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December 9, 2020 by dratner Leave a Comment

How to Reform Section 230

I’ve spent more than two decades as an engineer and executive building digital platforms for everything from helping people find childcare (Sittercity.com) to supporting President Obama’s 2012 election campaign. Many of the products I’ve worked on were made possible by the protections built into Section 230 of the CDA. While I’ve been a strong supporter of the law in the past, the time has come to reform it. The big platforms (including Facebook and Twitter) have shown that self regulation isn’t a possible solution unless it is spurred on by real legislative change. While different sides have different views of the problem, the fact is that these companies have developed not just business monopolies, but effective monopolies on the flow of information in society. That creates a public interest that an unmodified Section 230 no longer serves.

A priori, since the objections to repeal or revision of Section 230 tend to be rooted in free speech rights, it’s worth pointing out that these rights, while broad and sacred, are not absolute. Perjury, fraud, libel, assault, certain kinds of pornography, and hate speech are all common exceptions to free speech. At the moment, due in significant part to Section 230, all of these regulated types of speech thrive online.

The platforms have a grain of truth in their claims that they should not become the arbiters of truth, or, implicitly, of these laws. But rather than effectively vacate them, a better option would be to shift them back to where they belong: in public and in the courts. 

How could this be done?

First, require the platforms to better verify the people who use their platforms even if they don’t make that information generally available to the public. If liability is to be shifted from the platform to the person responsible for the content, it must be straightforward to identify to the level of legal certainty who the person is. While some will point out that anonymity is important for users in authoritarian regimes, it may well be that the platforms need different operating plans in different countries (just as they currently have in China) and that anonymity may well be causing more harm that it is avoiding. Advertisers and other sites that support social sign-in should support these changes as well, since they would also reduce bots and other fake traffic. This would be a trimmed down version of KYC in financial services.

Second, the platforms should be required to create a machine-readable near realtime public archive of all posts that exceed a certain threshold of views. If people truly desire privacy, they can be given the option to limit the reach of their posts to below that threshold (likely based on Dunbar’s number – the quantity of real social connections a person can maintain – which is around 150.) If a person doesn’t accept that limit, it is because they desire their post to reach not just their friends but the largest possible audience – effectively, they want to be publishers. Given this, it is reasonable that they should agree that their post will be part of the archive and that they will take public responsibility for it. 

This would provide transparency and allow researchers to prove or put to rest claims of algorithmic bias (a key Republican concern.) It would also have the incidental benefit of chipping away at the monopoly status of these companies since these archives would provide troves of AI training data that potential competitors need to create comparable products.

Third, since this will no doubt lead to an explosion of claims, the platforms should be subject to a tax to offset the costs to the judicial system. This would be a straightforward tax on earnings so those who benefit most would pay the most. These companies should embrace such a tax since the alternative would be to vastly expand their content moderation teams which have already shown they are unequal to the job.

This proposal is relatively modest compared to many others under consideration and attempts to balance the interests of individual people, the platforms, and society. It may not be enough, but it would be an important first step. 

Filed Under: Technology, Uncategorized Tagged With: section 230, slider, tech

August 19, 2019 by dratner Leave a Comment

Devil’s Dictionary of Tech

Every so often I see an homage to Ambrose Bierce’s original Devil’s Dictionary updated for the digital age. Since a dictionary can have many contributors, I’d like to offer some definitions of my own…

Privacy Policy: A legal agreement obfuscating how a company can take your data and keep it private from you.

Pinwheel: Trying to make colossal failure looking deliberate by making it witty or pretty. See also beachball, fail whale, oh snap.

App: software that gets between you and what you want to accomplish.

To Google Someone: See “peeping Tom” (arc).

Facebook Live: Indecent exposure.

User Generated Content: The wretched refuse of a mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Also ridden with plagiarism and misappropriation.

Anonymous: Unaccountable.

Crypto: The intersection of money laundering and mass speculation.

Scalable: A crime too big to be punished.

Disruptive: Breaking laws so quickly, brazenly, and massively that you get away with it for awhile.

Direct Message: A message meant only for you, the recipient, the platform, the NSA, and any interested advertisers.

Cookie: The bribe offered by would be abductors trying to get you into their van.

Internet Poll: Popularity contest.

Algorithmic Matching: popularity contest.

Internet Famous: Incredibly well known by 15 people for 15 seconds.

Infinite Scroll: what you get when you dip below the bottom of the barrel and just keep going down.

Ad Blocker: Free rider.

Peer-to-Peer: A technologically facilitating interaction between two people that somehow requires thousands of employees and billions of dollars in California.

Kambucha: A fermented beverage lacking alcohol but still useful for hazing or indoctrination. It smells like a gas leak, tastes like a swamp, and flows down the gullet with the consistency of sewage. A serving costs more that US minimum wage and it is de rigeur to offer free in all tech company cafeterias.

Uptime: The casino’s hours.

Two Screening: When you need a distraction from your distraction.

Texting: When you don’t care enough to think.

User: A short circuit between the screen and the chair.

Hacker: The resale shop for your sensitive data after vendors and governments have finished with it.

<noun> Hacking: something that used to have its own gerund but is rebranded so it can be claimed by Silicon Valley. See dieting/body hacking, subleasing/rent hacking, etc.

Silicon Valley: To the twenty first century what Detroit was to the twentieth. 

Experienced: An employee who might recognize we have no idea what we’re doing and who will look weird in a company hoodie.

Senior: Expensive.

Machine Learning: when you can’t find a use for all the data you stole so you need to ask a computer to help.

Cloud: Nebulous and squishy agglomerations of vapor, full of darkness, turbulence, and occasional bursts of fatal lightning. Also where your data is stored.

Smartphone: A device to which the wearer’s intelligence has been outsourced.

Microsoft: See Apple (10 years ago.)

Apple: See Microsoft (10 years ago.)

Evil Empire: Whatever big tech you are talking to at the moment.

Don’t Be Evil: Do as I say, not as I do.

Ecosystem: Walled garden.

Sharing Economy: Neither shared nor an economy. Simply a class of companies that rents your possessions and labor in return for a pittance.

Content: The inconvenient text or video in the middle of all the beautiful ads. Like a lure for a fish, you don’t even get to keep it.

Filed Under: Politics, Technology Tagged With: devils dictionary, humor, slider, tech

March 22, 2019 by dratner Leave a Comment

Social Impact: A Tale of Two Stocks

In 2017 Kraft Heinz tried to acquire rival global food company Unilever for $143 billion. The deal did not complete and at least part of the reason that then-Unilever CEO Paul Polman revealed later was that it would require too many compromises in Unilever’s commitments to positive social impact.

I’m often challenged by people who believe that social impact is a nice-to-have and that big companies really can’t afford to worry about it for fear of being punished by shareholders. But while it’s anecdotal rather that a full-on trend, the story of these two stocks (UL and KHC for those of you listening at home) tells a very different story. I find it interesting since these are two huge, established, highly diversified and very sophisticated companies (each can claim to reach a broader user base that even Facebook), not a couple of hot new startups hoping to disrupt a market.

Kraft has been following the course that would be suggested by pure, traditional capitalism. Its investors introduced an approach called zero-based budgeting meant to squeeze every unnecessary penny in costs out of the system. At its core, the system calls for assuming no costs and having to justify each and every expense in each and every budgeting cycle. Theoretically, this should maximize earnings in a low-growth, somewhat commoditized industry. (It’s hard to increase the overall demand for products like ketchup, so you either need to move market share or lower costs in order to grow earnings.)

Unilever, on the other hand, has embraced social impact as a key part of its corporate strategy, both at a corporate level through its commitment to sustainable packaging and through individual brand projects like Vaseline’s Healing Project. This approach is supported by research done by leading marketing firms like Edelman and Porter Novelli that in 2018 US consumers said they valued buying a brand that agrees with their social values behind only product quality and ahead of price. This is a 20-year rising trend and is particularly noticeable in highly competitive product categories with the differentiation between two items on the shelf can be relatively small.

While this has not been the only difference in the two companies’ approaches, it has been a very significant one. And over the period since the merger fell apart, the results are stark. Between early 2017 and today, Unilever rose from around 41 to 57 while Kraft Heinz went from around 89 to 32.

It seems social impact has a strong place in capitalism after all.

Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: slider

September 25, 2018 by dratner Leave a Comment

Facebook, Open the Doors

Today Attorney General Jeff Sessions will meet with states’ attorneys general to discuss his theory of bias among social media sites and what, if anything, should be done about it. Ostensibly at issue is whether social media companies like Facebook use their proprietary algorithms to suppress conservative viewpoints or boost liberal ones. It is virtually certain names like Alex Jones and Diamond and Silk will feature in the conversation.

The importance of the conversation is difficult to overstate. Although Mark Zuckerberg himself famously underestimated social media’s power to put its finger on the political scale both here and abroad (a position he has since walked back), it’s clear from both academic research, Robert Mueller’s indictments, and certainly from my own experience at the Obama campaign and beyond that in fact social media in not only key to elections, but is also aggravating political polarization in the United States.

Before even digging into the merits of Sessions’ conspiracy theory, it’s easy to call BS on Republicans who have routinely argued that corporations, in keeping with Citizens United, have first amendment rights to political speech and, therefore, spending. Facebook and Twitter are both corporations superficially much like those whose rights have been tested before. Social media companies could argue that maybe they’re biased, maybe they’re not, but they have a right to be any way we want.

But as a technologist who is neck deep in the media industry who has done my time in both the political world and Silicon Valley, I would argue that this superficial analysis should be challenged. I am not necessarily arguing that government regulation or prosecutorial discretion is the right way to handle the situation, but those are tools that may need to come into play both for the giants to be able to justify potentially unprofitable changes to their boards and investors or to get them to reexamine some of their entrenched positions.

At issue are the algorithms that determine what social media users actually see and how it gets prioritized. Feeds are no longer simply chronologies, but have become what the Internet portals of yesteryear once were – along with search, they are the jumping off point for virtually all of everyone’s online activity from news to purchases to their original purpose of keeping up with friends. They aren’t simply compilations where everything posted by people you follow is arranged chronologically interspersed with occasional ads. Instead, content is prioritized using a myriad of behavioral data (likes, shares, history of engagement with similar content, etc.) to achieve specific outcomes. The outcomes can be seen as an improved user experience (cutting through the clutter) or an optimization of the social media sites own KPIs (e.g. visits, opportunities to display ads). In Sessions’ view, they can also be seen as more subversive deliberate attempts to advance a political agenda.

Personally, I do not believe in deliberate liberal or progressive bias in these algorithms. Despite the perceived liberal leanings of a majority of people working in the tech industry, the reality is that Valley politics, especially at the billionaire executive level, continues to swing more and more libertarian. Is it possible that line engineering and technical staff have implemented some kind of tweaks and changes without the blessing of corporate overlords, a sort of Silicon Valley deep state? It’s very unlikely since the prioritization of content is absolutely key to these companies’ revenue models and is under relentless internal scrutiny.

But is it possible that, in spite of this, bias still exists? Yes. For two reasons. The first is the manipulation of these systems by outside actors. Certainly marketers around the world are obsessed with how to optimize their messages for Facebook, and so too are political operatives. Both Mueller and Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie have described ways that this can be done that go well beyond marketing. Since in politics many campaigns and organizations seek to discredit each other or sow discord as much as promote their own candidate, it’s actually significantly easier.

The second reason has to do with technology. We don’t know much about the specifics of the algorithms these companies use, but we can look at the foundational technologies they are doubtless based on and make some inferences. For example, the algorithms could be purely rules-based, but that’s very unlikely given especially Facebook’s lauding of the importance of behavioral targeting, the number of variables involved, and the quantity and variety of data in play. It’s more likely that it’s some combination of rules, collaborative filtering, and machine learning, the last of which is a self-proclaimed area of expertise for Facebook.

While ML is certainly a good tool for solving the problem of creating customized experiences for billions of users, it is itself subject to hidden biases. ML models are trained using large sets of real world data and the output they create is subject to the influences and selection biases of the input data. For example, you could create a machine learning model to help screen great candidates from a pool of job applications using the resumes of your past employees scored by performance as input. In theory, this should result in the model figuring out which applications are more likely to be successful at your company. But it could also result in extended hidden biases – it might continue to pick majority male candidates even if it doesn’t know the gender of the applicants based on related signals like name (e.g. “John”), sports, or even the biased makeup of other companies you’ve successfully poached from.

ML researchers have shown that understanding not just how successful algorithms are at their jobs but also understanding how they work is crucially important. For example, one team demonstrated the ability to fool the system from a prototype autonomous car into thinking a stop sign was a 45 mile per hour speed limit sign, a technique now called adversarial images. If they could manipulate the image directly, the changes weren’t even perceptible to the human eye. The point of this was that the car’s recognition system was accurate at detecting stop signs, but it wasn’t just looking for red octagons. It had learned something else that was working for it.

It is likely that if Facebook and the others are using machine learning in their prioritization algorithms they could well be subject to either hidden bias or direct manipulation. While the company would certainly do it’s best to look for these things, outside scrutiny could also be extremely helpful and would also let us know what the companies are actually optimizing for.

While the companies might claim that these algorithms represent some kind of secret sauce and that their exposure would be very damaging, that doesn’t completely stand up to scrutiny. Facebook is a monopoly or near monopoly because of network effect, not the power of its prioritization algorithm. In fact, most people do not have a positive perception of the product as represented by their net promoter score (NPS) of -21 (Twitter’s NPS of 3 is a little better but still terrible.) No competing company would emulate the algorithms with the intent of creating a customer experience like that.

It’s more likely that the exposure would be in terms of how it promotes ads, but that could even be taken out of the picture for this purpose. Just a public understanding of the prioritization of the natural news feed would be an enormous win for transparency.

The last significant pushback would be that opening the algorithms would enable manipulators like Cambridge Analytica. That is almost plausible, but relies on the dubious principle of security through obscurity. The key to securing these systems lies in trust models, identifying bad actors, and in the scrutiny of trending content. It does not lie in keeping the algorithms secret.

Social media companies have resisted classification as media companies or public utilities although they actually have a lot in common with both. Opening their algorithms for prioritizing even non-commercial content to public scrutiny could do a huge amount to restore trust, might actually improve their products, and would be one of the least invasive ways of doing it. I’m not minimizing how hard it is to do – this isn’t just code, but also large samples of anonymized user data would need to be sanitized and made available as well. But I think it’s the best way forward. If there’s nothing to hide, it would defang Jeff Sessions and the attorneys general. If there is something hidden (perhaps even from the companies themselves) it would help bring that to light.

If you want to support organizations working to make social media better, you can do it below.

Filed Under: News, Politics, Technology Tagged With: slider

September 21, 2018 by dratner Leave a Comment

The O’Hare Plan

In a year without a lot to be cheerful about in our hometown, I was excited to hear that Mayor Emanuel is putting a real push behind the idea of high speed rail service from the Chicago loop to O’Hare. This is a really good idea for a few reasons but primarily because it will increase Chicago’s global competitiveness, take a big ding out of traffic, and bring a lot of economy that has sprawled into the suburbs back downtown.

If you are running a global business today, the fact of the matter is that you’ll have a lot of employees spending a lot of time on airplanes. We simply aren’t at the point where most interactions can be done virtually. And those hours really add up. Embarrassingly, not a single US airport makes the global list of best airports and right now Chicago doesn’t make the list even in North America. One big, often cited reason for one airport to outrank another is ease of transportation to and from it. This is one of things that always holds American airports back – we haven’t got anything like the Heathrow Express. Creature comforts are great, but efficiency and predictability are way more important (which is why I’ve previously argued for a service level agreement at customs, guaranteeing 95% of passengers get through in 15 minutes or fewer.)

This matters not just for businesses headquartered in Chicago (and would certainly be a boost to companies like Amazon or GE when they consider locating here), but it also matters a lot for other key Chicago industries: tourism, hospitality, and conventions. We all know Chicago has some of the greatest restaurants, theatre, and entertainment available anywhere and we get more than 50 million tourists a year spending billions of dollars. And many of the jobs in these industries are low skill or entry level but with career paths, which is a major win in an economy increasingly focused on high tech and services.

One way to see directly what a difference better airport transportation would make is to look at Rosemont. Why does it have its own thriving hotels, conference center, offices, etc.? It doesn’t offer a better climate, better amenities, or even appreciably lower prices that downtown. It’s just way more convenient that taking a car ride that could take anywhere between 45 minutes and two hours, or trying to drag luggage (especially convention kits) on the Blue Line. A side effect of high speed service to the loop would be that a lot of that business could move back downtown.

Less discussed, but probably also top of mind for Kennedy commuters is the fact that this rail service would take some load of the highways and even off the Blue Line. That would lead to fewer delays, longer lasting roads, and less crowded el cars. It would also make it easier for O’Hare freight service, since it would need to compete with a lot fewer cars on the roads.

There has been a tendency to think of the high speed airport link as just a concession to rich businesspeople, but I believe it’s anything but that. It would be a major factor in boosting the economy and increasing the quality of transportation even for people not themselves going to the airport. It’s a worthy project and one we should pursue.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: slider

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