Source Code: Your daily look at what matters in tech.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.
yesIssie LapowskyNone
November 19, 2020
Facebook's decision to send content moderators home in March had devastating consequences for the company's ability to catch and remove posts containing the most harmful content. Now, as some moderators have returned to the office in recent months, things are getting back to normal — underlining the importance of having humans in the loop.
That's according to Facebook's third-quarter transparency report, published Thursday. It shows, for instance, that in the third quarter of this year, Instagram removed nearly twice as much child sexual abuse material and nearly five times as much suicide-related content as it did in the second quarter.
This dramatic shift underscores just how crucial this global army of moderators is to the way the world's largest social media platform operates.
"People are an important part of the equation for content enforcement," Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of integrity, said on a call with reporters Thursday. "These are incredibly important workers who do an incredibly important part of this job ... The reason we're bringing some workers back into offices is exactly to ensure that we can have that balance of both people and AI working on these areas."
Facebook's report comes just one day after dozens of moderators signed an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others that criticizes recent orders that they return to the office despite a surge in COVID-19 cases and demands that they be made full-time employees. "By outsourcing our jobs, Facebook implies that the 35,000 of us who work in moderation are somehow peripheral to social media," the letter read. "Yet we are so integral to Facebook's viability that we must risk our lives to come into work."
Rosen stressed that the majority of content moderators are still working from home, but said that those who have gone back to the office are doing so in spaces with reduced capacity, physical distancing, mandatory temperature checks and other safety precautions "to ensure that we're providing a safe workspace for them to do this incredibly important work to keep our community safe as well."
The moderators argued that's not enough, and are pushing Facebook to guarantee them things like "real healthcare," hazard pay and the ability to continue working from home if they live with at-risk individuals.
Facebook's executives credited many of the gains they made this quarter to their investment in automated systems. That includes their ability to proactively detect 95% of hate speech on the platform. When Facebook first began reporting this stat in 2017, just 23.6% of hate speech was proactively detected before users reported it. Facebook also reported the prevalence of hate speech on the platform — that is, the percentage of times people actually see hate speech while using Facebook — for the first time. They found that prevalence was 0.1% to 0.11%, suggesting for every 10,000 views on Facebook, about 10 or 11 of them contain hate speech.
Despite these advances, Facebook's chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer acknowledged that automated filters will never replace the work of human moderators. "I don't see any short-term reduction or long-term reduction in the human involvement in this," he said on the call. "We get faster, more accurate, more powerful and then we can use our amazing staff we have to work on the more nuanced problems we have that really require human review."
Issie Lapowsky
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
People
Beeper built the universal messaging app the world needed
It's an app for all your social apps. And part of an entirely new way to think about chat.
Beeper is an app for all your messaging apps, including the hard-to-access ones.
Image: Beeper
January 22, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 22, 2021
Eric Migicovsky likes to tinker. And the former CEO of Pebble — he's now a partner at Y Combinator — knows a thing or two about messaging. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that feature, and he especially liked that it didn't care which app you used. Android-using Pebble wearers could speak their replies to texts, Messenger chats, almost any notification that popped up.
That kind of universal, non-siloed approach to messaging appealed to Migicovsky, and it didn't really exist anywhere else. "Remember Trillian from back in the day?" he asked, somewhat wistfully. "Or Adium?" They were the gold-standard of universal messaging apps; users could log in to their AIM, MSN, GChat and Yahoo accounts, and chat with everyone in one place.
<p>Migicovsky has spent the last two years building a modern equivalent. It's called Beeper, and it pulls 15 different messaging services — including WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram and iMessage — into a single app. The app launched this week, and will cost $10 a month for anyone who wants to use it. Migicovsky said roughly 40 people have been using the app for the last few months, and that he's come to rely on it completely. "Beeper went down for me a couple of weeks ago, and I had to fix it," he said. "And for the hours I was fixing it, I had to open up Slack, Telegram, Signal, everything. It was like going back to the Stone Ages." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
</div>
</div></p><p>To explain how Beeper works, and why Migicovsky thinks it's valuable, you have to understand the protocols. In the early days of online messaging (otherwise known as The Adium Era), many messaging services were based on a protocol called Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP. When it was designed, XMPP intended to make all kinds of communication on the internet, from text to video to file transfers, into decentralized systems. For a while, it worked: From AIM to Google Talk to the early days of Facebook Chat, some of the biggest messaging services used XMPP. </p><p>A few years later, Google and Facebook — and soon others — decided to stop supporting XMPP. Some argued XMPP was too complicated a protocol and simply didn't work; others said they could develop features more quickly by keeping everything in-house. "Today, group conversations, sharing your day with stickers or emojis and messaging across multiple devices have become second nature to many of us," Google product manager Mayur Kamat <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150704141805if_/https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/ETBvtp9VYav" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote in 2015</a> announcing the switch from Google Talk (which supported XMPP) to Hangouts (which didn't). Whatever the reason, messaging apps soon became walled gardens, with everything run — and stored — in one place.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
</div>
</div></p><p>In the last few years, though, a group of developers has been building a new protocol, one they hope can offer all the openness and decentralization of XMPP but with all the modern features people need now: encryption, voice and video, integrations with other apps and the like. It's called Matrix. "Matrix is our effort to right the balance" after decades of great tech being turned into walled gardens, said Matthew Hodgson, Matrix's technical co-founder. "If you were going to build the holy grail of messaging," the team asked themselves several years ago — a service where anyone can participate, where everything is encrypted, where nothing is locked off from the ecosystem — "what would it look like?" Some of this tech has been built in the past, but always inside a single company or service. They wanted to build it and give it to the internet.</p><p>Ultimately, Hodgson said, Matrix is more than a messaging protocol. "It's a real-time database for any kind of information," he said, from financial tickers to drone flights to VR streams. "Matrix just gives you the building blocks to synchronize it between different deployments." Messaging just happens to be something with which Hodgson and his team have plenty of experience. Not to mention, it's kind of a killer app. Matrix-based messaging can support a whole ecosystem of apps, the way email protocols do. It's all end-to-end encrypted, and it's resilient by virtue of not being housed in a single data center. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
</div>
</div></p><p>"When Slack goes down for six hours," Hodgson said, "or Signal goes down for 24 hours, people realize, 'hang on, all my eggs are in one basket.'" There are already decentralized, harder-to-kill apps like Slack or Signal running on Matrix, where there's less security risk or possibility of downtime. He added: "The narrative is swinging in our direction." Millions of users use Matrix messaging tools already, he said, including the entire French government, which uses a Slack-like tool called Element that is built by the Matrix team.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTUxMjQ3Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3MDIzNzU0NX0.NPrsWaIEy9RUG90_cIsyZMFW7foaGyiuP_vHdD2T-Ok/img.png?width=980" id="ce4ab" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="37ea800dd363bb5c0c588b2727990131" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Beeper chats">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Beeper tries to wrangle lots of messaging apps into one. Eventually, that might not be necessary.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: Beeper</small></p><p>Matrix is key to Beeper, but in a slightly different way. Migicovsky isn't trying to build a brand-new chat service to compete with WhatsApp; he's trying to wrangle all the services people use into a system that feels more open. So he's taking advantage of a Matrix feature called Bridges, which pulls other apps into the Matrix ecosystem. Sometimes this is easy: Migicovsky said IRC and Telegram have great APIs, making it easy to send and read messages from other apps. Most others are a bit hackier, though Migicovsky said it's rarely impossible: "If you can open something in a browser, we can get to it."<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
</div>
</div></p><p>One of Beeper's most enticing integrations is with iMessage, which would mean users could access their iMessages on Android or Windows through the Beeper app. This one is stupendously hacky. If a Beeper user has a Mac that's always on and connected to the internet, it's easy; Beeper just connects to the same relay that delivers messages to all your Apple devices, and sends them to Beeper. But if you don't have a Mac that fits the description, there's only one way in. "We wrote an app for jailbroken iPhones that acts as a relay," Migicovsky said. "There's a database on the iPhone called sms.db. And so we just read and write to that." </p><p>But wait, it gets hackier! There's no way to get everyone to jailbreak their iPhones, so Migicovsky found a workaround. "I buy used old cracked-screen iPhones for cheap," he said. "I jailbreak them, and send them to people with the app installed. And they just set it up and leave it somewhere connected to Wi-Fi." There's a box full of semi-busted iPhones, all the way back to the iPhone 4, on his desk right now. The plan works, though it doesn't exactly scale. "We tried a lot of different things," Migicovsky said. "It might not be like this forever." </p><p>There's one part of this setup that Migicovsky actually quite likes. "You control the phone," he said. All the code is open source, and Beeper encrypts all messages; only users have their passwords to access them. But if you really don't want Beeper getting your texts anymore, just unplug that jailbroken iPhone, and you're done.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
</div>
</div></p><p>Migicovsky has lots of ideas for how to improve Beeper as a product, and messaging in general. "No one has really innovated in chat in the last 10 years," he said, before allowing that maybe Slack and Discord get a little credit. But that's it. He's not sure what better looks like, though. He's intrigued by new ways to sort and organize messages, even how threads could look. "I'm really just excited about having this ... not a blank canvas, a malleable canvas," he said.</p><p>The list of places people message seems to get longer every day, and Migicovsky wants Beeper to support them all. "I want to build LinkedIn and Snapchat, and I'm not dating but a lot of people want Tinder messages on this," he said. He's not trying to replace those apps entirely, though. "Discord's amazing," he said, by way of example. "It has cool animations, you have the audio chat that's really good, it's got this social element." For Discord things, people should use Discord. But texting with friends or sharing photos shouldn't be a Discord thing. Or an Instagram thing, or a WhatsApp thing, or a Signal thing, or a Slack thing. It definitely shouldn't be all of those, separately.</p>"It would be wonderful if we didn't have to build what we built," Migicovsky said. "And you could just look me up, like in a phone book or something, and say, 'I want to talk to Eric.'" In the long run, Matrix might help make that possible — already, it appears some of Twitter's decentralization work through Project Bluesky is <a href="https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1352302821140549632" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">being done on Matrix</a>, and Hodgson said he's had conversations with a number of big players in the tech world about build a more open and interoperable messaging ecosystem. For now, the best anyone can do is put everything in one place. It's hacky, but it's progress.
Keep Reading
Show less
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Politics
Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t save it from the Trump ban backlash
The Board's decision on whether to reinstate Trump could set a new precedent for Facebook. But does the average user care what the Board has to say?
A person holds a sign during a Free Speech Rally against tech companies, on Jan. 20 in California.
Photo: Valerie Macon/Getty Images
January 21, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 21, 2021
Two weeks after Facebook suspended former President Donald Trump's account indefinitely, Facebook answered a chorus of calls and referred the case to its newly created Oversight Board for review. Now, the board has 90 days to make a call as to whether Trump stays or goes permanently. The board's decision — and more specifically, how and why it arrives at that decision — could have consequences not only for other global leaders on Facebook, but for the future of the Board itself.
Facebook created its Oversight Board for such a time as this — a time when it would face a controversial content moderation decision and might need a gut check. Or a fall guy. There could be no decision more controversial than the one Facebook made on Jan. 7, when it decided to muzzle one of the most powerful people in the world with weeks remaining in his presidency. It stands to reason, then, that Facebook would tap in its newly anointed refs on the Oversight Board both to earnestly review the call and to put a little distance between Facebook and the decision.
<p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
</div>
</div></p><p>It also stands to reason that the Oversight Board would oblige. It was designed to be Facebook's Supreme Court analog, taking up cases that can set new, important precedents for Facebook and issuing decisions on those cases. Like the actual Supreme Court, what matters now is not just what decision the board reaches regarding Trump's account, but how narrowly or broadly it rules. A broad decision that takes into account not just what Trump said on Facebook, but the offline consequences of his words, could mean tougher treatment of all global leaders with a record of <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/facebook-philippines-dutertes-drug-war" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exploiting Facebook to achieve violent ends</a>. A narrow one could risk creating a global double standard, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-01-15/facebook-social-media-bans-trump-capitol-riot" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">affirming fears</a> that Facebook is more concerned with violence on its own home turf than in other countries. </p><p>"I actually think this will be the Oversight Board's Marbury v Madison moment," Stanford Law professor Nate Persily <a href="https://twitter.com/persily/status/1352308920031666177?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote</a> on Twitter. "Meaning, even if they uphold the decision to suspend, the way they handle the case, decide on their jurisdiction, and consider the breadth of the issue presented will be important going forward."</p><p>But a broader question hangs over this entire experiment, and it is very much an experiment: Does the average Facebook user actually care what the Board has to say?</p><p>It's true that the Board's decisions will matter to Facebook, which means they will matter to its billions of users. The decisions it makes will be binding, according to bylaws agreed upon by Facebook, and will likely have domino effects on other content decisions down the line. But if there's a public relations aspect to all of this — that is, if Facebook is hoping to unload the burden of Trump's banishment and redirect some of the public backlash toward a third party — that effort seems doomed to fail. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
</div>
</div></p><p>Unlike the actual Supreme Court, the average American may very well have no idea that the Oversight Board exists. Even if they do, how many of them will take the time to understand the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-oversight-board-rules-of-the-internet" target="_self">tedious process</a> Facebook underwent to ensure the board is both bipartisan and independent? To the average Trump voter incensed about Facebook's decision to suspend Trump and so many other decisions before that, what is the Oversight Board, really, but an offshoot of the all-powerful tech giant they've believed to be shilling for Democrats all along?</p><p>That's what makes this moment so dicey for the Oversight Board. It's taking on one of its most consequential cases before it's even issued a single other decision. "On the one hand, it divests a huge amount of power from [Facebook] to give the Board authority over this. On the other hand, maybe the Board is too nascent to take on such an enormous question," Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at St. John's Law School, who has studied the Oversight Board extensively, <a href="https://twitter.com/Klonick/status/1352305708423929858?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Thursday. "The Board can establish its seriousness and jurisdiction/power over [Facebook]. That could be good for the Board, but it also means that it's very risky for establishing legitimacy [...] Not sending it also would have also been a damning message — that the Board's authority was limited and that [Facebook] didn't really intend to give it any hard questions."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
</div>
</div></p><p>Now, just months after it came into existence, the Board already <a href="https://twitter.com/hijakamran/status/1352306226923790341?s=20" target="_blank">faces</a> an existential question: to err on the side of public safety or public perception. "Whatever they say will piss off 50-ish percent of Americans. Purely as game theory, I think they're best off reinstating. That shows independence [and] reassures American conservatives, who broadly pose a bigger threat to the Facebook Oversight Board than American liberals," <a href="https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1352304994695798784?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Daphne Keller, who directs the program on platform regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. </p><p>Keller later <a href="https://twitter.com/daphnehk/status/1352306626947022853?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">added</a> that ruling based on those incentives "would be a dereliction of duty, in terms of what they are actually supposed to do."</p><p>But of course, those incentives do exist. The Board may be new, but the choice it's now facing is not. It's a choice between public safety and self-preservation — a choice that will determine the future of dictators and strongmen around the world and, as we've recently seen, have very real implications for the people they govern. It's a choice Facebook has made again and again throughout its history — a choice it's now asking the board to make instead.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
</div>
</div></p>
Keep Reading
Show less
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Politics
This is the future of the FTC
President Joe Biden has named Becca Slaughter acting chair of the FTC. In conversation with Protocol, she laid out her priorities for the next four years.
FTC commissioner Becca Slaughter may be President Biden's pick for FTC chair.
Photo: David Becker/Getty Images
January 21, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 20, 2021
Becca Slaughter made a name for herself last year when, as a commissioner for the Federal Trade Commission, she breastfed her newborn baby during video testimony before the Senate, raising awareness about the plight of working parents during the pandemic.
But on Thursday, Slaughter's name began circulating for other reasons: She was just named as President Joe Biden's pick for acting chair of the FTC, an appointment that puts Slaughter at the head of antitrust investigations into tech giants, including Facebook.
<p>Just days before Biden announced his pick, Slaughter took some time to speak at <a href="https://youtu.be/UFksDi3ygyU" target="_blank">a Protocol event</a> about the FTC's Facebook case, how antitrust enforcement can be "anti-racist" and what she hopes to see the FTC prioritize these next four years. Now that she's in charge, those priorities matter more than ever.</p><p><em>This interview has been lightly edited.</em></p><p><strong>It's indisputable that in the last few weeks since the Capitol riot, we've seen tech giants from Facebook to Amazon taking more action on dangerous speech on their platforms than ever before. Everyone's talking about regulation, but obviously any government regulation having to do with speech is a really dicey area. What do you anticipate the Biden administration's approach will be to this, and what are the appropriate legislative and regulatory remedies here? </strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
</div>
</div></p><p>I can't speak to the president's plans, but I do think what we're seeing is, on the one hand, eminently appropriate action being taken by the companies to stop violence. I am concerned as a citizen that that actually came too late, and it might have been much better taken much earlier. But at the same time, we're seeing really important questions surface about the fact that those decisions are lying in the hands of private companies with enormous market power. The decisions can be correct, while at the same time, we can take a step back and say: What does this tell us about the state of our markets that these really important conversations and decisions are governed entirely by individual companies with enormous market share?</p><p><strong>What are some ways the FTC, in particular, can respond to that?</strong></p><p>Within our mandate is antitrust law. One thing I've found really interesting is a lot of the voices that are decrying the actions of the platforms to remove some of this dangerous content are the same ones who resist government antitrust intervention. I think we have to be mindful of the fact that we have laws in place, and we need to be vigorously enforcing those laws that address outsized market share. The FTC has at least one big lawsuit pending on this topic. Colorado Attorney General <a href="https://www.protocol.com/Politics/google-phil-weiser-attorney-general" target="_self">Phil Weiser</a> is leading another one. We will continue to do investigations and bring cases that address misuse of market power under our antitrust laws.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
</div>
</div></p><p><strong><strong>Y</strong>ou mentioned the FTC case against Facebook. When you brought that suit, and a number of states brought a similar suit, Facebook <a href="https://www.protocol.com/facebook-antitrust-zuckerberg" target="_self">responded</a> by saying the FTC is looking at all of these past mergers and setting a standard where no company that had a merger settled in the past can be sure it will be permanent. What is your response to that criticism from Facebook?</strong></p><p>I don't find it particularly persuasive. That we've brought one lawsuit that seeks to address two, among many, mergers that happened as part of an ongoing course of conduct does not suggest all mergers in all industries for all companies are forever in legal uncertainty. That is beyond a stretch. </p><p>What we have to do, as enforcers, and what we do in this case, is look at the particular facts at issue and the particular conduct at issue. And it is the case under the law that when the FTC or the Department of Justice review mergers in advance, we don't clear mergers. We don't approve mergers in advance. What we have an opportunity to do is to say: At this moment, are we going to take effort to block the merger? And in fact, in the occasions where we do the investigations and decline to take effort, we don't say we will never take action. We say: Right now, we're not going to take action, but that does not mean if we later understand this conduct to have been illegal we are precluded from bringing a suit. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
</div>
</div></p><p>So that should be a disincentive to companies to enter into conduct, whether it's mergers or other conduct, that's illegal. That's what we want to disincentivize, and the threat of future lawsuits is an important part of that incentive structure. </p><p><strong>Beyond the Facebook suit, what do you think the priority of this FTC ought to be, and are there any big mistakes over the last four years that need to be corrected?</strong></p><p>Well, I can tell you what my priorities are. First, I think we do need to be thinking, like everyone across the government is right now, about pandemic response. COVID touches on a lot of areas of the FTC's mandate. There are some obvious ones, like work we've done to stop scams and phony cures, but some that are less obvious, including thinking about the effects of market concentration on, for example, supply chain resiliency. I think we need to be thinking about how all of our lives have moved digitally and the implications that has for privacy and data issues. </p><p>The second thing I would say is a huge priority for me has been making sure that our enforcement efforts continue and sharpen in our long, arduous and very large national task of being anti-racist. So I want us to be, in our enforcement efforts on marginalized communities, focusing on cases where harm disproportionately falls on people of color, whether that is as workers or as consumers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
</div>
</div></p><p>The third, generally, is I think we need to focus on being really strategic with the resources that we have. That means bringing cases that have big effects and can create deterrence across markets, rather than counting how many cases we bring or how many dollars we get. I want us to think very carefully about how each federal dollar we spend can best effectuate deterrence so we don't have to spend more federal dollars bringing the same sort of cases. </p><p>To the extent that I think there are things we could have done better over the last four years, there are a number of cases where I had dissented, because I thought that our resolutions, while they were good enforcement resolutions, didn't go far enough on that deterrence front. I'm concerned that we're going to end up back at the table with the same companies with the same problems if we are not bringing cases and really fighting for the outcome that will best protect consumers from having the same problems again. </p><p><strong>I want to go back to what you said about the anti-racism work. Can you give us an example of that?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
</div>
</div></p><p>We brought a really important case under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act last year involving auto financing for violations of fair lending rules and discriminatory behavior on financing. That's one kind of case. This is something we're very comfortable talking about in the consumer protection sphere. We are less comfortable talking about it as a general matter in the antitrust space. But for me, antitrust enforcement is fundamentally about market structure and making sure markets are fair. And one thing we know statistically is that our markets are currently structured in a way that is unfair and unequal for communities of color. So when we make decisions to do enforcement in certain places or not do enforcement in certain places, those decisions are never neutral. They will either help make our society less unequal or they will reinforce existing inequality. </p><p>So the first step for us, from my perspective, is just opening our eyes and understanding the effects of those decisions better. When we choose to bring a case — let's say, for example, a hospital enforcement case, because health care is an area where we know there are huge disparities in access and outcomes across races — we [should bring] cases that improve access, improve quality of care and reduce costs, particularly when the populations being served are communities of color. That's a big thing that we can do, and we already do, to help make our markets more anti-racist. </p><p>I would rather that we be honest and transparent about the effect our actions have and think about those decisions seriously, because we don't have the resources or the capacity to enforce all the violations of the law in all the markets. When we set priorities, for me, the priority has to include helping historically disadvantaged and marginalized communities where we need to equalize our society more effectively.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
</div>
</div></p><p><strong>Where do you see the role of the FTC when it comes to mitigating algorithmic bias?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>I think we do need a multi-stakeholder process. I think the FTC is one of the interested stakeholders that should be involved. I also think we need to be critically examining the toolbox we have and thinking creatively about how we can use all the tools in it to address this issue. This is something I spoke about and wrote about a year ago. For me, algorithmic bias is an economic justice issue. We see disparate outcomes coming out of algorithmic decision-making that disproportionately affect and harm Black and brown communities and affect their ability to participate equally in society. That's something we need to address, and we need to think about whether it fits under our unfairness framework, whether we might have rule-making authority that could apply to it or whether we use statutes like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act or the Fair Credit Reporting Act. But I think it's one of those things where really good, creative thinking needs to be applied. </p><p>The issue is new, and it is hard. But one thing I remind myself all the time: My older daughter, who is in Zoom school downstairs in my house right now and hates it, she was in kindergarten last year, and her teacher would say to her all the time, "Kindergarteners can do hard things." And I say to myself: "OK, well if kindergarteners can do hard things, the FTC can do hard things. Government can do hard things, and we have to start trying to tackle the big problems."<em></em></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
</div>
</div></p><p><em><strong>Update: </strong>This article was updated Jan. 21, 2021, to include that Slaughter was named acting chair.</em></p>
Keep Reading
Show less
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Politics
The other reason Facebook silenced Trump? Republicans lost power.
Yes, the president's acts were unprecedented. But Facebook is also preparing for a new Washington, controlled by Democrats.
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's head of public policy Joel Kaplan have spent four years bending to conservatives' demands. Now, Facebook is bending in a new direction.
Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
January 8, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 7, 2021
In his post announcing that President Trump would be blocked from posting on Facebook until at least Inauguration Day, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the president's incitement of the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday was "fundamentally different" than any of the offenses he's committed on Facebook before. "The risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great," he wrote on Thursday.
That may be true. But there's another reason why — after four years spent insisting that a tech company has no business shutting up the president of the United States, no matter how much he threatens to shoot protesters or engages in voter suppression — Zuckerberg finally had a change of heart: Republicans just lost power.
<p>Since at least 2016, when conservatives first set off on their crusade against Big Tech, armed with spurious claims of liberal bias, Facebook's leaders have cowered in fear of the right. That year, after Gizmodo reported that Facebook had kept some conservative news out of its trending topics feature, Zuckerberg invited a ragtag delegation of conservative pundits including Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson to Facebook's headquarters to extend an olive branch.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
</div>
</div></p><p>From that day forward, Facebook has repeatedly sought to avoid the right's ire, elevating Joel Kaplan, a former George W. Bush staffer and himself a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/15/its-insanity-how-brooks-brothers-riot-killed-recount-miami/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Brooks Brothers rioter</a>, to the company's highest public policy position to navigate a Washington that was no longer starry-eyed about Silicon Valley. During Trump's tenure and under a Republican-controlled Congress, Facebook refused to prohibit white nationalist content and conspiracy theories like QAnon, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-lonely-conservative-takes-on-a-power-position-11545570000" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">shelved plans</a> to promote healthier political dialogue for fear it would stoke Republican outrage and <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-zuckerberg-what-if-trump-disputes-election-results" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">lavished</a> special treatment on far-right pages that repeatedly violated its policies. All the while, conservative voices dominated the site in the U.S.</p><p>None of it helped, of course. Zuckerberg was still regularly excoriated by Republican members of the House and Senate in public hearings over imagined slights and asked to explain again and again why a given political ad had been taken down or why Diamond and Silk's Facebook traffic was falling. In those moments, Zuckerberg would steel himself and politely vow to look into the matter, bending over backward to prove he was taking each bad faith argument to heart.</p><p>But, now that the people of Georgia have spoken, Democrats are about to assume control of both the White House and the Senate. So it stands to reason then that Zuckerberg is beginning to bend in a new direction. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
</div>
</div></p><p>That fact didn't go unnoticed by some on the left, like former White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri, who <a href="https://twitter.com/jmpalmieri/status/1347064818944118784?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a> Thursday, "It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump's destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them." </p><p>"Most big content moderation decisions are a reaction to policymakers, negative press coverage or advertisers, and we're seeing that play out this week," said Nu Wexler, a former policy spokesperson for Facebook.</p><p>That's not to say Zuckerberg was wrong or lying about the unprecedented and dangerous nature of Trump's actions on Wednesday. Facebook has historically avoided touching his posts, in part out of respect for the office of president and the significance that the president's words are supposed to hold in this democracy. But as Trump used the platform to express his love and understanding for the Capitol rioters and again repeat the baseless claims that sent them to the Capitol in the first place, he shattered the last democratic norm that Facebook was supposedly protecting. In muzzling Trump for the rest of his presidency and possibly beyond, Facebook has taken stronger action than either Twitter or YouTube have so far, though both companies have removed some Trump posts and warned that the president risks permanent bans if he commits more violations in the future.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
</div>
</div></p><p>That's the generous read on Facebook's actions, at least. Another read reveals more cynical motives. Unlike Republicans on the Hill, who have fixated on how they and their conservative constituents are supposedly silenced, Democrats have spent the last four years fixated on how real-world harm manifests from Facebook's decision not to silence people more. But with the possible exceptions of the shooting at a Congressional baseball game in 2017 and the mail bombing attempts by the so-called MAGA bomber in 2018, rarely have the real-world repercussions of allowing people to become radicalized by lies online hit as close to Congress' home as they did on Wednesday. </p><p>Facebook's leaders, including Zuckerberg, know Washington well enough by now to expect this week's chaos to become Democrats' animating issue for the foreseeable future. "The Mazie Hironos of the world are definitely going to call for hearings on online harms, and they should," said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which researches disinformation online. "But now, it's gonna be like: 'Your platform coordinated an attempt on my life. What do you have to say?'"</p><p>And in those moments, Zuckerberg will steel himself once more and politely list all the steps Facebook has taken since that awful day to try to control the chaos, including, at least temporarily, banning Trump. Republicans will rant, as Democrats have done so often these last four years, about how the party holding the gavel is trying to force Facebook's hand and cow the company into carrying out their wishes. But without control of Congress or the White House, Republicans won't be able to do much about it. So Zuckerberg will hope instead that, at least in the eyes of the new people in power, these actions will help make up for the last four years. And he will almost certainly be wrong.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
</div>
</div></p>
From Your Site Articles
- YouTube, Facebook, Twitter remove Trump video amid Capitol Hill ... ›
- Pressure mounts on social media giants to suspend Trump as rioters ... ›
- Social networks didn't create a coup. But they helped. - Protocol ›
- Don’t worry about the cybersecurity fallout of the Capitol breach - Protocol ›
- Don’t worry about the cybersecurity fallout of the Capitol breach - Protocol ›
- Here are the tech companies pausing their campaign contributions - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech ›
- Trump officials and conservatives are quietly meeting in Las Vegas to discuss “woke tech” - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech ›
Keep Reading
Show less
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Power
Pressure mounts on tech giants to ban Trump, as rioters storm Capitol
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube removed a video in which Trump expressed love for the rioters, but none of the companies have banned him outright — yet.
Twitter locked President Trump's account.
Image: Twitter
January 10, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 6, 2021
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube took action against several of President Trump's posts Wednesday, labeling the posts, limiting reshares and removing a video in which President Trump expressed his love for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building, leading to the evacuation of the Senate, the deployment of the National Guard and to one person being shot and killed. Twitter locked President Trump's account, requiring him to remove three tweets and saying that his account would remain locked for 12 hours after those tweets were removed. Twitter also warned that any future violations would get him banned. Facebook also locked his account for 24 hours, citing "two policy violations." These actions followed a day of calls from tech investors, academics and others to kick Trump off of their platforms once and for all.
In an early tweet, University of Virginia law professor Danielle Citron implored Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to take action. "As someone who has served on your Trust and Safety Board since its inception and counseled you since 2009, time is now to suspend President Trump's account," Citron wrote. "He has deliberately incited violence, causing mayhem with his lies and threats."
<p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
</div>
</div></p><p>
In another <a href="https://twitter.com/Moonalice/status/1346924865203228674?s=20" target="_blank">tweet</a>, investor turned tech accountability activist Roger McNamee wrote, "Internet platforms — FB, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. — enabled this. They amplified hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories because it was profitable. They are accessories to the felonies we are seeing on our TVs ... and many others."</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">You've got blood on your hands, <a href="https://twitter.com/jack?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jack</a> and Zuck. For four years you've rationalized this terror. Inciting violent treason is not a free speech exercise. If you work at those companies, it's on you too. Shut it down.<br>— Chris Sacca 🇺🇸 (@sacca) <a href="https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1346921144859783169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></div><p>Facebook's former chief security officer Alex Stamos, who now heads up the Stanford Internet Observatory, also spoke out, arguing that Facebook and Twitter had run out of excuses not to ban Trump. "There have been good arguments for private companies to not silence elected officials, but all those arguments are predicated on the protection of constitutional governance," Stamos said. "Twitter and Facebook have to cut him off. There are no legitimate equities left and labeling won't do it."</p><p>Twitter responded to the chaos late in the afternoon, saying the company is "working proactively to protect the health" of conversation on the platform. "Threats of and calls to violence are against the Twitter Rules, and we are enforcing our policies accordingly," one <a href="https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1346926978562142214?s=20" target="_blank">tweet</a> read. Only later Wednesday night did the company remove the president's video, lock his account and warn that he could face a ban later on. "Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account," Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1346970432017031178?s=20" target="_blank">said</a>.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
</div>
</div></p><p>A Facebook spokesperson released a similar statement earlier in the day, writing, "The violent protests in the Capitol today are a disgrace. We prohibit incitement and calls for violence on our platform. We are actively reviewing and removing any content that breaks these rules."</p><p>YouTube was the first to remove President Trump's video altogether, citing its policy against videos that allege widespread election fraud. In his video address, Trump doubled down on his baseless claims that the election had been stolen, while in the same breath, asking his supporters to go home and be peaceful. "Go home. We love you. You're very special," the president said in the video. </p><p>YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo said the company was also working to remove livestreams that violate its policies against incitement to violence or that include footage of graphic violence. "In addition, we're continuing to raise up authoritative news sources on our home page, in search results and in recommendations. We will remain vigilant in the coming hours," Shadloo said.<br></p><p>Later, Facebook's vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen <a href="https://twitter.com/guyro/status/1346950532372393985?s=20" target="_blank">tweeted</a> that Facebook would do the same. "This is an emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump's video," Rosen said. "We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence." Facebook then blocked Trump's account for 24 hours, saying that the president would "lose the ability to post on the platform during that time." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
</div>
</div></p><p>
As the violence escalated Wednesday, Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1346904110969315332?s=20" target="_blank">asked</a> his supporters on Twitter to "stay peaceful," only after spending much of the last day — and much of the last several weeks — tweeting baseless theories about election fraud. But Trump's message hasn't been confined to social media. In a text sent directly to supporters at 1:35 p.m. ET Wednesday, Trump's campaign shared this message: "Congress is voting to certify, or OBJECT TO, the Election results. Pres. Trump needs YOU to STAND WITH HIM!"</p><p><em>This story is developing and will be continually updated.</em></p>
From Your Site Articles
- The other reason Facebook silenced Trump? Republicans just lost their power. - Protocol ›
- Don’t worry about the cybersecurity fallout of the Capitol breach - Protocol ›
- Trump got all he needed from Twitter. Now, he still has all the power. - Protocol ›
- Don’t worry about the cybersecurity fallout of the Capitol breach - Protocol ›
- Facebook’s Oversight Board deals with Trump ban backlash - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech ›
Keep Reading
Show less
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Latest Stories
See more
Most Popular
Bulletins
January 22, 2021 11:32 EST
Get Source Code in your inbox
David Pierce's daily analysis of the tech news that matters.