Open access has been discussed many times here on Techdirt. There are several strands to its story. It’s about allowing the public to access research they have paid for through tax-funded grants, without needing to take out often expensive subscriptions to academic titles. It’s about saving educational institutions money that they are currently spending on over-priced academic journals, and which could be better spent elsewhere. It’s about helping to spread knowledge without the friction that traditional publishing introduces, ideally moving to licenses that allow academic research papers to be distributed freely and without restrictions.
But there’s another aspect that receives less attention, revealed here by a new paper that looks at how open access articles are used in a particular and important context – that of Wikipedia. There is a natural synergy between the two, which both aim to make access to knowledge easier. The paper seeks to quantify that:
we analyze a large dataset of citations from Wikipedia and model the role of open access in Wikipedia’s citation patterns. We find that open-access articles are extensively and increasingly more cited in Wikipedia. What is more, they show a 15% higher likelihood of being cited in Wikipedia when compared to closed-access articles, after controlling for confounding factors. This open-access citation effect is particularly strong for articles with low citation counts, including recently published ones. Our results show that open access plays a key role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge, including by providing Wikipedia editors timely access to novel results. These findings have important implications for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field of information science and technology.
What this means in practice is that for the general public open access articles are even more beneficial than those published in traditional titles, since they frequently turn up as Wikipedia sources that can be consulted directly. They are also advantageous for the researchers who write them, since their work is more likely to be cited on the widely-read and influential Wikipedia than if the papers were not open access. As the research notes, this effect is even more pronounced for “articles with low citation counts” – basically, academic work that may be important but is rather obscure. This new paper provides yet another compelling reason why researchers should be publishing their work as open access as a matter of course: out of pure self interest.
We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the bill insist that they’re trying to stop experimentation on children).
We’ve also written about how NetChoice, an internet company trade group, has sued to block the law as unconstitutional, and how I filed a declaration explaining how the law would violate the rights of both us at Techdirt and our users.
That lawsuit has continued to move forward, with California filing a pretty laughable reply saying that it doesn’t regulate speech at all. NetChoice has filed its own reply as well, highlighting how ridiculous that is:
The State claims that AB 2273 regulates data management—“nonexpressive conduct,” Opp. 11—not speech. Nonsense. AB 2273’s text expressly requires services to “mitigate or eliminate” risks that a child “could” encounter “potentially harmful … content” online. Content was the through-line in the legislative process: Defendant Attorney General Bonta praised the Act precisely because it would “protect children from … harmful material” and “dangerous online content”—in other words, speech—and Governor Newsom lauded the law for “protect[ing] kids” from harmful “content.” The State’s own expert, who mentions “content” in her declaration 71 times, derides preexisting laws specifically because they “only” cover data management, not content. Radesky Decl. ¶ 98. The State cannot evade the Constitution by pretending the Act regulates only “business practices … related to the collection and use of children’s personal information,” Opp. 11, when the law’s text, purpose, and effect are to regulate and shape online content. Like California’s last attempt to “restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed,” Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 792, 794 (2011), AB 2273 violates the First Amendment
It appears that Governor Newsom may have realized how badly this case is going to go for him. Days after NetChoice filed that reply, Newsom sent NetChoice an angry letter demanding that it drop the case.
The text is quite remarkable… and bizarre. Newsom sounds… angry. Perhaps because he realizes (per the above) that his own words in support of the bill and how it should be used to block “content” are going to make him lose this case.
Enough is enough. In light of new action and findings released by the U.S. Surgeon General, I urge you to drop your lawsuit challenging California’s children’s online safety law.
Except, as we just detailed, the Surgeon General’s report does not find that the internet harms kids, and actually makes it clear that most kids benefit from social media. Straight from the report that it appears Newsom did not read:
A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). In addition, research suggests that social media-based and other digitally-based mental health interventions may also be helpful for some children and adolescents by promoting help-seeking behaviors and serving as a gateway to initiating mental health care.
But, Newsom appears to have only read the headlines that misconstrue what’s in the actual report. His letter then goes into full on moral panic mode:
Every day as our children browse the internet to connect with one another, build community, and learn, they are also pushed to horrific content and exposed to data mining and location tracking. This reality is dangerous to their safety, mental health, and well-being. That’s why, last September, I was proud to sign the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act — a bipartisan, first-in-the-nation law that protects the health and privacy of children using online platforms and prohibits online services from encouraging children to provide personal information.
Except, nearly everything in that paragraph is wrong. Embarrassingly so. There is no evidence that children are “pushed to horrific content.” It is true that there may be horrific content online, but the idea that companies are pushing kids to that content is not supported by the evidence. Furthermore, it’s rich that he’s complaining about “data mining and location tracking” while saying that this bill prohibits companies from seeking “personal information” from kids when the law’s “age assurance” requirements suggest the exact opposite. To comply with the law, websites will be effectively required to demand information from users to determine a likely age.
As I explained in my own declaration in the lawsuit, at Techdirt we have bent over backwards to learn as little about the folks who read our site as possible. But under the law, we will likely be compelled to institute a program in which we are required to determine the age of everyone who visits. In other words, the law requires more data mining, not less, and explicitly requires it for children.
Newsom continues the nonsense:
Rather than join California in protecting our children, your association, which represents major tech companies including Google, Meta, TikTok, and Twitter, chose to sue over this commonsense law. In your lawsuit, you have gone so far as to make light of the real harms our children face on the internet, trivializing this law as just being about teenagers who “say unkind things, insufficiently ‘like’ another’s posts,” or are unhappy about “the omission of a ‘trigger warning.’”
Again, nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline (at least where kids can reach it).
As for the claim that NetChoice is “trivializing this law,” that’s obviously bullshit to anyone who has read the filings in context (which apparently does not include this angry Governor Newsom). The references in that paragraph are in NetChoice’s motion for a preliminary injunction, but taken completely out of context. They’re not trivializing the issues children face: they’re pointing out that the way the law is drafted (i.e., very, very badly), it also applies to those more “trivial” situations. From the preliminary injunction filing:
AB 2273 also adopts a boundless conception of what speech must be restricted, including speech that cannot constitutionally be restricted even for minors. The requirement that services enforce their own policies, id. § 1798.99.31(a)(9), will lead them to suppress swaths of protected speech that the State could not restrict directly. See supra § IV.A.1.b. The bar on using algorithms and user information to recommend or promote content will restrict a provider’s ability to transmit protected speech based on the user’s expressed interests. And the law’s restrictions on content that might be “detrimental” or “harmful” to a child’s “well-being,” id. § 1798.99.31(a)(1)(b), (b)(1), (3)-(4), (7), could restrict expression on any topic that happens to distress any child or teen. This would include a range of important information children are constitutionally entitled to receive, such as commentary or news about the war in Ukraine, the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, school shootings, and countless other controversial, significant events.
More fundamentally, the “harm” the law seeks to address—that content might damage someone’s “well-being”—is a function of human communication itself. AB 2273 applies to, among other things, communications by teenagers on social media, who may say unkind things, insufficiently “like” another’s posts, or complain harshly about events at school; the use of language acceptable to some but not others; the omission of a “trigger warning”; and any other manner of discourse online. See, e.g., Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist. v. B. L., 141 S. Ct. 2038 (2021) (Snapchat post “fuck cheer” made high school students “visibly upset”)
So, no. The lawsuit is not trivializing harms children face by saying that it’s nothing more than kids saying unkind things, NetChoice is (accurately) pointing out that the broad language of the law means that it could be applied to those situations, rather than ones dealing with actual harm.
It’s pathetic and embarrassing that Newsom would imply that this paragraph was trivializing harms. His complete and total misread of what’s in the lawsuit is trivializing the seriousness of his state’s own law that is violating 1st Amendment rights.
Anyway, Newsom goes on:
Yet at the same time you are in court callously mocking this law, experts are confirming the known dangers of online platforms for kids and teens: Just days ago, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the profound toll that social media takes on kids’ and teens’ mental health without adequate safety and privacy standards. Your association and its members may be interested to learn of the Surgeon General’s urgent findings about the sexual extortion of our children, and the alarming links between youth social media and cyberbullying, depression, suicide, and unhealthy and dangerous outcomes and behaviors.
Honestly, this is making me wonder if Newsom ever reads anything. Because, as we discussed that is not what the Surgeon General’s report says at all. It literally says that there are widespread benefits to social media and then says “we do not have enough evidence” regarding whether or not it’s harmful. It notes there are concerns, and some “correlational” studies, but nothing proving a causal link. It notes that we need more research on that point.
So how the hell is Newsom claiming that it is claiming there is a “profound toll” from social media? The report does not say that.
As for the “Surgeon General’s urgent findings about the sexual extortion of our children,” again Newsom is blatantly misstating what the report says. It notes that the internet has been used for sexual extortion, which is a fact, but nothing in the AADC will stop bad people from being terrible. The report does not say anything about this fact being “urgent” or requiring social media companies to magically make people stop being bad. It just mentions such things as the kind of problematic content that exists online.
As for the “alarming links between youth social media and cyberbullying, depression, suicide, and unhealthy and dangerous outcomes and behaviors” that’s AGAIN misreading the Surgeon General’s report. Again, it does mention those things, but does not discuss “alarming links.” It highlights correlational concerns again, and suggests further research and caution. But does not mention any sort of causal link, alarming or not.
In fact, with regards to cyberbullying, the Surgeon General’s recommendations talk about better educating teachers, parents, and children on how to deal with such things. And, its one policy recommendation around cyberbullying is not to force websites to censor content, as the AADC does, but rather to “support the development, implementation, and evaluation of digital and media literacy curricular in schools and within academic standards.”
In other words, what the Surgeon General is kinda saying is that our policy makers are the ones who have failed our kids by not teaching them how to be good digital citizens.
Governor Newsom, that one’s on you.
So, so far we have Newsom lying about the law, lying about the filings from NetChoice, and now lying about the Surgeon General’s report. I know it’s a post-truth political world we live in, but I expect better from California’s governor.
But he’s not done yet:
The harms of unregulated social media are established and clear.
The Surgeon General’s report — not to mention the even more thorough report from the American Psychological Association — literally say the opposite. They say it is not clear, and much more research needs to be done.
Governor Newsom, you should stop lying.
It is time for the tech industry to stop standing in the way of important protections for our kids and teens, and to start working with us to keep our kids safe.”
Stomping on 1st Amendment rights and lying about everything is not “keeping our kids safe” Governor.
Utah, as a state, has a pretty long history of having terrible policy proposals regarding laws about the internet. And now it’s getting dumber. On Monday, the state’s Attorney General Sean Reyes and Governor Spencer Cox, hosted a very weird press conference. It was billed by them as an announcement about how Utah is suing all the social media companies for not “protecting kids.” Which is already pretty ridiculous. Even more ridiculous, is that Governor Cox’s audience eagerly announced that people should watch the livestream… on social media.
Even more ridiculous: I kept expecting them to announce the details of the actual lawsuit, but it turns out that they haven’t even hired lawyers, let alone planned out the lawsuit. The official announcement notes that they’re putting out a request for proposal to find the most ridiculous law firm possible to file the suit.
Specifics of any legal action are not being released at this time. A Request for Proposal (RFP) document will be submitted this week to prepare for hiring outside counsel to assist with any litigation that could soon occur.
Can I reply to the RFP with a document that just says: “this is not how any of this works, and it makes Utah look like a clueless, anti-tech, anti-innovation backwater?” Cox has actually been surprisingly good on internet issues in the past, and seemed like he understood this stuff, but this kind of nonsense grandstanding makes him look really bad.
Again, the actual evidence regarding social media and children is at best inconclusive, and more likely shows that most kids actually get real value out of it as a way to keep in touch with more people, and get more access to valuable, useful information and people. A big look at basically all of the research on the “harm” of social media on kids found… no evidence to support the narrative.
And looking at the actual research we see the same thing again and again. Oxford did a massive study, looking at over 12,000 kids, and found that social media had effectively zero impact on the health and well being of children. A few years ago, a study (again, looking at multiple studies) noted that the emerging consensus view was that social media didn’t harm kids.
Just recently, we covered a pretty massive Pew Research Center study that surveyed over 1,300 teenagers, and found that, not only was social media not causing harm, it appeared to be providing real value to many of them.
And, whether or not you trust Facebook’s own internal research, the leaked research that the company did on whether or not Facebook and Instagram made kids feel worse about themselves, found that on nearly all issues, it actually made them feel better about themselves:
So, just starting out, the entire premise of this lawsuit seems to be on a moral panic myth that is not supported by any actual evidence, which seems like a pretty dumb reason to file a lawsuit.
The reasons given in the announcement in Utah are the usual moral panic list of things that basically all teenagers face, and faced before the internet existed as well:
“Depression, eating disorders, suicide ideation, cutting, addictions, mass violence, cyberbullying, and other dangers among young people may be initiated or amplified by negative influences and traumatic experiences online through social media.
Except, it’s one thing to say that people using social media experience these things, because basically everyone is on social media these days. The real question is whether or not social media is somehow causing these things, and again, pretty much all of the actual studies say the answer is “no.” And, expecting anyone to be able to sort out which harms are caused by social media, let alone in a way that has legal liability, is ridiculous.
Also, many of these topics are way more complex than the simple analyses cover. We’ve talked before about the studies on eating disorders, for example. Multiple studies have shown that when social media tried to crack down on online discussions about eating disorders it actually made the problem worse, not better. That’s because the eating disorders aren’t caused by social media. The kids are dealing with them no matter what. So when the content is banned, kids find ways around the bans. They always do. And, in doing so, it made it more difficult for others to monitor those discussions, and it often destroyed more open communities where people were helping those who had eating disorders get the help they needed. So demands that websites “crack down” on such content are actually making things worse, and doing more harm to the kids than the websites were doing in the first place.
There’s evidence to suggest the same is true of suicide discussions as well.
All that is to say, this is complicated stuff, and a bunch of grandstanding politicians ignoring what the actual research says in order to generate misleading headlines for themselves are not helping. At all.
And that’s not even getting into what any possible lawsuit could claim. What legal violation is there here? The answer is that there’s none. It doesn’t mean that AG Reyes can’t hassle and annoy companies. But, there’s no actual legal, factual, or moral reason to do any of this. There are only bad reasons, based around Reyes and Cox wanting headlines playing off the moral panics of today.
Right after the 2016 election that saw Donald Trump elected President, there was this collective wail among many who were unable to comprehend how this could have happened, searching for someone to blame. Two targets quickly emerged: social media and Russia. Often the two were combined into “Russian trolls on social media.” As we’ve noted, those Russian trolls certainly existed, and certainly were trying to influence the election, but it seemed dubious to us that they had any real effect. As we noted the day after the election, it was silly to claim that social media magically made people vote for Trump.
In the time since then, we’ve seen more and more evidence showing that the impact of social media was really not at all what many people seem to believe. We’ve talked about the studies that have, repeatedly, shown that cable news had way more of an impact than anything that came out of social media, not just for the election, but also for COVID disinfo.
Now there’s a very interesting new study, published in Nature with a long list of researchers (George Eady, Tom Paskhalis, Jan Zilinsky, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker), looking at whether or not Russian trolls on social media had any real impact on the 2016 election and the summary is no, they did not.
There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media.
Basically, yes, the trolls showed up and tried to sow discontent. But, the people who interacted with it were always going to vote for Trump anyway, and again, existing media was way, way, way more influential than the Russian trolls on social media.
The full report is all sorts of fascinating, and again shows how little impact the Russian trolls actually had. Especially compared to existing news media and US politicians.
The research does show that those who identified as “strongly Republican” were way more likely to encounter/interact with Russian propaganda, but that’s little surprise since that was a key (but not only) target of Russian propaganda. But, again, those individuals were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton in the first place. The study used various models to determine the impact on voting and found it basically negligible.
As estimates in the first panel indicate, the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero (and not statistically significant). This is the case whether the outcome is measured as vote choice in the election itself; the ranking of Clinton and Trump on equivalent survey questions across survey waves; and with the broader measure capturing whether voting behavior more generally favored Trump or Clinton through voting abstentions, changes in vote choice, or voting for a third party. The signs on the coefficients in each case are also negative, both for the count and binary measure, a result that would be inconsistent with a relationship of exposure being favorable to Trump. It is also worth noting that none of the other explanatory variables (with the exception of sex in some models) used as controls appear to be statistically significant predictors of the change in voting preferences
As the researchers conclude:
Taking our analyses together, it would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior for four related reasons. First, we find that exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts was concentrated among a small group of users, with only 1% of users accounting for 70% of all exposures. Second, exposure to Russian foreign influence tweets was overshadowed by the amount of exposure to traditional news media and US political candidates. Third, respondents with the highest levels of exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts were those arguably least likely to need influencing: those who identified themselves as highly partisan Republicans, who were already likely favorable to Donald Trump. Fourth, we did not detect any meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior. Each of these findings is not independently dispositive. Jointly, however, we find concordant evidence between exposure to Russian disinformation—which is both lower and more concentrated than one might expect to be impactful—and the absence of a relationship to changes in attitudes and voting behavior.
The researchers do note that there are some limitations to their research (focused just on tweets, and just on identified Russia influence campaigns), but it does seem noteworthy.
This is a really useful addition to the research out there, though it’s not going to stop the, ahem, disinformation that social media magically impacted the election from continuing to spread. Even if that’s disinformation about disinformation.
Hany Farid is a computer science professor at Berkeley. Here he is insisting that his students should all delete Facebook and YouTube because they often recommend to you things you might like (the horror, the horror):
Farid once did something quite useful, in that he helped Microsoft develop PhotoDNA, a tool that has been used to help websites find and stop child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and report it to NCMEC. Unfortunately, though, he now seems to view much of the world through that lens. A few years back he insisted that we could also tackle terrorism videos with a PhotoDNA — despite the fact that such videos are not at all the same as the CSAM content PhotoDNA can identify, which has strict liability under the law. On the other hand, terrorism videos are often not actually illegal, and can actually provide useful information, including evidence of war crimes.
Anyway, over the years, his views have tended towards what appears to be hating the entire internet because there are some people who use the internet for bad things. He’s become a vocal supporter of the EARN IT Act, despite its many, many problems. Indeed, he’s so committed to it that he appeared at a “Congressional briefing” on EARN IT organized by NCOSE, the group of religious fundamentalist prudes formerly known as “Morality in Media” who believe that all pornography should be illegal because nekked people scare them. NCOSE has been a driving force behind both FOSTA and EARN IT, and they celebrate how FOSTA has made life more difficult for sex workers. At some point, when you’re appearing on behalf of NCOSE, you probably want to examine some of the choices that got you there.
Last week, Farid took to the pages of Gizmodo to accuse me and professor Eric Goldman of “fearmongering” on AB 2273, the California “Age Appropriate Design Code” which he insists is a perfectly fine law that won’t cause any problems at all. California Governor Gavin Newsom is still expected to sign 2273 into law, perhaps sometime this week, even though that would be a huge mistake.
Before I get into some of the many problems with Farid’s article, I’ll just note that both Goldman and I have gone through the bill and explained in great detail the many problems with it, and even highlighted some fairly straightforward ways that the California legislature could have, but chose not to, limit many of its most problematic aspects (though probably not fix them, since the core of the bill makes it unfixable). Farid’s piece does not cite anything in the law (it literally quotes not a single line in the bill) and makes a bunch of blanket statements without much willingness to back them up (and where it does back up the statements, it does so badly). Instead, he accuses Goldman of not substantiating his arguments, which is hilarious.
The article starts off with his “evidence” that the internet is bad for kids.
Leaders have rightly taken notice of the growing mental health crisis among young people. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called out social media’s role in the crisis, and, earlier this year, President Biden addressed these concerns in his State of the Union address.
Of course, saying that “there is no longer any question” about the “nature of the harm to children” displays a profound sense of hubris and ignorance. There are in fact many, many questions about the actual harm. As we noted, just recently, there was a big effort to sort through all of the research on the “harms” associated with social media… and it basically came up empty. That’s not to say there’s no harm, because I don’t think anyone believes that. But the actual research and actual data (which Hany apparently doesn’t want to talk about) is incredibly inconclusive.
For each study claiming one thing, there are equally compelling studies claiming the opposite. To claim that “there is no longer any question” is, empirically, false. It is also fearmongering, the very thing Farid accuses me and Prof. Goldman of doing.
Just for fun, let’s look at each of the studies or stories Farid points to in the two paragraphs above, which open the article. The study about “body image issues” that was the centerpiece of the WSJ’s “Facebook Files” reporting left out an awful lot of context. The actual study was, fundamentally, an attempt by Meta to better understand these issues and look for ways to mitigate the negative (which, you know, seems like a good thing, and actually the kind of thing that the AADC would require). But, more importantly, the very survey that is highlighted around body image impact looked at 12 different issues regarding mental health, of which “body image” was just one, and notably it was the only issue out of 12 where teen girls said Instagram made them feel worse, not better (teen boys felt better, not worse, on all 12). The slide was headlined with “but, we make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls” because that was the only one of the categories where that was true.
And, notably, even as Farid claims that it’s “no longer a question” that Facebook “heightened body image issues,” it also made many of them feel better about body image. And, again, many more felt better on every other issue, including eating, loneliness, anxiety, and family stress. That doesn’t sound quite as damning when you put it that way.
The “TikTok challenges” thing is just stupid, and it’s kind of embarrassing. First of all, it’s been shown that a bunch of the moral panics about “TikTok challenges” have actually been about parents freaking out over challenges that didn’t exist. Even the few cases where someone doing a “TikTok challenge” has come to harm — including the one Farid links to above — involved challenges that kids have done for decades, including before the internet. To magically blame that on the internet is the height of ridiculousness.
I mean, here’s the CDC warning about it in 2008, where they note it goes back to at least 1995 (with some suggestion that it might actually go back decades earlier).
But, yeah, sure, it’s TikTok that’s to blame for it.
The link on the “sexualization of children on YouTube” appears to show the fact that there have been pedophiles trying to game YouTube comments, though a variety of sneaky moves, which is something that YouTube has been trying to fight. But it’s not exactly an example of something that is widespread or mainstream.
As for the last two, fearmongering and moral panics by politicians are kind of standard and hardly proof of anything. Again, the actual data is conflicting and inconclusive. I’m almost surprised that Farid didn’t also toss in claims about suicide, but maybe even he has read the research suggesting you can’t actually blame youth suicide on social media.
So, already we’re off to a bad start, full of questionable fear mongering and moral panic cherry picking of data.
From there, he gives his full-throated support to the Age Appropriate Design Code, and notes that “nine-in-ten California voters” say they support the bill. But, again, that’s meaningless. I’m surprised it’s not 10-in-10. Because if you ask people “do you want the internet to be safe for children” most will say yes. But no one answering this survey actually understands what this bill does.
Then we get to his criticisms of myself and Professor Goldman:
In a piece published by Capitol Weekly on August 18, for example, Eric Goldman incorrectly claims that the AADC will require mandatory age verification on the internet. The following week, Mike Masnick made the bizarre and unsubstantiated claim in TechDirt that facial scans will be required to navigate to any website.
So, let’s deal with his false claim about me first. He says that I made the “bizarre and unsubstantiated claim” that facial scans will be required. But, that’s wrong. As anyone who actually read the article can see quite clearly, it’s what the trade association for age verification providers told me. The quote literally came from the very companies who provide age verification. So, the only “bizarre and unsubstantiated” claims here are from Farid.
As for Goldman’s claims, unlike Farid, Goldman actually supports them with an explanation using the language from the bill. AB 2273 flat out says that “a business that provides an online service, product, or feature likely to be accessed by children shall… estimate the age of child users with a reasonable level of certainty.” I’ve talked to probably a half a dozen actual privacy lawyers about this, and basically all of them say that they would recommend to clients who wish to abide by this that they invest in some sort of age verification technology. Because, otherwise, how would they show that they had achieved the “reasonable level of certainty” required by the law?
Anyone who’s ever paid attention to how lawsuits around these kinds of laws play out knows that this will lead to lawsuits in which the Attorney General of California will insist that websites have not complied unless they’ve implemented age verification technology. That’s because sites like Facebook will implement that, and the courts will note that’s a “best practice” and assume anyone doing less than that fails to abide by the law.
Even should that not happen, the prudent decision by any company will be to invest in such technology to avoid even having to make that argument in court.
Farid insists that sites can do age verification by much less intrusive means, including simple age “estimation.”
Age estimation can be done in a multitude of ways that are not invasive. In fact, businesses have been using age estimation for years – not to keep children safe – but rather for targeted marketing. The AADC will ensure that the age-estimation practices are the least invasive possible, will require that any personal information collected for the purposes of age estimation is not used for any other purpose, and, contrary to Goldman’s claim that age-authentication processes are generally privacy invasive, require that any collected information is deleted after its intended use.
Except, the bill doesn’t just call for “age estimation,” it requires “a reasonable level of certainty” which is not defined in the bill. And getting age estimation for targeted ads wrong means basically nothing to a company. They target an ad wrong, big deal. But under the AADC, a false estimation is now a legal liability. That, by itself, means that many sites will have strong incentives to move to true age verification, which is absolutely invasive.
And, also, not all sites engage in age estimation. Techdirt does not. I don’t want to know how old you are. I don’t care. But under this bill, I might need to.
Also, it’s absolutely hilarious that Farid, who has spent many years trashing all of these companies, insisting that they’re pure evil, that you should delete their apps, and insisting that they have “little incentive” to ever protect their users… thinks they can then be trusted to “delete” the age verification information after it’s been used for its “intended use.”
On that, he’s way more trusting of the tech companies than I would be.
Goldman also claims – without any substantiation – that these regulations will force online businesses to close their doors to children altogether. This argument is, at best, disingenuous, and at worst fear-mongering. The bill comes after negotiations with diverse stakeholders to ensure it is practically feasible and effective. None of the hundreds of California businesses engaged in negotiations are saying they fear having to close their doors. Where companies are not engaging in risky practices, the risks are minimal. The bill also includes a “right to cure” for businesses that are in substantial compliance with its provisions, therefore limiting liability for those seeking in good faith to protect children on their service.
I mean, a bunch of website owners I’ve spoken to over the last month has asked me about whether or not they should close off access to children altogether (or just close off access to Californians), so it’s hardly an idle thought.
Also, the idea that there were “negotiations with diverse stakeholders” appears to be bullshit. Again, I keep talking to website owners who were not contacted, and the few I’ve spoken to who have been in contact with legislators who worked on this bill have told me that the legislators told them, in effect, to pound sand when they pointed out the flaws in the bill.
I mean, Prof. Goldman pointed out tons of flaws in the bill, and it appears that the legislators made zero effort to fix them or to engage with him. No one in the California legislature spoke to me about my concerns either.
Exactly who are these “hundreds of California businesses engaged in negotiations”? I went through the list of organizations that officially supported the bill, and there are not “hundreds” there. I mean, there is the guy who spread COVID disinfo. Is that who Farid is talking about? Or the organizations pushing moral panics about the internet? There are the California privacy lawyers. But where are the hundreds of businesses who are happy with the law?
We should celebrate the fact that California is home to the giants of the technology sector. This success, however, also comes with the responsibility to ensure that California-based companies act as responsible global citizens. The arguments in favor of AADC are clear and uncontroversial: we have a responsibility to keep our youngest citizens safe. Hyperbolic and alarmist claims to the contrary are simply unfounded and unhelpful.
The only one who has made “hyperbolic and alarmist” claims here is the dude who insists that “there is no longer any question” that the internet harms children. The only one who has made “hyperbolic and alarmist” claims is the guy who tells his students that recommendations are so evil you should stop using apps. The only one who is “hyperbolic and alarmist” is the guy who insists the things that age verification providers told me directly are “bizarre an unsubstantiated.”
Farid may have built an amazing tool in PhotoDNA, but it hardly makes him an expert on the law, policy, how websites work, or social science about the supposed harms of the internet.
It would be nice if we could go at least a day or two without Republicans playing absolutely pathetic victims over made up moral panics. A few weeks ago, we debunked the nonsense story making the rounds in Trumpist media that a new study “proved” that “Gmail censored conservatives” by catching their campaign emails in their spam filter. The actual study showed that Gmail’s spam filter did, in fact, catch more Republican campaign emails than Democrat ones, but also that the reverse was true for Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook email programs, which flagged more Democratic campaign emails than Republican ones.
In other words, spam filters are imperfect, and lots of campaign emails either look like spam or an awful lot of users of every email program flag those emails as spam. This isn’t surprising. Over the years I’ve occasionally gotten onto email lists for candidates of both parties, and they are just filled with never ending nonsense emails that sure feel like spam.
And spam filters are not programmed to have any political bias to them. They’re programmed to react to what users describe as spam and to filter it out of your inbox. Don’t want your campaign emails to be spam binned? Don’t send so many spammish emails.
But, because Republicans simply have to make a nonsense controversy out of everything, they took that study (leaving out the Microsoft and Yahoo parts) and insisted they had a smoking gun proving that Google was “interfering with elections.” And, to keep this nonsense story going, they’ve now filed an FEC complaint, trying to argue that the Gmail spam filter (no joke) “made illegal, corporate in-kind contributions to the Biden campaign and Democrat candidates across the country.”
Oddly, their complaint does not mention Microsoft or Yahoo, nor suggest that those companies made the same “in kind contributions” to the Trump campaign or Republican candidates across the country.
It’s almost like this isn’t a serious complaint at all, or one based on any principal other than “look at how victimized we are.” The statement put out by the Republicans over this is just hilarious. Senator Rick Scott’s quote is laughable when you know what the study actually showed:
“As midterm elections approach, we are formally calling on the FEC to investigate the extent and intentionality of Google’s censorship of Republican fundraising efforts. This is a financially devastating example of Silicon Valley tech companies unfairly shaping the political playing field to benefit their preferred far-left candidates. Companies like Google don’t think you have the right to hear both sides: they’d rather make the decision for you.”
Yahoo? Microsoft? Nowhere to be mentioned at all. The fact that the study said those systems caught more Democrat emails? Not a concern.
And, really, what resolution are they seeking here? They’re basically demanding that Google turn off Gmail’s spam filters because they’re unable to write non-spammy campaign emails.
Of course, this FEC complaint will go nowhere. They just want it for the headlines. This is no different than back when Republicans also filed a similar FEC complaint against Twitter over the whole nonsense Hunter Biden laptop thing, and the FEC easily rejected it (even though the FEC currently has three Republican Commissioners and only two Democrats, along with one independent). Or the time they filed an FEC complaint because Twitter refused to give a blue check to a Republican congressional candidate due to her history of abusive postings on the site. That was also rejected. Also, putting fact checks on Donald Trump tweets? Not an FEC violation. Snap not wishing to amplify Trump Snaps? Not an FEC violation.
Basically, any time any tech company does anything that doesn’t put Republican whiners at the very tippy top of the list leads to them filing an FEC complaint. And each one gets rejected.
But in this case it’s doubly pathetic, given that they ignore how the study showed two other companies’ spam filters went the other direction — and you know they’d scream and cry louder than anyone if Democrats were so petty as to file an FEC complaint just like this one.
Either way, imagine if this actually succeeded, and Google turned off it spam filters during election season, filling everyone’s Gmail with thousands of spam messages? I’m sure Republicans would file an FEC complaint about that as well, claiming it was an evil Democrat/Big Tech/Silicon Valley plot to flood email inboxes and hide Republican campaign emails.
Is there a contest in the Senate to see who can propose the highest number of unconstitutional bills? You might think that the leader in any such contest would have to be a crazed populist like a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz, but it seems like Senator Amy Klobuchar is giving them a run for the money. Last summer, she released a bill to try to remove Section 230 for “medical misinformation,” as declared by the Ministry of Speech Director of Health and Human Services. We already explained the very, very serious constitutional problems with such a bill.
In some ways, it’s an improvement on the health misinformation bill, in that she’s finally realized that for any bill to pass 1st Amendment scrutiny it needs to be “content neutral.” But… it’s not. It claims that it’s taking a “nudge” approach — popularized from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book of that name. But the whole point of “nudges” in that book is about small tweaks to programs that get people to make better decisions, not threats of government enforcement and regulations (which is what Klobuchar’s bill does).
The bill starts out fine… ordering a study on “content-agnostic interventions” to be done by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to look for such content-agnostic interventions that would “reduce the harms of algorithmic amplification and social media addiction.” And, sure, more research from independent and trusted parties sounds good — and the NSF and NASEM generally are pretty credible and trustworthy. Perhaps they can turn up something useful, though historically, we’ve seen that academics and government bureaucrats who have no experience with how content moderation actually works, tend to come up with some ridiculously silly ideas for how to “fix” content moderation.
But, unfortunately, the bill goes beyond just the studies. Once the “initial study report” has been delivered, the bill then tries to force social media companies to adopt its recommendations, whether or not they’ll work, or whether or not they’re realistic. And… that is the unconstitutional part. You can call it “content-agnostic” all you want, but as soon as you’re telling companies how they have to handle some aspect of the editorial discretion/content moderation on their sites, that’s a 1st Amendment issue. A big one.
The bill requires the Commission it creates to start a rulemaking process which would release regulations for social media websites. The Commission would determine “how covered platforms should be grouped together” (?!?), then “determine which content-agnostic interventions identified in such report shall be applicable to each group of covered platforms…” and then (play the ominous music) “require each covered platform to implement and measure the impact of such content-agnostic interventions…”
And here’s where anyone with even a tiny bit of trust and safety/content moderation experiences throws back their heads and laughs a hearty laugh.
Content moderation is an ever-evolving, constantly adapting and changing monster, and no matter what “interventions” you put in place, you know that you’re immediately going to run into false positives and false negatives, and more edge cases than you can possibly imagine. You can’t ask a bunch of bureaucrats to magically come up with the interventions that work. The people who are working on this stuff all day, every day are already trying out all sorts of ideas to improve their sites, and through constant experimentation, and adaptation, they keep gradually improving — but it’s a never-ending impossible task, and the idea that (1) government bureaucrats will magically get it right where companies have failed, and (2) a single mandate will work is beyond laughable (even excluding the constitutional concerns).
Also, the setup here seems totally disconnected to the realities of running a website. “Covered platforms” will be given 60 days to submit a plan to the Commission as to how they’ll implement the mandated interventions, and the Commission will approve or disapprove of the plan. And any changes to the plan need to also be approved by the Commission. Some trust and safety teams make multiple changes to rules all the time. Imagine having to submit every such adjustment to a government Commission? This is the worst of the worst kind of government nonsense.
If companies fail to implement the plans, as the Commission likes, then the bill says the websites will be considered to have committed “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” enabling the FTC to go after them with potential fines.
The bill has other problems, but seems to just be based on a bunch of tropes and myths. It would only apply to sites that have 20 million active users (why that many? who the hell knows?), despite the fact that over and over again we’ve seen that laws that target companies by size create very weird and problematic side effects. The bill is nonsense, written by people who don’t seem to understand how social media, content moderation, or the 1st Amendment work.
And, bizarrely, the bill might actually have some support because (astoundingly?!?) it has bipartisan backing. While it’s a Klobuchar bill, it was introduced with Senator Cynthia Lummis from across the aisle. Lummis has, in the past, whined about social media companies “censoring” content she wanted to see (about Bitcoin?!?), but also was a co-sponsor of a bill that would require social media companies to disclose when the government pressures them to remove content, which is kinda funny because that’s what this bill she’s sponsoring would do.
I’m all for doing more credible research, so that’s great. But the rest of this bill is just unconstitutional, unrealistic nonsense. Do better, Senator.
When I became a parent nearly seven years ago, I tasked myself with reading up on what to expect and how to be a good parent. Among many more important things, one prominent point of reading that led to many discussions in our household was screen time for children. And, as you might expect, that conversation has been ongoing to date. There are lots of theories out there about just how much screen time kids should get at certain ages, but the unifying force behind those theories typically is that it should be relatively limited. Some nations have even gotten into the game of forcing screen time limitations on children, or at least many have gone that route for targeted types of screen time, such as video games.
But what if I told you that all that worrying done by parents, all the reading on the topic, and all of the effort put into it by governments is basically for nothing? Well, that seems to be the main conclusion reached by a new study that finds that the impact of recreational screen time on children is statistically negligible.
Even when kids spend five hours a day on screen – whether computers, television or text – it doesn’t appear to be harmful. That’s what my colleagues and I at the University of Colorado Boulder discovered after analyzing data taken from nearly 12,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study – the largest long-term study of its kind ever in the U.S.
The participants included children between the ages of 9 to 10, from diverse backgrounds, income levels and ethnicities. We investigated how screen time was linked to some of the most critical aspects of their lives: sleep, mental health, behavior and friendships.
Now, there are a ton of caveats to all of this. The most important of those include that this is a correlative study, not one looking for causality. It’s also a narrow age group being studied, even as the study has an impressive sample size. And there were also both positive and negative correlations uncovered.
For instance, increased screen time in the sample group correlated to stronger interpersonal relationships with peers. That would be the opposite of the old parental dogma that suggests that looking at a screen means you aren’t going to have any friends. On the other hand, increasing screen time on the far end of the spectrum did correlate with declining sleep and academic performance. So what does this mean? Screen time is good? Screen time is bad?
Perhaps neither one: When looking at the strength of the correlations, we see only very modest associations. That is, any association between screen time and the various outcomes, whether good or bad, is so small it’s unlikely to be important at a clinical level.
Some kids scored lower than others on these outcomes, some scored higher; screen time only explained 2% of the difference in the scores. This suggests the differences are explained by many variables, not just screen time. It’s a very small piece of a much larger picture.
Which should mostly tell us what we already know: outcomes in children are nuanced and complicated, involving many factors, and every child’s needs are different. What isn’t true, based on this study, is that parents should be given blanket recommendations on the amount of screen time their children should be allowed to have.
And, because, again, these are correlative studies, even correlation found doesn’t equate to screen time being a root cause.
For example, we found that adolescents who spend more time on screens may display more symptoms of aggression. But we can’t say screen time causes the symptoms; instead, maybe more aggressive children are given screen devices as an attempt to distract them and calm their behavior.
There are so many boogeymen set up for parents to jump at these days. At the very least, it’s probably time to make it so that reasonable spectrums of screen time for children are not on the list.
On the one hand, you have a wireless industry falsely claiming that 5G is a near mystical revolution in communications, something that’s never been true (especially in the US). Then on the other hand you have oodles of internet crackpots who think 5G is causing COVID or killing people on the daily, something that has also never been true. In reality, most claims of 5G health harms are based on a false 20 year old graph, and an overwhelming majority of scientists have made it clear that 5G is not killing you (in fact several incarnations are less powerful than 4G).
Last week, more evidence emerged that indicates that no, 5G isn’t killing you. Researchers from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) and the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia both released studies last week in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology. Both studies are among the first to look exclusively at 5G, and the only people who’ll be surprised by their findings get all of their news from email forwards and YouTube. From an ARPANSA press statement on its first study’s findings:
“?In conclusion, a review of all the studies provided no substantiated evidence that low-level radio waves, like those used by the 5G network, are hazardous to human health,? said Dr Karipidis, Assistant Director, Assessment and Advice at ARPANSA.”
The second study, which focused on RF energy specifically in the millimeter wave band (the ultra-fast but limited range variant of 5G) also found no health impact that could be replicated by other studies:
“?This meta-analysis of the experimental studies also presented little evidence of an association between millimetre waves and adverse health effects,? said Dr Karipidis. “Studies that did report biological effects were generally not independently replicated and most of the studies reviewed employed low-quality methods of exposure assessment and control.”
Now that doesn’t mean these studies are the definitive answer to questions surrounding 5G’s impact on human health, but the evidence we do have continues to indicate that the technology isn’t killing you. Granted the actual underlying scientific evidence is headed in the complete, opposite direction of the conspiracy theorists and assorted dipshits who’ve been attacking telecom infrastructure (or employees) because some supplement-grifting nitwit said so on YouTube.
The reality is, and continues to be, that 5G isn’t interesting enough to warrant hyperventilation over its supposed revolutionary impact on communications, or its supposed diabolical impact on human health. But since neither opinion is a real money maker, the truth continues to play second fiddle to bullshit, whether it’s coming from the mouths of wireless carriers or complete crackpots.
For the first few decades after video games became a serious medium of entertainment among the public, they were also blamed for all manner of ills. Violence in children was chief among the concerns, of course, but so too were claims that video games made kids anti-social, apathetic, and fat slobs stuck in their parents’ basements. It was only part of the way into the 2010s when the studies on the topic of video games started making a notable turn away from these dire warnings. Oxford University’s Andrew Przybylski had his hands on many of these new studies, such as the one indicating games only made people violent if they were too shitty or difficult, or his study decoupling social media from any causation of unhappiness in children.
Well, Przybylski is at it again with an interesting study that seems to indicate some correlation, though not causation, between time spent playing video games and “well being.”
The research began in 2019 with the Oxford team discussing collaborative opportunities with several major gaming companies. One of the general goals was to conduct a correlational study using objective play-time data as opposed to the traditional self-reported data used in prior research.
Using anonymized telemetry data supplied by Electronic Arts and Nintendo of America the research ultimately looked at two games: Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Players were invited to opt-in to the research, and alongside objective telemetry data they completed surveys asking about emotional well-being and motivations for gaming.
While the researchers were surprised at the findings, which seemed to indicate that there was a small correlation between time spent gaming and self-reporting of positive well-being, Przybylski rightfully cautioned consumers of the report to not come to the wrong conclusion about any of this. The idea isn’t that you should play more games for longer if you want to be happier. Instead, the focus should be why players play certain games. If that’s the focus, the idea that paring back the time playing games to address unhappiness might be exactly the wrong approach for some.
All this goes to suggest regulating video game play solely on duration of play time may not be an effective way to moderate the medium’s possible negative effects. For some people, in some contexts, longer video game play time may lead to more positive well-being outcomes.
“Our findings show video games aren’t necessarily bad for your health; there are other psychological factors which have a significant effect on a persons’ well-being,” Przybylski adds. “In fact, play can be an activity that relates positively to people’s mental health – and regulating video games could withhold those benefits from players.”
The point here is that when it comes to mental health and how video games interact with mental health, the landscape is so wildly complicated and full of nuance that blanket approaches become downright silly. And, instead of focusing on the video game as though it were the problem, the focus should be put on the person, what they play and why the play it, and what the outcome of such game playing is for that individual.
When put that way, honestly, it seems rather obvious.
