Wednesday, November 7, 2018
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Americans peddling disinformation and hate speech
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Cambridge Analytica and Brexit Financier Misused Private Data
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Elections
Who was trying to influence your vote in the midterm elections? On Facebook, it was not always easy to find out. Political advertisers are required to fill in a field that says who paid for the message in your news feed, but that does not necessarily tell you who they or their backers are. Entities can write whatever they want in that field as long as it's not deceptive or misleading. A growing number of Facebook ads in the run-up to the election took advantage of that loophole to obscure or conceal the identity and political motives of who paid for them – and Facebook did not catch it. That allowed some Facebook pages to remain anonymous while stirring political discord. Facebook doesn’t try to verify who's behind every political ad, but political advertisers must accurately represent themselves, and most of them do, the company says. When Facebook identifies potentially deceptive or misleading disclaimers, it investigates and may remove them. Facebook says it's exploring "additional checks" to prevent abuse.
Even as Silicon Valley has become more aggressive in battling foreign efforts to influence US politics, it is losing innumerable cat-and-mouse games with Americans who are eagerly deploying the same techniques used by the Russians in 2016. “Everyone’s witnessed the playbook playing out,” said former FBI agent Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Now they don’t need Russia so much. They’ve learned that the tactic is devastatingly effective.” Accounts controlled by Russians probably helped amplify such misleading narratives, experts say, but the evidence so far is that they started with American political activists who are increasingly adept at online manipulation techniques but enjoy broad free-speech protections that tech companies have been reluctant to challenge.
How the 'propaganda feedback loop' of right-wing media keeps more than a quarter of Americans siloed
Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage, and even on liberal outlets like MSNBC, and the topics that get broadcast as news on the Fox network and its fellows on the right? What process lets even the most outlandish conspiracy notions survive and flourish in the right’s echo-chamber ecosystem, in a way they don’t come close to doing elsewhere? Yochai Benkler is a Harvard law professor, the co-director of the university’s center for studying the internet and society, and co-author of a new book with the unmistakably alarming title “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics.” The book is a work of anatomy, dissecting how this deep disequilibrium is imperiling the nation’s civic and public life. Benkler has also rethought the part that social media play in all of this, beginning with our perceptions of what free speech has come to mean in the age of Facebook and Twitter.
UK's Information Commissioner’s Office Finds Cambridge Analytica and Brexit Financier Misused Private Data
Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which has been investigating the misuse of personal data by political campaigns, found that defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica violated British law when it used improperly harvested Facebook data to aid Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and would face a significant fine if it were not already in bankruptcy. The commissioner's office also said an insurance company owned by Arron Banks, a main backer of Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union, broke British law when it used customer data to aid the Brexit effort. Eldon Insurance, shared private email addresses to be sent campaign messages on behalf of Leave.EU, a pro-Brexit group, months before the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union.
The commissioner’s investigation revealed that political campaigns in Britain had exercised little restraint in exploiting consumer data, despite the European Union’s relatively strict data laws. Political groups were acting more like online businesses and internet marketing firms to target and engage voters.
The internet is an invisible mesh that enables instantaneous global communications, but delivering all those bits quickly to more people in more places requires increasingly exotic approaches. Here are a few things you may not realize about how communication pipes work around the world:
- Hundreds of thousands of international cables are actually buried underwater.
- Even the cloud is increasingly moving under water.
- "Wireless" technologies actually use a ton of wires.
- Those wireless base stations often stick out like a sore thumb. That's why wireless towers are often disguised to look like other things.
- Space has become the new frontier for wireless signals.
More than 1 million veterans rely on the Lifeline program connecting low-income households to essential services like health care, job opportunities and public safety. Unfortunately, proposed changes from the Federal Communications Commission threaten to undermine this vital program and hurt those who depend on it most. About 40 million people are eligible for Lifeline and roughly 10 million of those have enrolled. Of the enrollees, around 1.3 million (or more than 10 percent) are veterans or disabled veterans living near or below the poverty line. In many cases, these individuals and their families rely on the Lifeline program for everyday tasks, like staying connected to their jobs, their families and to emergency services. The phone call can be a real lifeline, especially since many veterans often face difficult re-entry back into civilian life and turn to support hotlines.
Pennsylvania State University researchers rounding the bend on a year-long study of broadband access in rural Pennsylvania are finding that speeds are even slower than previously thought. Bradford County, on the NY border in Northeastern PA, has slow connectivity speeds, but according to the most recent map available from the Penn State study, it's not among the worst. Adjacent counties like Sullivan and Wyoming had the slowest speeds, roughly 0-3 megabits per second (mbps), far below the FCC's 25 mbps benchmark for "high speed." Penn State found speeds differed from what providers had been promising. "What we are documenting is profoundly different than what we were told, the speeds far slower," said Sascha Meinrath, the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State. "Places we were told have access appear to have limited to no access. The important word is appear." In PA, 6 percent of the population about 803,645 people do not have access to 25 mpbs broadband.
The Federal Communications Commission sent letters to voice providers, calling on them to assist industry efforts to trace scam robocalls that originate on or pass through their networks. These letters, written by FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Rosemary Harold and Chief Technology Officer Eric Burger, were sent to voice providers that are not participating in these “traceback” efforts, including those the FCC has encouraged to do more to guard against illegal traffic. These traceback efforts assist the FCC in identifying the source of illegal calls. “The industry is helping combat illegal robocalls and spoofing, but more must be done,” said Dr. Burger about the letters. “We hope all carriers and interconnected VoIP providers will join these traceback efforts and implement tools to speed the traceback process, such as deploying a robust call authentication framework. In my experience, strong enforcement is the best tool against bad actors, and improved traceback is a critical tool for finding scammers.”
The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.
Governments Will
- Ensure everyone can connect to the internet so that anyone, no matter who they are or where they live, can participate actively online.
- Keep all of the internet available, all of the time so that no one is denied their right to full internet access.
- Respect people’s fundamental right to privacy so everyone can use the internet freely, safely and without fear.
Companies Will
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Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone so that no one is excluded from using and shaping the web.
- Respect consumers’ privacy and personal data so people are in control of their lives online.
- Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst so the web really is a public good that puts people first.
Citizens Will
- Be creators and collaborators on the web so the web has rich and relevant content for everyone.
- Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity so that everyone feels safe and welcome online.
- Fight for the web so the web remains open and a global public resource for people everywhere, now and in the future.
The most remarkable aspect of the walkout at Google may not have been that an estimated 20,000 people participated or that it had global reach, or even that it came together in less than a week. It was the way the organizers identified their action with a broader worker struggle, using language almost unheard-of among affluent tech employees. For decades, Silicon Valley has been ground zero for a vaguely utopian form of individualism — the idea that a single engineer with a laptop and an internet connection could change the world, or at least a long-established industry. Class consciousness was passé. Unions were the enemy of innovation, an anchor to the status quo. But the issues that contributed to the walkout at Google — the company’s controversial work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence, its apparent willingness to build a censored search engine for China and above all its handling of sexual harassment accusations against senior managers — proved too large for any worker to confront alone, even if that worker made mid-six figures. They required a form of solidarity that would be recognizable to the most militant 20th-century labor organizers.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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