facebook is not the first to face it. In fact, every new media form has gone through similar steps. The then new medium of radio is sometimes said to have helped the Nazi party to power in 1930’s Germany. Now regarded as pillars of democracy, newspapers were once called “gutter press” and the tabloid looking for scandals rather than the truth is still an archetype. Video games have often been criticized for violent content. And so on. In that view, Facebook is in good company and if history is any guide, it will be held in better regard in the future. Except that does not happen on its own. One could get the impression that it is the world that adjusts to the new medium and learns to accept it. But the reality is that the new medium needs to make necessary changes to earn trust.

THE NEIGHBOURS

The way those examples have gained trust is by putting in place systems that help the audience and check the content. Broadcast media is regulated through law and permissions, many countries have public service organisations and oversight boards or authorities. Newspapers follow similar patterns. The journalist profession requires years of education, there are organisations for professional development, forums for discussing press ethics, special media covering media – the ethos is that difficult publishing decisions are well-served by being discussed by others. Academics do research on press and media ethics. And so on, a very advanced and professional system and, importantly, a learning system that evolves as the world changes. Same for video games, the industry keeps in close touch with researchers, organisations and authorities. Europe has PEGI – a co-regulation system funded by the industry, run by an independent organization and governed by an advisory board appointed by the member states (experts in teaching, child psychology, media, medicine, sociology and many more). Similar systems exist in other parts of the world. The point is that these media forms did not say “we’re just a tech company”, they faced the criticism and made a system to do better.

THE ANSWER

Self-regulation or co-regulation systems can be the way forward also for the internet platforms. There are some criteria that need to be met:

• Independence – self/co-regulation should be independent of individual companies
• Transparence – the rules and rulings should be available to anyone
• Legal certainty – both parties can appeal a ruling to some form of appeals board
• Rest on actual regulation – the self/co-regulation system falls back on law
• Avoid conflict of interest – the delegates in the system should not be appointed directly by the companies they regulate

Done right, self/co-regulation tries more cases, moves faster and achieves better results than courts and authorities can on their own. (Co-regulation is when the state is represented in some way, self-regulation is independent of the state.)

Now, this is your homework: check the Facebook Oversight Board against the bullets above. If it ticks all boxes, good news for Facebook and digital citizens anywhere. If it ticks only a few boxes, Facebook needs to do more work to cope with fair criticism and avoid government intervention. (Send your answers to mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com)

THE COINCIDENCE

Fun fact: besides the three liberal law professors in the oversight board core, the surprise guest is Danish former prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. When she ran Denmark, her Minister of Economy and Interior was Margrethe Vestager. Yes, the same Vestager, European Commission Vice President and digital watchdog. What a fortunate coincidence for Facebook!

Netopia will follow the oversight board’s work with great anticipation. Will it stop or reduce hate speech and troll factories? Fake news? Election meddling? Genocide propaganda? Privacy breachs? Terrorist content? Abuse of dominant position? Restrictions to free speech? Content theft? Bring back “sexy” emojis? That would be terrific, thanks!

He was known to the public as the lawyer who put The Pirate Bay-operators behind bars. Henrik Pontén was Sweden’s most famous anti-pirate and around those years the target of many pirate pranks. I know, I was there.

Some of the pranks were cute. Like when the Pirate Party youth section gave Henrik Pontén ginger bread cookies for Christmas. In Sweden, the folklore is that ginger bread cookies makes one nicer.

Some of the pranks were funny but obnoxious. Like when somebody changed Henrik’s name in the Swedish tax registry, so that his legal name was Pirate Pontén. Took him some bouts with bureaucracy to change it back.

Some of the pranks were aggressive. Like the boxes in the mail nobody dared opened. The shattered glass window in the office door (they brought in a security guard to patrol the office, unheard of in Sweden). The flowers to his board members with the note “the first part of your funeral bunch”. The list goes on. The pressure took a toll on Henrik’s health, but he did not fold. He kept winning his cases.

In 2009, a couple of months after the first trial against The Pirate Bay and only weeks after the Pirate Party was elected to European parliament by 7,1% of the Swedish voters, Henrik Pontén and I were invited to do an onstage Q&A at a digital festival called Dreamhack. Dreamhack has more than 10,000 participants and is a beautiful example of digital grass roots culture. Back in those days, it was also a popular gathering for software pirates. We came by car and were advised to park it just outside the stage entrance, radiator facing out so we could make a speedy escape if necessary. The door opened and we were met by flashing news cameras, like in a movie scene. On stage, we were meant to give proper answers to questions asked online by the audience. Some questions were pranks, some were serious and interesting. But it was heard to make any sense in the noise. Somebody threw a tomato (and missed). Henrik thought that was hilarious. There are no tomatoes at Dreamhack. They had gone through the trouble of exiting the festival, finding a supermarket and buying tomatoes only so they could throw it at us. That episode captures Henrik Pontén’s personality. He always found humour in the most absurd situations.

Henrik Pontén was a national-team fencer, goat shepherd, horse-rider, motorcyclist, husband and father of three. He passed away this weekend, 54 years old. The gap he leaves is immense.

Time spent in lockdown can be used to think about the big things in life. Like artificial intelligence. Netopia has a mini-theme on artificial intelligence, with Peter Warren’s story on insuring self-driving cars and Ralf Grötker’s review of Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible. Both put artificial intelligence in context. No, artificial superintelligence will not eliminate humans anytime soon. Yes, there are completely different issues we need to debate to make AI useful for humans.

Exponential growth is a popular way to think about digital phenomena. Innovations added to innovations in an ever-accelerating pace. This mindset leads to quotes like “change will never again be so slow as it is now”. It brings the conclusion that there will come a point where innovation happens all at once and the speed of change explodes into the “singularity”.

In this virus pandemic, we have been looking at a lot of exponential growth curves and thinking about ways of flattening them. While the virus might be disruptive in its own way, it is driven by mutation rather than innovation.

Exponential growth is seductive. Apply it to any process and you get mind-blowing results. The problem of course is that not all processes can accelerate exponentially. Let’s look at self-driving cars. If computing power (whichin theory grows exponentially according to Moore’s Law), that would make the AI smart enough to take over from the driver anytime soon. The first problem is that AI relies on a number of other technologies, such as GPS, cameras, lidar, radar and many other sensors and communication technologies. Each of these technologies develops at its own pace, but not necessarily with exponential speed. 5G telecom networks, for example, are often mentioned as a key to self-driving cars, but the roll-out pace is held back by many factors: legal, financial, political etc.

The second problem is the data-set. One way to make AI useful is to train it on a big set of data and make it find the patterns. This is what machine-translation has done. In the old days, machine-translation tried to replicate how humans learn languages with grammar and glossary and such. The break-through came with predictive statistics applied to huge samples of real language (corpuses), where the AI can guess with some accuracy what the most likely next word will be from the context. This is what auto-maker Tesla tries to do with its auto-pilot system, which silently observes how real drivers deal with various traffic situations (such as stopping at red lights), uploading that to a central system which then analyses the best driver behaviours and feed them back to the autopilot. That brings the philosophical question if all traffic situations can be predicted and simulated. If the answer is no, self-driving cars will never be 100% self-driven, just like machine-translation can never be 100% accurate.

Put together, this means that exponential growth in self-driving cars may exist in simulation but not on the road. In real-life, incremental innovation is a better explanation. We make the camera a little better, so the car can navigate in rainy conditions. Then we make the wheel sensors a little better, so the AI can get more feedback about the tires grip and calculate braking power better. Then we add more videos to the data-set so that the AI better recognizes road indications and can keep the car in lane. All these things little steps amount to great progress, but it makes for systems that assist the driver (lane departure warnings, automatic high beams), rather than the computer replacing him. Mathematically this is logarithmic growth, which means diminishing returns, also know as Achilles and the Turtle.

In many real-life AI applications, logarithmic growth may be a better explanation than exponential, only not as spectacular. If we keep this distinction in mind we can have a better informed debate about the threats and opportunities of artificial intelligence. Also, next time somebody says exponential growth, you can ask “sure it’s not logarithmic”?

Now, if we could only flatten the corona-virus curve in the same way…

Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki published a statement yesterday on how the video platform responds to the corona virus outbreak. It is worth reading.

Wojcicki says “It remains our top priority to provide information to users in a responsible way.” Sounds great. Could that not be the policy always? So maybe we would not have to live with alt.right-propaganda, election interference, ISIS execution videos and such things that would never be published in proper media. That would make the internet better, regardless of virus outbreaks, right?

“YouTube will continue to quickly remove videos that violate our policies when they are flagged” – Another great idea. Hope it’s not like pirate videos where rights holders must go through a slow bureaucratic process just to have the videos uploaded again right after. Except the really responsible thing would be to not have those videos posted in the first place. That would really help stop virus misinformation! (and the creative economy)

Perhaps that can’t be done because of the way Youtube works? But wait, Wojcicki has the answer:

“In the days ahead, we will enable ads for content discussing the coronavirus on a limited number of channels, including creators who accurately self-certify and a range of news partners”

Great idea, perhaps similar things can be applied to the other problems Youtube brings upon the world?

Thanks to Susan Wojcicki for speaking out. There are two problems here. The first is that this is not enough if Youtube wants to live up to its parent company’s motto Do the right thing. This fits more into the familiar pattern of “do as little as possible” which is justified with anything else would “break the internet” (or Google’s profit forecast). The second is that at previous occasions, the standard response from Google, Youtube and most of Big Tech has been something along the lines of “it’s the algorithm we don’t know what it does” or “that would be like in China”. Wojcicki’s statement shows that they can if they want to. Great, now do that more often. And better.

(A similar issue related to a smear campaign against Michelle Obama. Watch this great TED Talk!)