Way back in 2005 I wrote about the launch of Amazon Prime, talking about the trade offs of joining this “shipping club” as I called it then. If you look at that post now, it has nearly 600 comments. However, the first comment didn’t even get added until over a year after I posted the story. When I first wrote about it, it was such a non-story that we got zero comments on it (admittedly, Techdirt was a bit smaller then and a lot of our stories at the time got few, if any, comments).
So why does it now have nearly 600? Because a year later someone commented, complaining about how they had somehow accidentally signed up for Amazon Prime, and were furious that they had been charged $79. And, then, somehow, that post must have shown up in Google searches for users angry that they had accidentally signed up for Prime without knowing it. For the next ten years or so, when people were angry about having accidentally signed up for Prime, many of them would… come to a single 2005 Techdirt post to bitch about it in the comments.
It was a bit weird.
But, either way, it gave me some level of awareness that some people have been “tricked” into signing up for Amazon Prime.
So, when the FTC recently sued Amazon for tricking users into signing up for Amazon Prime and making it hard to cancel, I figured they must have some pretty good evidence of bad practices. Coupled with the fact that FTC boss Lina Khan built her reputation largely on the back of a paper arguing that the FTC needed to take down Amazon, and people have been perplexed that the FTC under her leadership had not gone after Amazon, it seemed natural to assume that the eventual case against the company would be really solid. Also, while some of the earliest cases her FTC has filed have been incredibly weak, some of the more recent filings (including against Google) have been much stronger, actually zeroing in on what appear to be legitimate issues. So, again, I expected the case against Amazon to be fairly strong.
But then I read it. And… I’m confused.
There are a few things in the complaint that narratively sound bad — like Amazon employees referring to the cancelation setup as “Iliad” — but the details really seem like extremely nitpicky about UI decisions, many of which are defensible.
Now, there’s a ton of stuff redacted in the complaint, so perhaps under those blacked out lines there is stronger evidence of truly nefarious behavior. But, what’s shown really just doesn’t seem that crazy.
I should be clear, by the way, I’m not a Prime customer, and have magically avoided getting tricked into using Prime for pretty much my entire time using Amazon. I have (on multiple occasions) done free trials of Prime, but never felt unwittingly sucked into paying for it when those trials were over. I might be more tech savvy than your average Amazon shopper, so I’m not saying that my experience applies to everyone, but at the very least, it seems entirely possible to not get suckered into paying for Prime if you don’t want it. I know that because I’ve done it.
Anyway, part of what surprised me is that the complaint basically admits that Amazon is pretty upfront about the deal, saying that after a free trial you have to pay a monthly fee:
A lot of what the FTC is complaining about is that the small text part of the deal is, well, in small text. But… that’s been the way things have kinda always worked? Is small text now against the law?
Could Amazon be even more upfront? Sure. But would it really change that much?
Given the number of sneaky hidden fees we see from telcos and broadband providers and tons of other companies, it would seem like that would be a much bigger and better target for this type of action, rather than “Amazon tells you the details, but puts it in smaller text below the offer.”
As Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out in an analysis of the case, it relies on claims that Amazon’s design uses “dark patterns.” But “dark patterns” basically is a term that is being used when someone doesn’t particularly like the way a website is setup. The complaint talks about small print and interstitials and standard upsell offers. Are some of those annoying? Sure. But, annoying isn’t illegal, nor should it be.
Again, with so much of the complaint blacked out, I have to assume there’s something more serious behind the redaction bars. Because, even though I was sympathetic to the idea that this could be a good case, and that Amazon was up to no good, what’s in the unredacted portion of the lawsuit just seems like “gee, we don’t like how Amazon tries to upsell Prime.” But not liking something doesn’t mean it violates the law.
Our most popular post last year was my post attempting to help Elon Musk “speedrun” the content moderation learning curve. People still talk to me about that post to this day. What’s been somewhat surprising to me, however, is that while nearly every other social media site eventually figures out the basics of the content moderation learning curve, Musk has a Sisyphean ability to slide back down that curve again and again and again.
But I had a realization over the weekend: it’s not the content moderation learning curve that he’s speedrunning. It’s the Enshittification learning curve.
As you’ll recall from Cory Doctorow’s excellent coinage, enshittification happens through the following process:
first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
The key element here is fucking over your users and customers to try to claw back as much value for themselves as possible. When viewed through that lens, the events of the past few days on Twitter make some kind of sense. Because, without that framing, Elon’s moves make zero sense at all.
It started late on Thursday, when Twitter suddenly made it so you could only see tweets if you were registered and logged in. There are other sites where this is true, but it was fundamentally against Twitter’s entire ethos for years. Indeed, Twitter’s early success was driven by that open ability to access the content, and (while people no longer remember this), Mark Zuckerberg’s paranoia about Twitter eating Facebook’s lunch in the early days caused him to pivot the entire company and effectively push more people to publicly revealing their Facebook info in response to Twitter’s openness policy (as an aside, this created one of Facebook’s first big privacy scandals, but… that’s another story).
As has become standard practice, this change was made with no notice or explanation, but a day after it began, Elon explained it in a random reply on Twitter, claiming that “several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.”
This made Twitter a pain to use for many people. It also broke a bunch of things, and even pulled tons of tweets out of Google search. Meanwhile, sometime last night or this morning, it appears that Twitter (again with no explanation and no announcement) rolled back this entire thing and quietly started letting non-logged in users view tweets again.
But, either way, Elon was just getting started. On Saturday, tons of people got messages noting that they were “rate limited” and had exceeded the number of tweets they were allowed to read.
Most people assumed that Twitter had just broken down (again) and was popping out that error. No one actually thought that anyone could possibly be so stupid as to limit the number of tweets that you could see. But, alas, Elon Musk runs Twitter and sees things… um… differently. Hours after tons of users were confused by this, Elon tweeted (not just a reply this time!) that it was all on purpose and most accounts would now be limited to viewing just 600 tweets per day.
If you were willing to pay $8/month, that would be 6000. New accounts could only see 300 tweets. Once again, Musk argued this was because of “data scraping.”
However, multiple people I’ve spoken to, both current and former employees, said that excuse is bullshit. Twitter can easily handle the scraping it’s receiving. It is apparently true that scraping Twitter has increased, but due to Musk’s own policies killing off its API. That move means that many who formerly relied on the API to get data have now resorted to scraping instead. But the actual impact on Twitter from that scraping is not a problem.
Separately, some people noticed that around the same time that all of this was going down, Twitter introduced a very stupid error that meant Twitter was literally DDoSing itself, though it’s not clear if that’s the cause of Musk’s panic either (it is more plausible than scraping, however).
Again, though, if you look at this through the framing of enshittification, it makes more sense. Musk is focused solely on trying to extract all the value of Twitter for himself, not for its users. That this is a ridiculously short-term view, one that drives away those users in the long term, does not seem to have yet occurred to him. But, you know, sometimes he seems a bit slow on the uptake.
Cutting off anything that screams of “freebies” fits well within the enshittification process, because people who get stuff for free need to be mined for value.
Of course, even Elon’s biggest fans seemed to complain that these limits were ridiculous, so he began slowly upping them. A few hours after the initial announcement he upped the limits from 6,000 for people who pay, 600 for most users, and 300 for new users to 8,000/800/400. And a few hours after that, it bumped up again to 10,000/1,000/500.
Amusingly, days later, I’m still seeing tons of people assuming it’s the lower numbers, because this is not how you do product announcements if you actually want people to understand what the fuck you’re doing. I’ve also seen friends insist that he removed all limits, when that does not appear to be the case.
Instead, days later, Twitter put out a ridiculously useless “Update on Twitter’s Rate Limits” that is full of corporate speak nonsense and clarifies literally nothing:
To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.
At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways.
Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal.
While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone.
At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up.
We appreciate your patience.
Literally none of that makes any sense at all. First of all, a couple weeks ago we were being told (falsely) that spam and bots had been already eliminated. How many times is Elon planning to go back to that well as an excuse for his own incompetence?
Second, “any advance notice” of this particular change wouldn’t have made one bit of difference. And, on top of that, even if you don’t give “advance notice,” Twitter put out this statement literally 4 or 5 days after the changes were made, which suggest this wasn’t so much about not giving “advance notice,” it was about no one within Twitter knowing what the fuck is actually going on.
But, the “new CEO” has to pretend this all sensible and normal.
Of course, none of this helps with bots or spam. All it really does is drive down usage of Twitter. The main thing left on Twitter that had mostly kept me on the site was some sports accounts, but just trying to follow tweets about a single baseball game would make me lose access in half an hour or so.
What Elon has done with this rationing of tweets is introduce even more friction. Not just in the fact that some people get limited, but in making users have to think about whether or not it’s worth visiting the site at all, as every tweet you see (and each time you load the page, you get about 20 tweets) is worth cutting into your daily allotment.
It’s a mental transaction cost, on top of everything else. That just makes the entire site way, way, way less valuable. And that includes for advertisers (whose tweets appear to count in the tweet ration limit). And those Musk fans who moved their video programs to Twitter as well. Making your site much more difficult to view is just galaxy brain nonsense, unless you’re so focused on trying to squeeze existing users for cash that you forget what made your site valuable in the process.
Oh, and Musk and co weren’t even done.
Over the weekend, power users who rely on Tweetdeck (which always presented Twitter in a much more useful interface) realized that it wasn’t working. Again, many initially chalked this up to “Elon breaking shit” (which has happened a few times now), but then suddenly it was announced that Twitter had shut down the old Tweetdeck, forced everyone to the “new” Tweetdeck (which has been around since the pre-Elon days, but so many users hated it that it was possible to switch back to the old one). And, on top of that, the company announced that the new, much crappier Tweetdeck would only be available to TwitterBlue subscribers.
If you’re not familiar with Tweetdeck, it was a very nice multi-column view for Twitter, allowing you to follow lists, notifications, searches, and more in a single screen, rather than having to pop through a bunch of different pages to find each thing. It was especially popular with professionals and social media managers. And, now it is way worse than it was and costs money, whereas before it was free.
Again, this will drive down usage of the site, especially by Twitter’s most committed users, and those who provide tons of content to the site.
Of course, none of this makes any sense if you’re trying to build a sustainable business and attract more users. It only makes sense if you’re desperate for cash, have no idea why your own site is valuable, and feel the need to go on a rent seeking expedition to try to capture any and all value that the site provides, even if doing so kills off a significant percentage of that value.
No wonder both Mastodon and Bluesky surged in new users over the weekend. Either way, given that he paid no heed to my attempt to help him better run the content moderation learning curve, I have little doubt he’ll also ignore my recommended steps to avoiding enshittification as well.
I continue to be fascinated in watching how the various decentralized protocol-based social media systems are evolving — in particular how they’re dealing with the challenges of content moderation. There was an interesting discussion a recently on nostr over whether or not moderation should be best handled by relays or clients*.
ActivityPub has, of course, continued to move forward with its systems of moderation handled at each instance level, combined with the threat of “defederation” being used to keep “bad” instances in line (or cut off from parts of the network). That’s worked surprisingly well in some cases, but is also facing a few challenges, as there have been complaints about some of the largest instances, and now that Meta is planning to release an ActivityPub-compatible offering, there’s a weird push to make some instances promise to defederate from any Meta offering immediately.
But, again, Bluesky may be where the most interesting discussions on decentralized trust & safety and moderation are happening. A few months ago, we wrote about their plans for decentralized composable moderation, and recently they released some thoughts on how you can handle moderation in a public commons.
The goal of Bluesky is to turn social media into a shared public commons. We don’t want to own people’s social graphs or communities. We want to be a tool that helps communities own and govern themselves.
The reason we focus on communities is that for an open commons to work, there needs to be some sort of structure that protects the people who participate. Safety can’t just be left up to each individual to deal with on their own. The burden this puts on people — especially those who are most vulnerable to online abuse and harassment — is too high. It also doesn’t mirror how things work in the real world: we form groups and communities so that we can help each other. The tooling we’re building for moderation tries to take into consideration how social spaces are formed and shaped through communities.
Somewhat importantly, they make it clear that they don’t have all the answers (no one does!), but it’s really interesting to see them discussing this openly, and publicly, and asking for thoughts and feedback as they move forward. To me, the thing that stands out is that the ideas that are presented obviously involved a lot of thought (to the point that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around some of the different proposals, some of which seem clever, while others may need a bit more baking before they fully make sense).
Historically, trust & moderation decisions come in two forms: formed on high in a centralized system in which little is discussed publicly, and people are left trying to sort through what’s actually happening, or in an entirely distributed manner in which things often spring up ad hoc out of need (see: Usenet killfiles), which often run into problems later on.
The Bluesky folks are trying to think about something that is a more hybrid approach, in which the system itself is design to enable communities to better manage things, not just one giant opaque centralized control bunker, and not putting all the weight on users which is unfair to many (especially the targets of abuse and harassment).
I think this kind of vision seems exactly the right one for an organization like Bluesky to have:
A company is an efficient structure for building out a cohesive vision of how things should work, but locking users into our systems would be antithetical to our mission. An open commons can’t be governed at the sole discretion of one global company. We offer services like professional moderators so that we can help protect people and provide a good experience, but we shouldn’t exert total control over everyone’s experience, for all time, with no alternative. Users should be able to walk away from us without walking away from their social lives.
The reason we’re building in decentralization is because we observed that business interests and the open web have a habit of coming into conflict. Third-party developers often get locked out. Moderation policies come into conflict with the diverse interests and needs of different groups of users. Ads push towards algorithms that optimize for engagement. It’s a systemic problem that keeps playing out as centralized social media companies rise and fall.
On Bluesky itself, the lead developer, Paul Frazee noted that they view the future company as a potential adversary, and are designing accordingly. That, alone, is a fascinating perspective to have on things, and one that certainly makes sense in the age of enshittification. And, unlike the way many companies that start on the open web, and later come into conflict with it, as they seek to pull up the ladder behind them to protect a moat, Bluesky is trying to design its systems in a way that protects the system from their own future attempts at enshittification:
Even when things are working correctly on social platforms, there are weird dynamics caused by people’s relationships being mediated by a single company. The Internet is pretty obviously real life in the sense that its management has real-world consequences. When these places control our identities and our ability to connect and to make money, having no way out from the founding company is a precarious situation. The power difference is daunting.
The goal of Bluesky is to rebuild social networking so that there’s not a lock-in to the founding company, which is us. We can try to provide a cohesive, enjoyable experience, but there’s always an exit. Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences. We hope this helps break the cycle of social media companies coming into conflict with the open web.
Now, some users point to the complex onboarding of Mastodon, or the “WTF how does any of this work?” nature of nostr, and worry that any decentralized/federated system has to be confusing. And that user unfriendliness, in some weird way, acts as a moderation tool in its own right, by keeping communities somewhat smaller. But it also keeps communities… smaller. So Bluesky has a different vision. A surprisingly refreshing and honest one:
A great experience should be simple to use. It shouldn’t be overly complex, and there should be sensible defaults and well-run entry points. If things are going well, the average user shouldn’t have to notice what parts are decentralized, or how many layers have come together to determine what they see. However, if conflict arises, there should be easy levers for individuals and communities to pull so that they can reconfigure their experience.
A great experience should recognize that toxicity is not driven only by bad actors. Good intentions can create runaway social behaviors that then create needless conflict. The network should include ways to downregulate behaviors – not just amplify them.
A great experience should respect the burden that community management can place on people. Someone who sets out to help protect others can quickly find themselves responsible for a number of difficult choices. The tooling that’s provided should take into account ways to help avoid burnout.
A great experience should find a balance between creating friendly spaces and over-policing each other. The impulse to protect can sometimes degrade into nitpicking. We should drive towards norms that feel natural and easy to observe.
A great experience should reflect the diversity of views within the network. Decisions that are subjective should be configurable. Moderation should not force the network into a monoculture.
Finally, a great experience should remember that social networking can be pleasant one day and harsh the next. There should be ways to react to sudden events or shifts in your mood. Sometimes you need a way to be online but not be 100% available.
There is no perfect content moderation solution out there. There is no whiz bang simple technical solution to the messiness that is human beings. As I’ve said many times, so many trust & safety dilemmas are really societal problems that we think are new or need to be solved by internet companies because they’re appearing through screens over the internet.
And, of course, nothing that Bluesky is working on may turn out to work, or matter. It’s still a small operation, and some of these ideas are completely untested. But, at the very least, it is presenting some pretty thoughtful ideas in an open way, and trying to think through the real consequences of what it’s creating here. And that, alone, is incredibly refreshing.
* The creator of nostr apparently does not believe moderation should happen at the client level, but when I asked him how relay operators could express their moderation rules suggested it didn’t matter since relays weren’t moderating anyway. Of course, since then I’ve noticed that nostr is being overrun with cryptocurrency spam, so at some point people there are going to realize that something needs to be done.
This isn’t a huge surprise, as they’d already suggested they would do this, but Google has announced officially that it will block news links in Canada to avoid having to pay to send traffic to Canadian news sources.
We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada.
The company goes on to note all the ways in which it had been supporting journalism in Canada, nearly all of which it will now stop because of the pure stupidity and open internet-breaking nature of the bill, which demands payments for linking to news, going against the fundamental principle of the web.
We already pay to support Canadian journalism through our programs and partnerships – and we’ve been clear we’re prepared to do more. As part of our Google News Showcase program, we have negotiated agreements covering over 150 news publications across Canada. Last year alone, we linked to Canadian news publications more than 3.6 billion times — at no charge — helping publishers make money through ads and new subscriptions. This referral traffic from links has been valued at $250 million CAD annually. We’re willing to do more; we just can’t do it in a way that breaks the way that the web and search engines are designed to work, and that creates untenable product and financial uncertainty.
Ever since the Government introduced C-18 last year, we have shared our experiences in other countries and been clear that unworkable legislation could lead to changes that affect the availability of news on Google’s products in Canada.
We have successfully collaborated with Governments and news publishers around the world on the shared goal of strengthening the news industry, and we currently have thousands of mutually beneficial agreements with news publications around the world.
We tried to take this same approach with Bill C-18. We repeatedly offered constructive feedback and recommended solutions that would have made it more workable for both platforms and publishers, unlocking further financial support for Canadian journalism. We also endorsed the alternative model of an independent fund for Canadian journalism supported by both platforms and the Government, an approach that’s worked elsewhere. We appeared several times before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications and submitted detailed recommendations to both committees.
We advocated for reasonable and balanced amendments to the legislation for over a year. None of our suggestions for changes to C-18 were accepted.
As the fallout from the federal government’s Online News Act continues, Facebook parent Meta is terminating a contract with The Canadian Press that saw the digital giant support the hiring of a limited number of emerging journalists at the national newswire service.
The newswire agency was informed Wednesday that Meta will end the contract, which has funded roughly 30 reporting fellowship positions for early-career journalists at CP since the program’s inception in 2020.
Canadian Press executive editor Gerry Arnold said that in its letter informing the media company of its decision, Meta clearly linked its termination of the program to Canada’s Online News Act, which became law last week.
With all of this going on, even as the Canadian government was very clearly warned about just how damaging C-18 would be, Drew Wilson at Freezenet reported that the government is now scrambling to negotiate (after the bill was passed) on ways to keep Meta and Google allowing news links in Canada.
Of course, that quoted some Google folks saying that they were hopeful for an agreement — and that was before this announcement from Google, so it sounds like the negotiations failed.
Meanwhile, two of Canada’s biggest newspapers, Postmedia (owners of the National Post) and Nordstar (owners of the Toronto Star), are apparently in talks to merge, meaning there would be even less competition and fewer major news orgs in Canada. I’m sure that some would argue that this is why the internet companies need to pay for links, but it actually just reinforces how terribly traditional news orgs have been run in the internet age, where they’ve consistently failed to adapt or figure out how to actually embrace the internet.
And now they want to be paid for their own failures. But, instead, the end result may be that they’re in more trouble because Google and Facebook take away all the benefits they’ve been providing them already.
You don’t need to be some fortune teller to predict some of this stuff. A year ago, after he had announced his plans to buy Twitter (but before he tried to back out, and then was eventually forced to complete the purchase), we were horrified to see Elon Musk meet with the top EU’s Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, and give a full embrace of the EU’s Digital Services Act. As we noted at the time, there are some serious concerns about the free speech implications of the DSA, and someone who was actually committed to free speech would be calling those out, rather than claiming “it’s exactly aligned with my thinking.”
Of course, Breton knew full well what he was doing, and that he was outplaying Musk, because Musk appears to have no curiosity about the impact of actual policy issues, and just works off of whims and spite.
A top European Union official is in Silicon Valley to check whether Twitter is ready to comply with the bloc’s tough new digital rulebook, a set of sweeping new standards that the world’s biggest online platforms all must obey in just two months.
Breton met with Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino to discuss how the company will comply with the law. Over the last year or so, Breton has seemed almost gleeful in repeatedly reminding Musk that he endorsed the DSA last year, and now Breton seems to want to make sure that Musk regrets it.
Before his trip to France, Musk stopped in Italy, a visit that appears to have helped consolidate the sympathies of right-wing supporters in his battle against the Digital Services Act. Musk, along with other tech leaders, opposes the package of EU rules on platform liability that includes requirements to block fake news and restrict online violence. And it is precisely the right-wing political forces in Europe that could help curb measures proposed by the European Commission.
That said, I’m confused by that paragraph, since the measures are no longer “proposed.” They’re law. And some aspects of them go into effect in less than two months. And Musk has not yet publicly opposed the law, he’s embraced it.
“If a law is enacted, Twitter commits to comply with it,” he told TV presenter Anne-Sophie Lapix during an interview, broadcast in dubbed French, on France 2.
I mean, all of this suggests someone who is in way over his head on policy debates. He’s telling people of course he’ll comply with the law, while making decisions that will actively violate the law, while trying to shore up help to fight the law, while saying that the law aligns with his own views.
It’s almost as if he has no clue and is just flailing around.
And the thing is, these rules may be the most consequential global laws for the next decade when it comes to free speech. Someone who actually was a “free speech absolutist” would be working with actual experts to figure out how to make sure those laws don’t create tons of harm regarding free speech. But, again, Musk’s idea of free speech is simply “let my trollish friends be assholes, while embracing dictators who censor, and kicking people who annoy me off Twitter.”
It’s not principled. It’s not about free speech at all. It’s about Elon Musk.
There are some fairly strict rules about communicating with government agency employees regarding some matter that they’re adjudicating, without making those communications public. We want whatever administrative state we have to have any attempts to influence outcomes to be public for all to see. That’s why agencies have rules regarding what’s known as “ex parte” communications, when someone tries to communicate with someone adjudicating some sort of dispute about that dispute.
The standard practice is, if a lobbyist or an activist meets with an official to discuss a matter that is under active adjudication consideration, they’re supposed to file some details on the “ex parte” communication with the agency so that all sides are made aware of it.
Of course, there are times when that just doesn’t happen, and… that’s not good.
So it was interesting that some filings showed up recently on the FTC’s docket regarding its recent move to reopen its 2020 consent decree with Facebook (pre-Meta!) regarding some of its activities regarding products targeting kids and how data is collected. I haven’t looked closely at the details, and it’s possible that there’s a legitimate argument here from the FTC (I mean, it’s Facebook we’re talking about here — though Meta quickly moved to block the FTC).
However, even as the three current FTC Commissioners all voted in favor of this FTC action, one of them, Alvaro Bedoya, released a statement explaining that even as he voted in support of this move, he wasn’t entirely sure that the new concerns were really tied to the old order:
There are limits to the Commission’s order modification authority. Here, the relevant question is not what I would support as a matter of policy. Rather, when the Commission determines how to modify an order, it must identify a nexus between the original order, the intervening violations, and the modified order. Based on the record before me today, I have concerns about whether such a nexus exists for proposed Provision I.
In other words, even if the FTC has a legitimate concern about the products and data collection practices, it looks like the FTC may be trying to take a shortcut. Rather than bringing a full action, and having that lead to a new consent decree, it’s claiming that the old consent decree was violated, and therefore it can modify that. And Bedoya is noting that it’s not entirely clear that that’s the case. Effectively, he’s saying that without more info, it looks like the FTC is trying to cut corners.
For what it’s worth, I’ve followed Bedoya’s work for many years, both as a congressional staffer (where he was always one of the smartest, most thoughtful, staffers on privacy issues, even if I didn’t always agree with him) as well as when he went into academia afterwards. As far as I can recall, I’ve never spoken with him, but I was happy that he was nominated to the FTC.
I think the statement above is indicative of the kind of integrity that Bedoya has, and why I’ve always appreciated his thinking. He highlights that the process matters separate from the policy goal, and is making it clear that we shouldn’t cut corners to achieve a good policy outcome, when there are proper ways to reach those outcomes. That, by itself, is integrity.
So too was the thing that more recently showed up on the docket: Bedoya submitting various “ex parte communications” from a bunch of activists who were furious at him for his statement, and who texted him and some of his staffers in angry, and somewhat threatening tones. The worst of it came from former Elizabeth Warren chief of staff, Dan Geldon, who angrily texted Bedoya to yell at him for making that statement.
Bedoya, rightly recognizing that he can’t be privately communicating with anyone regarding this matter didn’t reply, and so at some later date but it’s at an AM time rather than PM, so it must be a later date (unclear if it’s the next day, but it is clear that Bedoya took screenshots of these soon after they came in, likely recognizing the nature of these ex parte communications) snidely complaining about Bedoya’s lack of response, and talking about how they did communicate when Geldon apparently helped Bedoya get confirmed:
“Very telling that you don’t even respond to text messages now that you don’t need help getting confirmed. That pretty much says it all.”
Yes, what it says is that Bedoya knows darn well that he can’t be privately discussing this matter while it’s an ongoing issue before the Commission. And, of course, he could respond during his nomination because that had nothing to do with an ongoing matter over which he had to adjudicate a regulatory matter.
Geldon also texted a staffer who works for Bedoya, and approached him at an event (both of which are also reported in the document). The staffer responds to Geldon and makes it clear he should knock off the ex parte communication as it’s inappropriate for them to have any private communications regarding an ongoing manner, and Geldon still feels the need to follow it up by telling the staffer to tell others that Bedoya’s (pretty fucking benign) statement ws “inexcusable and unforgivable,” before going on to basically threaten Bedoya:
No, dude, what’s inexcusable and unforgivable is thinking that you have the right to privately communicate and pressure an FTC Commissioner without revealing it publicly.
There are a few other communications included in the file, but most are just others expressing their “disappointment” in general terms, and not as aggressive and offensive as Geldon’s bullying.
Look: I get it. There is a crew of people who want to attack “big tech” at any opportunity. Senator Warren was in that crew, as we’ve discussed before, so it’s no surprise that her former Chief of Staff is happy about the FTC’s move. But, as we keep explaining, if you want to take down big tech, do it legitimately. Don’t do weak shortcuts or just attacking for the sake of attacking.
Because these weak attacks are failing, and they’re undermining any legitimacy the FTC has to take on actual problems. There are real, and serious, problems throughout many industries, including tech, that the FTC can and should be taking on. But each time it tries to half-ass it, it makes the FTC look ridiculous.
Again, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Meta is doing bad shit regarding data collection on kids. It sure rings true, given the company’s past actions. But that’s no excuse for taking a procedural shortcut, and kudos to Bedoya and the FTC Office of the General Counsel for noting that these communications should be on the docket.
The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful tools by jacking up the price on it to unsupportable levels — was about making Reddit more “democratic.”
Except, that’s clearly not the case. For weeks now, Reddit has been ratcheting up the threats to various moderators of subreddits to try to force them to reopen.
The latest is that Reddit started contacting more mods of protesting subs (most have reopened, but many are still engaging in acts of protest) telling them they had 48 hours to tell the company their plans for reopening. Quickly after that, they issued an ultimatum: closed subreddits must reopen.
“This community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue” beyond the deadline, the admin (Reddit employee) account ModCodeofConduct wrote in a note to one of the biggest Reddit communities that’s still private.
After a mod replied, ModCodeofConduct went even further. “[Millions of] members have lost complete access to this community and that is not going to continue,” the account said. “Wanting to take time to consider future moderation plans is fine, but that must be done in at least a ‘restricted’ setting. This community will not remain private beyond the timeframe we’ve allowed for confirmation of plans here.”
In a conversation with moderators of a different subreddit, ModCodeofConduct told them that “continued violation of [Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct] over the next 31 hours will result in further action.” Rule 4 of that document is “Be Active and Engaged.” That subreddit has since reopened, though in an “archive” mode where new posts will be automatically removed.
The thing is, in many of these subreddits, the users voted in favor of going private. So, for all of Huffman’s nonsense talk about “democracy” and getting rid of what he preposterously called “the landed gentry,” the reality is the opposite. It’s Huffman’s way, or you’re out.
Indeed, there are already reports of Reddit admins being willing to help stage coups to oust protesting mods and install others in their place. Meanwhile, there’s talk of renewed protests on July 1st (the day the API changes go into effect), though who knows how well that will go.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen lots of reports noting that Redidt’s traffic, after an initial dip, has returned to normal, but it’s possible that some of that is just people gawking at the spectacle of the protesting subs that were covered in John Oliver images.
But, perhaps a more concerning issue regarding Huffman’s plans to take the company public in the near future, is that the same reports saying traffic has returned to normal, are noting that traffic to Reddit’s advertising portal… has dropped noticeably.
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
Next thing you know, we’ll be hearing that Huffman has hired Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO….
I don’t know how many times it needs to be said, but since so many are still insisting the opposite is true, I guess many more times: Twitter’s moderation policies were not driven by some anti-conservative bias, nor were they pushed by the government to block Trump or his supporters. We have, of course, discussed all this before, but now the Washington Post got its hands on a video recording of an internal Twitter meeting right before the January 6th attack on the Capitol, in which they discussed how to handle the growing calls for violence.
Nothing in the video is surprising, as it all confirms what’s been said before, but it does provide more evidence. The video, and testimony from some people involved in this and related meetings, were part of why the January 6th Committee highlighted just how far Twitter staff bent over backwards to protect Trump and conservatives on the platform.
And, it’s confirming what a former Twitter trust & safety employee testified under oath, about how when they saw a tweet by Donald Trump that clearly violated the site’s policies, the decision Twitter’s leadership made was to rewrite the rules to effectively exempt Trump’s tweet.
That’s not even getting into the many studies, both internal and external to Twitter, that showed no evidence of anti-conservative bias in Twitter’s moderation policies. In fact, Twitter’s own research showed that it favored conservative tweets, with its algorithm promoting them more than non-conservative tweets.
And the new video, again, shows that the company wanted to give every possible leeway to Trump’s supporters, even as some were advocating violence (some of which later occurred):
On Jan. 5, 2021, the lawyers and specialists on Twitter’s safety policy team, which set rules about violent content, were bracing for a day of brutality in Washington. In the weeks since President Donald Trump had tweeted a call for his supporters to gather in the nation’s capital for a protest he promised would be “wild,” the site had erupted with pledges of political vengeance and plans for a military-style assault.
“I am very concerned about what happens tomorrow, especially given what we have been seeing,” one member of the team, Anika Collier Navaroli, said in a video call, the details of which are reported here for the first time. “For months we have been allowing folks to maintain and say on the platform that they’re locked and loaded, that they’re ready to shoot people, that they’re ready to commit violence.”
Some participants in the call pushed the company to adopt a tougher position, arguing that moderators should be able to remove what they called “coded incitements to violence” — messages, such as “locked and loaded,” that could be read as threats. But a senior manager dismissed the idea, saying executives wanted them to take action against only the most flagrant rules violations, adding, “We didn’t want to go too far.”
I think this is actually a fully defensible position, especially as it wasn’t entirely clear how far all the talk would go. But it also blows a big hole in the idea that Twitter was actively seeking to suppress such voices.
The same records that the Post obtained show that Twitter was also very reluctant to suspend Trump:
But the records reveal a company that fought until the end to give some of Trump’s most belligerent supporters the benefit of the doubt, even as its internal teams faced an overwhelming volume of tweets threatening retribution in line with Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.
They also show that Twitter’s leaders were reluctant to take action against Trump’s account two days after the insurrection, even as lawyers inside the company argued that his continued praise of the Capitol rioters amounted to “glorification of violence,” an offense punishable then by suspension under Twitter’s rules.
And, one more thing: the records suggest that the narrative about the Biden administration (or, at the time, campaign and then transition team) having anything to do with the Trump suspension is false:
None of the records obtained by The Washington Post — including the 32-minute video, a five-page retrospective memo outlining the suspension discussions, and a 114-page agenda document detailing the safety policy team’s meetings and conversations — show any contacts with federal officials pushing the company to take any action involving Trump’s account.
Again, none of this should be a surprise to you if you’ve been following the actual details. Versions of all of this information have come out, repeatedly. Though, these new records provide some more details on what actually happened inside of the company:
On the night of Jan. 6, after law enforcement officials had fought to regain control of the Capitol grounds, Twitter briefly suspended Trump’s account but said it would allow him to return after 12 hours if he deleted three tweets that broke Twitter’s “civic integrity” rules against manipulating or interfering in elections. One tweet included a video in which he called for peace from the “very special” rioters who he said had been “hurt” because the “fraudulent election … was stolen from us.”
The former Twitter executive said the company sent Trump’s representatives an email on Jan. 6 saying that his account would face an immediate ban if he broke another rule and that the executives hoped, with a 12-hour timeout, Trump would “get the message.”
Trump deleted the tweets and, on Jan. 7, posted a conciliatory video in which he said that “this moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” The next day, however, he tweeted a more fiery message about how the “American Patriots” who voted for him would “not be disrespected” and announced that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The documents then discuss the internal back and forth (some of which we’ve already talked about with regards to the — widely misinterpreted — Twitter Files) between employees at Twitter about what to do in response to Trump’s account potentially inspiring violence. As we’ve heard before, and the notes obtained by the Post confirm, there was a somewhat passionate debate internally, with many arguing that his tweets did not go so far as to incite violence, while others argued that Trump’s messages were clearly coded to encourage the January 6th insurrectionists to continue to attack our Democratic institutions.
And, again, there seemed to be back and forth debate, not driven by any political ideology, or with any input from anyone outside the company, debating how to handle the account:
Still, some Twitter executives voiced hesitation about taking down Trump’s account, arguing that “reasonable minds could differ” as to the intentions of Trump’s tweets, according to Navaroli’s document. Twitter had for years declined to hold Trump to the same rules as everyone else on the basis that world leaders’ views were especially important for voters to hear.
At a 2 p.m. video call on Jan. 8, which was described in the document but not viewed by The Post, top officials in Twitter’s trust and safety team questioned the “glorification of violence” argument and debated whether the company should instead wait to act until Trump more blatantly broke the platform’s rules.
Navaroli argued that this course of inaction had “led us to the current crisis situation” and could lead “to the same end result — continued violence and death in a nation in the midst of a sociopolitical crisis,” the document shows.
In another call, around 3:30 p.m., after safety policy team members had compiled examples of tweets in which users detailed plans for future violence, Twitter’s top lawyers and policy officials voiced support for a “permanent suspension” of Trump’s account. One note in the safety policy agenda document read that there was a “team consensus that this is a [violation]” due to Trump’s “pattern of behavior.”
Their assessment was sent to Dorsey and Gadde for final approval and, at 6:21 p.m., Twitter’s policy team was notified over Slack that Trump had been suspended. A company tweet and blog post announced the decision to the world shortly after.
There’s a lot more in the Post’s story, which covers a ton of background info as well. Anyone who is discussing this stuff owes it to themselves to read the whole thing. But it gives yet another stack of evidence confirming what all of the earlier evidence had shown: that Twitter bent over backwards to keep Trump on the platform, that the decision to remove him was deeply debated and focused on issues around fears of actual violence, not political ideology, and that there was no evidence of any interference or involvement from anyone outside of Twitter, let alone anyone associated with the Biden transition team.
And yet, there are still some extremely motivated, ignorant, and/or gullible people out there who believe the opposite is true.
I’m assuming that this new evidence won’t convince them, because they seem to brush off and ignore any evidence that debunk their hallucinations. But, for everyone else, it’s useful reinforcement for what has already been shown to be true.
Look, we were not kind when Genius first accused Google of copying lyrics from its site. The only interesting bit was the cleverness with which Genius figured out Google had copied the lyrics from its site, by sneakily adding in curved or non-curved apostrophes to see if the same ones showed up in Google’s version of the lyrics.
But, as we noted at the time, even if Google copied the lyrics from Genius, that was not a legal matter. After all, Genius did not hold any rights in the lyrics, and its method of “getting” the lyrics was basically having people copy down what they heard (one of the stupid things about copyright and lyrics is that there are no official lyrics most of the time, and every lyric site, even those that “license” lyrics, still have to figure out what those lyrics are, which is just kinda crazy when you think about it). And, more importantly, we had a lawsuit almost exactly on this point years ago, where a phone book company inserted fake entries to capture those who “copied” their phone book, and the court said that you can’t copyright facts, and allowed it to stand.
We were even less kind when Genius stupidly sued Google anyway. And we were not at all surprised when a judge rejected the many, many, many ways in which the company tried to turn this into a legal claim. And so, it’s no surprise that this case ends with a complete whimper as the Supreme Court rejected Genius’ cert petition with no comment.
There’s really not much more to say about this other than whoever decided to bring this case in the first place was no genius, and just wasted a bunch of money on high priced lawyers to bring an exceptionally silly case.
Next time, the company should just put a copy of its planned complaint on Genius for copyright experts to annotate before they bring such a silly lawsuit.
A few months back I attended a workshop regarding keeping children on the internet safe, and at some point a debate broke out over whether social media was “more like” cigarettes or chocolate (i.e., obviously addictive and harmful or just a little unhealthy in large doses), and a long term trust & safety executive who was in the room told me it was driving them crazy, because it’s just not an analogy that works. Chocolate and cigarettes are things you literally consume in your body, and they have a clear, and pretty well understood, impact on your body.
Social media… is speech.
Speech can have an impact on people: it can motivate them, inspire them, scare them, etc. And sometimes those impacts can be negative. But speech alone is not something you metabolize. It does not change your body. It does not poison you.
It is not a toxin.
And that’s why it’s so frustrating that this analogy keeps popping up. The latest is from Ashwin Vasan, the Commission of the New York City Department of Health. He could be dealing with all sorts of actual health problems facing New Yorkers, but instead decided to pen a nonsense opinion piece falsely declaring social media the equivalent of known toxins.
The title gives away the game:
“We must treat social media like the toxin that it is”
He then uses his own children as the example of how social media is bad (which makes me wonder how his kids feel about being props here).
As a parent of three young children, I see every day how young people have been conditioned to reach for their for phones and devices. The fault lines of this tectonic shift are in my home, and homes like it throughout our nation.
Yes, parents having some control over their kids use of devices and online services is a challenge, but that’s way different than calling it a “toxin.” And, having spent plenty of time around adults, many of them seem to feel “conditioned to reach for their phones and devices” as well, and yet that’s somehow considered just fine, but with kids it’s somehow a problem?
Vasan then admits that social media might actually be good for some kids (while tons of studies actually show it’s good for way more kids than it’s bad for), but then immediately insists that social media is “uniquely harmful” to kids (which is not, actually, what any study has shown).
Real communities can form online, and virtual kinship can help young people explore the world and their own identities. It is clear that social media is now a part of our lives, and so all-out bans or prohibition is neither realistic nor advised. But the evidence is clear that unregulated, unfettered access to all kinds of social media and its content is uniquely harmful to children. Much as toys have package safety inserts for children and parents, we need information and protections for social media.
The link there to “uniquely harmful to children” is not any study that actually supports that claim. It’s to an NPR radio program in which some parents driven by a moral panic have pushed senators to pass legislation to “protect the children online.”
Except, again, all of the evidence suggests that this is wrong. The evidence says that social media is not super dangerous for most kids. It says that there are some kids who have trouble dealing with it, and attention should be paid to those kids. As the American Psychological Association just explained, the evidence simply does not support the narrative that social media is inherently or uniquely problematic. Instead, they recommend better media literacy and digital citizenship efforts in schools, to help those who do run into trouble how to avoid getting sucked in.
But Vasan buys into the narrative, and evidence be damned.
I mean, sure he has statistics, but they don’t say what he wants them to say:
Inaction has helped lead us into a youth mental health crisis. In 2021, 38 percent of NYC high schoolers reported feeling so sad or hopeless during the past 12 months that they stopped doing their usual activities — a rate that was significantly higher for Latino/a and Black students than their white peers.
A survey in 2021, you say? Gee… I wonder why might have happened in the preceding 12 months that might have had an impact on their mental health. What might have caused kids to feel sad and hopeless leading them to stop doing their usual activities? Vasan writes this and assumes you’ll all agree with him that it must be social media, when, for fuck’s sake, it was the damn pandemic. In the preceding 12 months, kids watched a global pandemic take over the world, taking them out of schools, getting people sick, killing loved ones, leading many to have parents who may have lost jobs, while mostly keeping them locked up in their homes to avoid contracting a deadly viral infection.
Indeed, social media was kind of a savior for many of those kids, in that it allowed them to actually continue to have something resembling a social life during the lockdown periods of the pandemic when NYC’s schools were shut down or totally remote.
But, no, to Vasan, it’s obvious that the problem was social media all along:
We must lay out strategies for how we’ll protect young people from the harms of social media. We must rework regulations and, where appropriate, hold companies accountable for the damage they continue to inflict.
Again, Pew and the American Psychological Association both released reports in the last year detailing how social media was actually more helpful to most kids, and noted that there was just a very small percentage who seemed to find social media problematic.
And, yes, sure, let’s work towards fixing those situations and helping those students. But to insist, flat out, that social media is harmful to kids, and that companies need to be “held accountable” because some kids use the internet for problematic purposes, is ridiculous.
And then Vasan closes out with the most ridiculous bit of them all, claiming that social media is no different than lead paint. Really.
Social media may be digital, but its effects can be just as damaging as tobacco, lead paint, or air pollution. One of the primary roles of public health has been to reduce exposure to these toxins through education and harm reduction, and sometimes through litigation, regulation and enforcement, thereby preventing disease, staving off suffering, and mitigating societal costs.
There is no reason to treat social media any differently.
No. Social media’s effects literally cannot be “just as damaging” as tobacco, lead paint, or air pollution. All three of those lead to actual poisons breaking down your body.
Words do not do that.
Again, throughout this I’ve been clear that some kids cannot handle social media, and we should look to help them, but anyone who insists that social media is the equivalent of lead paint does not know what the fuck they’re talking about, and should not be anywhere near a health department, let alone running one for the largest city in the US.
If you want to deal with the downsides of social media, you need rational people in charge. Not foolish people driven by evidence-free moral panics. Unfortunately, New York City has the latter.
