Tag: internet

Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

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Democrats’ SAFE TECH Act Could ‘Destroy Most of the Open Web’

A newly-proposed change to Section 230 would introduce legal liability for online platforms and forums for third-party speech. It is being suggested as a way of combating alleged racial and social online injustices. According to critics, however, the bill is ill-conceived and has the potential to transform large parts of the internet for the worse and empower powerful players against smaller competitors.

Section 230 has become a hot topic in the US in recent years. Under this law, which “defined how the Internet works”, platforms adopting a hands-off approach to content moderation cannot be held reliable for harmful or illegal third-party content hosted by them. The protections under the law do not extend to sites which filter users’ submissions and curate content featured on the page. As the Washington Post recounts, the Section was created in the wake of two lawsuits in the 1990s – against Prodigy Services and against CompuServe – coming to similar conclusions.

The provision has come under criticism from both Democratic and Republican legislators, albeit for different reasons. The goal of Republicans, including former president Trump, was to address selective political censorship which has been repeatedly alleged against Silicon Valley online platforms. For example, in December last year, Trump attempted to use his veto power over a proposed defence bill as leverage against the Congress to outright repeal Section 230. 

On the other hand, critics of the law among the Democrats have been blaming social media platforms for being reluctant or slow to remove content deemed as harmful, from hostile communication perceived as harassment to the spread of unreliable information. 

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Google Quietly Escalates Manual Search Censorship

Google has quietly escalated censorship of its market-dominating search engine, adding a range of new topics where human moderators are allowed to manually penalize websites, suppressing them in search results.

If a website is affected by one of these manual acts of censorship, “some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results,” according to the tech giant.

The list, published in full on Google’s support website, includes the following:

  • Discover policy violation: Adult-themed content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Dangerous content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Harassing content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Hateful content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Manipulated media
  • News and Discover policy violation: Medical content
  • Discover policy violation: Misleading content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Sexually explicit content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Terrorist content
  • News policy violation: Transparency
  • News and Discover policy violation: Violence and gore content
  • News and Discover policy violation: Vulgar language and profanity

Publishers who have been hit with a manual action by Google will be able to appeal the decision by “fixing” whatever issue violated the policy and then submitting their website to Google for a review. Google states that it could take “several days or a week” for the tech giant to reach a final decision, leaving

Once upon a time, Google attempted to conceal its censorship of search. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai insisted, under oath before congress, that the company does not “manually intervene on any particular search result,” a statement that one of Google’s own former employees said was a lie.

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This is how we lost control of our faces

In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in printed photographs and fed them into a computer program. His rudimentary successes would set off decades of research into teaching machines to recognize human faces.

Now a new study shows just how much this enterprise has eroded our privacy. It hasn’t just fueled an increasingly powerful tool of surveillance. The latest generation of deep-learning-based facial recognition has completely disrupted our norms of consent.

Deborah Raji, a fellow at nonprofit Mozilla, and Genevieve Fried, who advises members of the US Congress on algorithmic accountability, examined over 130 facial-recognition data sets compiled over 43 years. They found that researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge.

It has also led to far messier data sets: they may unintentionally include photos of minors, use racist and sexist labels, or have inconsistent quality and lighting. The trend could help explain the growing number of cases in which facial-recognition systems have failed with troubling consequences, such as the false arrests of two Black men in the Detroit area last year.

People were extremely cautious about collecting, documenting, and verifying face data in the early days, says Raji. “Now we don’t care anymore. All of that has been abandoned,” she says. “You just can’t keep track of a million faces. After a certain point, you can’t even pretend that you have control.”

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Bill Would Force Social Media Users To Secretly Report Suspicious People To Law Enforcement

Senator Joe Manchin wants to bring DHS’s spy on your neighbors “If You See, Something Say Something”  program to social media, blogs, websites, and much more. Manchin’s bill, the “See Something, Say Something Online Act” would essentially turn social media users into federal spies by forcing them to report suspicious people to law enforcement.

Just how bad is this bill?

This bill would essentially force anyone on social media to report suspicious “transmissions” to law enforcement.

Known Suspicious Transmission.—The term ‘‘known suspicious transmission’’ is any suspicious transmission that an interactive computer  service should have reasonably known to have occurred or have been notified of by a director, officer, employ, agent, interactive computer service user, or State or Federal law enforcement agency.

Major Crime —The term ‘‘major crime’’ means a Federal criminal offense that is a crime of violence (as defined 13 in section 16 of title 18, United States Code); relating to domestic or international terrorism (as those terms are defined in section 16 2331 of title 18, United States Code)

What exactly is a known suspicious transmission or major crime?

Suspicious Transmission is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission that government officials later determine commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime. Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a serious drug offense.

How could social media users, bloggers, web forum moderators, web conferencing users etc., know that a comment left or uttered by someone would later lead to them committing a major crime?

The See Something, Say Something Online Act would force social media users into red flagging every person’s comments just in case someone commits a major crime in the future.

This bill would effectively destroy the First Amendment as we know it, dispelling any vestiges of America still being a free country.

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