*prerol music*
Herald: Our next Talk will be tackling how social media companies are creating a
global morality standard through content regulations. This would be presented by
two persons standing here the digital rights advocate Matthew Stender and the
writer and activist Jillian C. York. Please give them a warm applause.
*applause*
Matthew: Hello everybody. I hope you all had a great Congress. Thank you for being
here today. You know we're almost wrapped up with the Congress but yeah we
appreciate you being here. My name is Matthew Stender. I am a communications
strategist's creative director and digital rights advocate focusing on privacy.
Social media censorship and Freedom of Press and expression.
Jillian: And I am Jillian York and I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I
work on privacy and free expression issues as well as a few other things and I'm
based in Berlin. Thank you. For Berlin? Awesome. Cool. Hope to see some of you
there. Great. So today we're gonna be talking about sin in the time of
technology and what we mean by that is the way in which corporations particularly
content platforms and social media platforms are driving morality and our
perception of it. We've got three key takeaways to start off with. The first is
that social media companies have an unparalleled amount of influence over our
modern communications. This we know I think this is probably something everyone
in this room can agree on. These companies also play a huge role in shaping our
global outlook on morality and what constitutes it. So the ways in which we
perceive different imagery different speech is being increasingly defined by
the regulations that these platforms put upon us on our daily activities on them.
And third they are entirely undemocratic. They're beholden to shareholders and
governments but not at all to the public. Not to me, not to you. Rarely do they
listen to us and when they do there has to be a fairly exceptional mount of public
pressure on them. And so that's, that's our starting point that's what we wanna
kick off with and I'll pass the mike to Matthew.
M: So thinking about these three takeaways I'm going to bring it to kind of top level
for a moment. To introduce an idea today which some people have talked about but
the idea of the rise of the techno class. So probably a lot of people in this room
have followed the negotiations, leaks in part and then in full by WikiLeaks about
the Trans-Pacific Partnership the TPP what some people have mentioned in this debate
is the idea of a corporate capture in a world now in which that corporations are
becoming are maturing to this to the extent in which they can now sue
governments that the multinational reach of many corporations are larger than that.
The diplomatic reach of countries. And with this social media platforms being
part of this that they, that these social media companies now are going to have the
capacity to influence not only cultures but people within cultures and how they
communicate with people inside their culture and communicate globally. So as
activists and technologists I would like to propose at least that we start thinking
about and beyond the product and service offerings of today's social media
companies and start looking ahead to two - five - ten years down the road in which
these companies may have social media services and serve as media social media
service offerings which are indistinguishable from today's ISPs and
telcos and other things. And this is really to say that social media is moving
past the era of the walled garden into neo empires. So one of the things that is on
the slide are some headlines about different delivery mechanisms in which
that social media companies and also people like Elon Musk are looking to roll
out an almost leapfrog if not completely leapfrog the existing technologies of
Russia broadcasting fiberoptics these sort of things. So we now are looking at a
world in which that Facebook is now gonna have drones. Google is looking into
balloons and other people looking into low earth orbit satellites to be able to
provide directly to the end consumer, to the user, to the handset the content which
flows through these networks. So one of the first things I believe we're gonna see
in this field is free basics. Facebook has a service it was launched as Internet.org
and now it's been rebranded free basics and why this is interesting is that while
in one hand free basis is a free service that it's trying to get the people that
are not on the Internet now to use a Facebook's window Facebook's window to the
world. It has maybe a couple dozen sites that are accessible it runs over the data
networks for countries reliance the telecommunications company in India is one
of the larger telcos but not the largest. There's a lot of pressure that Facebook is
putting on the government of India right now to be able to have the service offered
across the country. One of the ways that this is problematic is because a limited
number of Web sites flow through this that people that get exposed to free basic.
This might be their first time seeing the Internet in some cases because an example
is interesting to think about is a lion born into a zoo. Perhaps evolution and
other things may have this line dream perhaps of running wild on the plains of
Africa but at the same time it will never know that world Facebook free basic users
knowing Facebook's view to the window of the Internet may not all jump over to a
full data package on their ISP. And many people may be stuck in Facebook's window
to the world.
J: In other words we've reached an era where these companies have as I've said
unprecedented control over our daily communications both the information that
we can access and the speech and imagery that we can express to the world and to
each other. So the postings and pages and friend requests, the millions of
politically active users as well, have helped to make Mark Zuckerberg and his
colleagues as well as the people at Google, Twitter and all these other fine
companies extremely rich and yet we're pushing back in this case. I've got a
great quote from Rebecca MacKinnon where she refers to Facebook as Facebookistan
and I think that that is an apt example of what we're looking at. These are
corporations but they're not beholden at all to the public as we know. And instead
they've kind of turned into these quasi dictatorships that dictate precisely how
we behave on them. I also wanted to throw this one up to talk a little bit about the
global speech norm. This is from Ben Wagner who's written a number of pieces on
this but who kind of coined the concept of a global speech standard which is what
these companies have begun and are increasingly imposing upon us. This global
speech standard is essentially catering to everyone in the world trying to make every
user in every country and every government happy. But as a result have kind of tamper
down free speech to this very basic level that makes both the governments of let's
say the United States and Germany happy as well as the governments of countries like
Saudi Arabia. Therefore we're looking at really kind of the lowest common
denominator when it comes to sometimes tone types of speech and this sort of flat
gray standard when it comes to others.
M: So Jillian just mentioned we have countries in play. Facebook is another
organizations social media companies are trying to pivot and play within an
international field but let's just take it up for a moment a look at the scale and
scope and size of these social media companies. So I just put some figures from
the Internet and with some latest census information we have China 1.37 billion
people, India 1.25 billion people 2.2 billion individuals and practitioners of
Islam and Christianity. But now we have Facebook with according to their
statistics 1.5 billion active monthly users. Their statistics - I'm sure many
people would like to dispute these numbers - but the same time with these platforms
are now large. I mean larger than - not larger than some of religions - but
Facebook has more monthly active users than China or India have citizens. So
we're not talking about - you know - basement startups, we're now talking about
companies with the size and scale to be able to really be influential in a larger
institutional way. So Magna Carta app the U.S. Constitution the Declaration of Human
Rights the tree of masters the Bible the Quran. These are time tested at least
longstanding principle documents. That's how that place upon their constituents
whether it be citizens or spiritual adherents a certain code of conduct.
Facebook, as Jillian mentioned, is nondemocratic. Facebook's terms and
standards were written by a small group of individuals with a few compelling
interests in mind. But we are now talking about 1.5 billion people on a monthly
basis that are subservient to a Terms of Service in which they had no input on.
Sort of pivot from there and bring it back to spirituality why is this important.
Well spiritual morality has always been a place for - for religion. Religion has a
monopoly on the soul. You could say, that religion is a set of rules in which that
if you obey you are able to not go to hell or heaven after an afterlife reincarnated
whatever the religious practice may be. Civil morality is quite interesting in the
sense that the sovereign state as a top level institution has the ability to put
into place a series of statutes and regulations. The violation of which can
send you to jail. Another interesting note is that the state is also, also has a
monopoly on the use of sanctioned violence. Say that's the actors of
official actors of the states are able to do things in which that the citizens
citizens of that state may not. And if we take a look at this this concept of
digital morality I spoke about earlier with services like free basic introducing
new individuals to the Internet well, by a violation of the terms of service you can
be excluded from these massive global networks. And really they, Facebook is
actually trying to create a if not a monopoly a semi monopoly on global
connectivity. in a lot of ways. So what drives Facebook and this is a few things.
One is a protection stick protectionistic legal framework. Ok. The control of
copyright violations is something that a lot of platforms stomped out pretty early.
They don't want to be sued by the IRA or the MPAA. And so there was mechanisms in
which copyright, copyrighted material was able to be taken on the platform. They
also or limit potential competition. And I think this is quite interesting in the
sense that they have shown this in two ways. One: They've boughten they've
purchased rival or potential competitors. You see this with Instagram being bought
by Facebook. But Facebook has also demonstrated the ability or willingness to
censor certain context, certain content. tsu.co was a news social sites and
mentions and links to this platform were deleted or not allowed on Facebook. So
even using Facebook as a platform to talk about another platform was was not
allowed. And then a third component is the operation on the global scale. It's only
the size of the company it's also about the global reach. So if Facebook maintains
offices around the world, as other social media companies do, they engage in public
diplomacy and they also offer aid in many countries and many languages. So just to
take it to to companies like Facebook for a moment really an economics you have the
traditional multinationals the 20th century Coca Cola McDonald's. The end
user. The end goal the goal for the end user of these products was consumption.
This is changing now. Facebook is looking to capture more and more parts of the
supply chain. And as a this may be as a service provider as a content moderator
and responsible for negotiating and educating the content disputes. At the end
of the day that users are really the product. It's not for us Facebook users
the platform it's really for advertisers. We take a hierarchy of the platform where
the corporation advertisers and then users kind of at the fringes.
J: So let's get into the nitty gritty a little bit about what content moderation
on these platforms actually looks like. So I've put up two headlines from Adrian Chan
a journalist who wrote these for Gawker and wired respectively. They're both a
couple of years old. But what he did was he looked into he investigated who was
moderating the content on these platforms and what he found and accused these
companies out of is outsourcing the content moderation to low paid workers in
developing countries. In this case he found the first article I think Morocco
was the country and I'm gonna show a slide from that a bit of what those content
moderators worked with. And the second article talked a lot about the use of
workers in the Philippines for this purpose. We know that these workers are
probably low paid. We know that they're given very very minimal amount of a
minimal timeframe to look at the content that they're being presented. So here's
how it basically works across platforms with small differences. I post something
and I'll show you some great examples of things they posted later. I post something
and if I post it to my friends only, my friends can then report it to the company.
If I post it publicly anybody who can see it or who's a user of the product can
report it to the company. Once a piece of content is reported a content moderator
then looks at it and within that very small time frame we're talking half a
second to two seconds probably based on the investigative research that's been
done by a number of people they have to decide if this content fits the terms of
service or not. Now most of these companies have a legalistic terms of
service as well as a set of community guidelines or community standards which
are clear to the user but they're still often very vague. And so I wanna get into
a couple of examples that show that. This is just this slide is the one of the
examples that I gave. You can't see it very well, so I won't leave it up for too
long. But that was what content moderators at this outsource company oDesk were
allegedly using to moderate content on Facebook. This next photo contains nudity.
So I think everyone probably knows who this is and has seen this photo. Yes? No?
OK. This is Kim Kardashian and this photo allegedly broke the Internet. It was a
photo taken for paper magazine. It was posted widely on the web and it was seen
by many many people. Now this photograph definitely violates Facebook's terms of
service. Buuut Kim Kardashian's really famous and makes a lot of money. So in
most instances as far as I can tell this photo was totally fine on Facebook. Now
let's talk about those rules a little bit. Facebook says that they restrict nudity
unless it is art. So they do make an exception for art which may be why they
allowed that image of Kim Kardashian's behind to stay up. Art is defined by the
individual. And yet at the same time that you know they make clear that that's let's
say a photograph of Michelangelo's David or a photograph of another piece of art in
a museum would be perfectly acceptable whereas you know you're sort of average
nudity maybe probably is not going to be allowed to remain on the platform. They
also note that they restrict the display of nudity to ensure that their global..
because their global community may be sensitive to this type of content
particularly because of their cultural background or age. So this is Facebook in
their community standards telling you explicitly that they are toning down free
speech to make everyone happy. This is another photograph. Germans are
particularly I'm interested. Is everyone familiar with the show the Golden Girls?
OK. Quite a few. So you might recognize her she was Dorothea on the Golden Girls
this is the actress Bea Arthur and this is from a painting from 1991 by John Curran
of her. It's unclear whether or not she sat for the painting. It's a wonderful
image, it's beautiful it's very beautiful portrait of her. But I posted it on
Facebook several times in a week. I encouraged my friends to report it. And in
fact Facebook found this to not be art. Sorry. Another image this is by an artist
a Canadian artist called Rupi Kaur. She posted a series of images in which she was
menstruating, she was trying to essentially describe the normal the
normality of this. The fact that this is something that all women go through. Most
women go through. And as a result Instagram denied. Unclear on the reasons,
they told her that had violated the terms of service but weren't exactly clear as to
why. And finally this is another one. This is by an artist friend of mine, I'm afraid
that I have completely blanked on who did this particular piece, but what it was is:
They took famous works of nude art and had sex workers pose in the same poses as the
pieces of art. I thought it was a really cool project but Google Plus did not find
that to be a really cool project. And because of their guidelines on nudity they
banned it. This is a cat. Just want to make sure you're awake. It was totally
allowed. So in addition to the problems of content moderation I'm gonna go ahead and
say that we also have a major diversity problem at these companies. These
statistics are facts these are from all of these companies themselves. They put out
diversity reports recently or as I like to call them diversity reports and they show
that. So the statistics are a little bit different because they only capture data
on ethnicity or nationality in their US offices just because of how those
standards are sort of odd all over the world. So the first stats referred to
their global staff. The second ones in each line refer to their U.S. staff but as
you can see these companies are largely made of white men which is probably not
surprising but it is a problem. Now why is that a problem? Particularly when you're
talking about policy teams the people who build policies and regulations have an
inherent bias. We all have an inherent bias. But what we've seen in this is
really a bias of sort of the American style of prudeness. Nudity is not allowed
but violence extreme violence as long as it's fictional is totally OK. And that's
generally how these platforms operate. And so I think that when we ensure that there
is diversity in the teams creating both our tools our technology and our policies,
then we can ensure that diverse world views are brought into those that creation
process and that the policies are therefore more just. So what can we do
about this problem? As consumers as technologists as activists as whomever you
might identify as. In the first one I think a lot of the technologists are gonna
agree with: Develop decentralized networks. We need to work toward that
ideal because these companies are not getting any smaller. We're not gonna
necessarily go out and say that they're too big to fail but they are massive and
as Matthew noted earlier they're buying up properties all over the place and making
sure that they do have control over our speech. The second thing is to push for
greater transparency around terms of service takedowns. Now I'm not a huge fan
of transparency for the sake of transparency. I think that these, you
know, these companies have been putting out transparency reports for a long time
that show what countries ask them to take down content or hand over user data. But
we've seen those transparency reports to be incredibly flawed already. And so in
pushing for greater transparency around terms of service take downs that's only a
first step. The third thing is, we need to demand that these companies adhere to
global speech standards. We already have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I don't understand why we need companies to develop their own bespoke rules. And so
by.. *applause*
And so by demanding that companies adhere to global speech standards we can ensure
that these are places of free expression because it is unrealistic to just tell
people to get off Facebook. I can't tell you how many times in the tech community
over the years I've heard people say well if you don't like it just leave. That's
not a realistic option for many people around the world and I think we all know
that deep down. *applause*
Thank you. And so the other thing I would say though is that public pressure works.
We saw last year with Facebook's real name policy there are a number of drag
performers in the San Francisco Bay Area who were kicked off the platform because
they were using their performance - their drag names - which is a completely
legitimate thing to do just as folks have hacker names or other pseudonyms. But
those folks pushed back. They formed a coalition and they got Facebook to change
a little bit. It's not completely there yet but they're making progress and I'm
hoping that this goes well. And then the last thing is and this is totally a pitch
thrown right out there: Support projects like ours I'm gonna throw to Matthew to
talk about onlinecensorship.org and another project done by the excellent
Rebecca MacKinnon called ranking digital rights.
M: So just a little bit of thinking outside the box onlinecensorship.org is a
platform that's recently launched. Users can go onto the platform and submit a
small questionnaire if their content has been taken down by the platforms. Why we
think this is exciting is because right now as we mentioned that transparency
reports are fundamentally flawed. We are looking to crowdsource information about
the ways in which the social media companies, six social media companies, are
moderating and taking down content because we can't know exactly what kind of
accountability and transparency in real time. We're hoping to be able to find
trends both across the kind of conduct has been taking down, geographic trends, news
related trends within sort of self-reported content takedown. But it's
platforms like these that I think that hopefully will begin to spring up in
response for the community to be able to put tools in place that people can be a
part of the poor porting and Transparency Initiative.
J: We launched about a month ago and were hoping to put out our first set of reports
around March. And finally I just want to close with one more quote before we slip
into Q&A and that is just to save it. It's reasonable that we press Facebook on these
questions of public responsibility, while also acknowledging that Facebook cannot be
all things to all people. We can demand that their design decisions and user
policies standard for review explicit thoughtful and open to public
deliberation. But - and this is the most important part in my view - the choices that
Facebook makes in their design and in their policies or value judgments. This is
political and I know you've heard that in a lot of talk. So have I. But I think we
can't, we cannot forget that this is all political and we have to address it as
such. And for someone if that means you know quitting the platform thats fine too.
But I think that we should still understand that our friends our relatives
our families are using these platforms and that we do owe it to everybody to make
them a better place for free expression and privacy. Thank you.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you so much. So please now we have a section of Q&A for anyone who
has a question please use one of the mikes on the site's. And I think we have a
question from one of our viewers? No. OK. Please proceed numer one.
Mike 1: You just addressed that I am sort of especially after listening to your talk
I'm sort of on the verge of quitting Facebook or starting to I don't know.
*applause* Yeah, I mean and I agree it's a hard
decision. I've been on Facebook for I think six years now and it is a dispute
for me myself. So, I'm in this very strange position. And now I have to kind
of decide what to do. Are there any.. is there any help for me out there to tell me
what would be.. I don't know what.. that takes my state and helps me in deciding..
I don't know. It's strange.
J: That's such a hard question. I mean I'm.. I'll put on my privacy hat for just
a second and say what I would say to people when they're making that
consideration from a privacy view point because they do think that the
implications of privacy on these platforms is often much more severe than those of
speech. But this is what I do. So in that case you know I think it's really about
understanding your threat model of understanding what sort of threat you're
under when it comes to you know the data collection that these companies are
undertaking as well as the censorship of course. But I think it really is a
personal decision and I I'm sure that there are - you know - there are great
resources out there around digital security and around thinking through those
thread model processes and perhaps that could be of help to you for that. If you
want to add? M: No I mean I think it's, it's one of
these big toss ups like this is a system in which that many people are connected
through even sometimes e-mail addresses rollover and Facebook. And so I think it's
the opportunity cost by leaving a platform. What do you have to lose, what
do you have to gain. But it's also important remember that well the snapshot
we see of Facebook now it's not gonna get any it's probably not gonna get better.
It's probably gonna be more invasive and in coming into different parts of our
lives so I think from the security and privacy aspect it's really just up to the
individual. Mike 1: Short follow up - if I am allowed
to - I don't see the.. the main point for me is not my personal implications so I am
quite aware that Facebook is a bad thing and I can leave it, but I'm sort of
thinking about it's way past the point where we can decide on our own and decide:
OK, is it good for me or is it good for my friend or is it good for my mom or for my
dad or whatever? We have to think about: Is Facebook as such for society is a good
thing - as you are addressing. So I think we have to drive this decision making from
one person to a lot, lot, lot of persons. J: I agree and I'll note. What we're
talking about.. *applause*
- I agree. What we're talking about in the project that we work on together is a
small piece of the broader issue and I agree that this needs to be tackled from
many angles. Herald: Ok, we have a question from one of
our viewers on the Internet, please. Signal Angel: Yeah, one of the questions
from the internet is: Aren't the moderators the real problem who bann
everything which they don't really like rather than the providers of the service?
Herald: Can you please repeat that? Signal Angel: The question was if the
moderators sometimes volunteers aren't the problem because they bann everything that
they don't like rather than the providers of a certain service?
J: Ahm, no I mean I would say that the content moderators.. we don't know who
they are, so that's part of the issue, as we don't know and I've - you know - I've
heard many allegations over the years when certain content's been taken down in a
certain local or cultural context particularly in the Arab world. I've heard
the accusation that like oh those content moderators are pro Sisi the dictator in
Egypt or whatever. I'm not sure how much merit that holds because like I said we
don't know who they are. But I would say is that they're not.. it doesn't feel like
they're given the resources to do their jobs well, so even if they were the best
most neutral people on earth they're given very little time probably very little
money and not a whole lot of resources to work with in making those determinations.
Herald: Thank you. We take a question from Mike 3 please.
Mike 3: Test, test. OK. First off, thank you so much for the talk. And I just have
a basic question. So it seems logical that Facebook is trying to put out this mantra
of protect the children. I can kind of get behind that. And it also seems based on
the fact that they have the "real names policy" that they would also expect you to
put in a real legal age. So if they're trying to censor things like nudity: Why
couldn't they simply use things like age as criteria to protect children from
nudity. While letting everyone else who is above the legal age make their own
decision? J: You wanna take that?
M: I think it's a few factors one: It's I guess on the technical side what on the
technical side, what constitutes nudity. And in a process way if it does get
flagged as when something is flagged do you have a channel or two boxes to say
what sort of content I could use a system in which that content flagged as nudity
gets referred to a special nudity moderator and then the moderator says:
"Yes is nudity" then filter all less than - you know - legal age or whatever age.
But I think it's part of a broader more systematic approach by Facebook. It's the
broad strokes. It's really kind of dictating this digital baseline this
digital morality baseline and we're saying: "No". Anybody in the world cannot
see this. These are our hard lines and it doesn't matter what age you are where you
reside. This is the box in which we are placing you in and content that falls
outside of this box for anybody, regardless of age or origin, that these
this is what we say you can see and anything that falls out that you risk
having your account suspended. So I think it's a mechanism of control.
Herald: Thank you so much. I think unfortunately we're run out of time for
questions. I would like to apologize for everyone who's standing maybe you have
time to discuss that afterwards. Thank you everyone and thank you.
*applause*
*postrol music*