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< | Wicked Twitter |
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> | Our Digital Ecology of Deception |
| | -- By PatricioMartinezLlompart - 04 Nov 2016 |
| | “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” – Melvin Kranzberg, 1986
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> | Something’s wrong with what we have made of the Net. In the aftermath of the presidential election, reckoning with how our direct bond to the Net, particularly via Twitter and Facebook, makes some kinds of evil easy has been all the rage. From the proliferation of fake news to the disregard of systemic user harassment, the social networks we presumably turn to for knowledge and connection have become safe spaces for misinformation and hate speech. The norms of civility, truthfulness, and respect that bound together a vibrant democratic society are eroding fast in the Net, and we are alarmed at what this will mean for our non-digital lives. |
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< | Twitter makes some kinds of evil easy. But the night I sent my first tweet I just wanted to keep up with the weather. I was home in Puerto Rico, awaiting the first tropical storm expected to crisscross the island in over a decade. When Facebook began to feel unexciting, Twitter did the trick. I still craved information and connection, sans the clutter of photo albums, rambling status updates, and event reminders. Soon enough, a morning scroll down the timeline became routine, feeding me what I wanted to know, without less or more. |
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> | This collective outrage at how the Net is deceiving us to the beat of fake news, however, is also pure irony. Deception powers our relationship with many of the “services” we obtain through the Net. We don’t only go online to simplify daily errands, obtain information, and pursue human connection; we are also in the Net to self-promote and police our peers. In turn, and whether we are aware or not, service providers surveil each of our digital steps and bask us with untruthful news. Our digital lives navigate a multidimensional highway of deception—and before the current moment’s moral panic about fake news—many didn’t seem to care. |
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< | I want to be more mindful about the relationship between self and Net. And with that want, I must ask: does Twitter really make some kinds of evil easy? |
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< | Interconnecting... |
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> | Fake News Get Real |
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< | Twitter was born from our innate human need to communicate and connect. In 2006, still known as Twttr, one cofounder allegedly told another: “You know what’s awesome about this thing? It’s a whole emotional impact. You feel like you’re connected with that person.” Jack Dorsey initially conceived the product as a system through which you could send text to a particular number that would then route that text to all your friends. But it’s been long since Twttr became Twitter. Beyond facilitating communication, the platform now emboldens wide misinformation, a especially heinous evil in an increasingly digital society that aspires for democratic governance. |
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> | If the system thrives on deceiving and allowing its users deceive, what explains our indignation at fake news? Why do we care more about the untruth going viral than about the fundamental injustice of our digital lives being constantly surveilled and commodified? An immediate answer may lie in the recent behavior that fake news have unleashed in our physical world: |
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< | The Pew Internet and American Lives Project points that 20% of American adults used Twitter last year—a 5% increase from 2013. If this brutal election foretells anything, is that more people will turn to Twitter in the immediate future to engage in politics. In other words, the place of facts and truth in our democracy is about to get smacked. |
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> | A man armed with an assault rifle stormed a popular pizza restaurant in Washington DC to investigate “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory widely shared across social media alleging that Hillary Clinton’s campaign operatives procured child prostitutes from the restaurant. |
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< | ...And Misinforming |
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> | Around the same time, a Huffington Post journalist learned he was under FBI investigation for tweeting about engaging in voter fraud as a joke in response to a fake news story. |
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< | Twitter empowers us to be the reporter, publisher, and broadcaster of our own media companies. Its web of hashtags and retweets propels our words across vast distances, and allows for a “broad-based, free-flowing, and instantaneous discussion of political claims.” This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a world-wide oracle for those in search of political truth. In fact, research studies and recent events suggest it's the opposite. |
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> | And most recently, Florida authorities charged a woman who believes the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax to advance gun-control legislation for threatening a parent of one of the massacre’s victims. |
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No. The Web does all these things. Twitter actually just reduces the web's complexity so that people who don't have much to say can say it as easily as those who have more, for whom the Web natively, without the tweet bullshit, works better. It's important to understand what is being democratized, in a service-balancing sense. The front service is self-promotion, the back service is surveillance. The illusion that information is involved in the front service is just that.
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> | These three incidents exemplify how the Machine not only collects but also generates behavior—the tangibility and concreteness of which perhaps explains why we are more scandalized by fake news than by a regime of surveillance and data mining that, albeit pervasive, feels “invisible.” Moreover, the first large-scale study on the effect of fake news reveals that American adults are deceived by untrue news articles 75% of the time, and that they are mostly unable to distinguish between real and fake stories. Such a phenomenon may beg rethinking what constitutes censorship in our age of Big Fake News: Although the “Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” aren’t Facebook and Twitter censoring the truth by allowing it to drown in a sea of misinformation? |
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< | Studying over 300,000 tweets on the 2012 election, researchers at the University of Southern California found that Twitter served as a “platform for partisans to selectively share unsubstantiated claims with their followers and accelerate virality.” Researchers found that unsubstantiated claims —like the rumor that President Obama’s birth records were sealed—diffused through “homogenous follower-followee relationships using the retweet feature rather than through public hashtag communities.” This means rumors often don't even enter the broader Twitter sphere, where cross-partisan political discussion may push their correction. Perhaps most telling is that those spreading the rumors did not discuss their plausibility or looked for accurate information. This final observation supports the larger claim that media over-saturation enables us to discard information and only consider that which supports our beliefs and fits within our narrative. |
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< | Fast forward to the wreckage of the ongoing electoral cycle. This past week, a Twitter user reported another account was targeting African Americans and Spanish-speakers with tweets informing that, to skip the lines on Election Day, they could “vote from home” via text message. Twitter initially responded to the complaining user that such tweets did not violate platform rules. But the company ultimately deleted the misleading tweets after Buzz Feed published a story about it. I wonder: what truth will tweets communicate on Election Night? |
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> | The Front to Misinform and the Back to Surveil |
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< | Mining Tweets |
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> | In light of these recent events, then, it should be no surprise that over the past year we have been more interested in learning about fake news than the collection of our online behavior. Meanwhile, we remain appeased residents of a “curiously fabricated privatised commons of data and surveillance.” |
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< | "The market sees Big Data as pure opportunity." |
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< | Just as it is about communication, Twitter is about consumption. Can anyone consume the data we accumulate across social media? Twitter’s answer to this question is that it depends on the size of your checkbook. |
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> | In-Q-Tel-backed Dataminr retains its monopoly over the mining of our tweets. Out of our Millenial distaste for carrying cash, Venmo’s default sharing features and limited privacy controls expose the financial transaction data of over two million users. A recent study shows Venmo behaves just like Facebook in choosing the profit of user growth over addressing identified privacy vulnerabilities. And our entryway to Facebook, Twitter, and Venmo—the ISPs—are still able to access everything that exits and enters their customers’ computers (although, in a welcome change, broadband providers will soon need to obtain permission before collecting and sharing data on consumers' online activities as new FCC rules come into effect). |
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< | In finance, big data derived from social media is referred to as “Alt Data.” Twitter data has become a tool for risk management or “being aware of what could wrong”—from elections to terrorism and natural disasters—in today’s market of high-speed electronic trading. |
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< | New York-based Dataminr is at the forefront of mining aggregate Twitter data to provide financial players, and other private and public sector clients, with real-time alerts on potential breaking news. Dataminr mines through Twitter with an algorithm that identifies and contextualizes tweet patterns. It is also the only company with complete access to Twitter’s data and permission to sell it. Curiously, Twitter owns approximately 5% of Dataminr. |
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> | As such, deception in the form of fake news is not only a product of these services; deception is also their business model. The trick? Luring user traffic with the promise of hyper— connectivity and awareness of what’s going on. The real deal? Packaging our behavior for advertising. Think Facebook is the product? You are deceived; the Machine's most prized product is you. |
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< | Twitter’s developer agreement provides that partners like Dataminr cannot “assist any government entities, law enforcement, or other organizations to conduct surveillance on Content.” Yet, Dataminr was denounced earlier this year for entering a pilot program that provided mining services to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Contrary to its usual glacial response pace to user allegations of deception or harassment, Twitter issued a swift response to clarify that “they never authorized Dataminr to sell data to [the] government…for surveillance purposes.” But In-Q-Tel remains a Dataminr investor, and the company still has a $250,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security. |
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< | We tweet without much regard for the afterlife of our 140 characters. But Dataminr’s entire business is to trade in our abandonment of that afterlife. We are the product, equal parts invisible and hotly commodified. Again, I must take a moment to wonder: for how much would Twitter allow Dataminr to gift the FBI and CIA with our tweets? |
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> | Awakening to Deception is Liberation: A Return to First Principles |
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< | Because It's Easy |
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> | Our freak out over fake news ultimately makes me hopeful because it suggests we are no longer oblivious to what’s happening around us. It recognizes that using Facebook and other mediums to obtain information is an illusion; it means we have awakened to the reality that the Net is not serving us as it should; it may signal we are ready to rein control of both the Machine’s viral production of untruths and commodification of our behavior. |
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< | "Data is increasingly digital air...It can be a source of both sustenance and pollution." |
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> | This past September, 91% of adults told Pew “that consumers have lost control of how personal information is collected and used by companies.” Pew also noted that privacy was no longer a “condition” of American life but a “commodity to be purchased.” Only 9% of those surveyed believe they retain significant control regarding how their data is collected and used. We have taken a hard look at our Black Mirror and are conscious about the urgency of pushing back.
As we ready to take action, the Net’s founding principles of inter-operation and collaboration should serve as guides. Professor Lessig identified markets, norms, law, and tech as the four regulators of online conduct. Given the Net’s current political economy, law and markets don’t provide a way. But in the spirit of the command for collaboration embedded in the norms and code of the Net’s original structure, we should first use our knowledge of the Machine’s deceit to alert others who remain in the dark. Our mandate is clear: now that we know we can be surveilled at all times, we have a responsibility to resist. |
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< | Twitter’s handling of hate speech and other forms of harassment is a story and easy evil I hope to explore in future revisions or writing opportunities. But for the moment, my initial query has been partially satisfied: Twitter makes some kinds of evil easy because it wants to. It is profitable; it is easy. |
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< | It’s been three hours since I last checked my timeline. Matthew Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald are probably spitting brawling tweets about the election. Going on Twitter has always been easy, and, oh, it has always felt so good. |
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The tendency to analyze services in terms of "the unique thing about the service I use most" is an example of mistaking propaganda for information, or bias for judgment. There is useful information in this essay, but the most promising route to improvement for me would be to back away from the Twitter-specific to a more general taxonomy of service pairs, and their social functions. Then perhaps we could ask questions about the nervous system as a whole and not only about the physiology of particular impulses it carries.
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