social media – Page 4 – Media Matters

January 21, 2019March 13, 2019

A Teachable Moment at the Lincoln Memorial

Last week in class we spent some time laying the groundwork for our study of mass media and the societal effects of modern communications technologies. To understand media you have to understand communication and that begins with the ancient art of rhetoric and the modern study of semiotics and how we share and process symbols.

We discussed how we, as human beings, are born communicators. We like to connect with others and share our experiences. We are constantly communicating even when we’re not aware of it. We cannot NOT communicate. We discussed how everything that we SAY (or don’t say) and DO communicates…including our choice of clothing, our body language, and our use of space.

Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann and Native American Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial

These points were illustrated and driven home in a video that circulated over the weekend. You might recognize this frame from a video clip that went viral on social media. The students had participated in the March for Life demonstration earlier in the day and were waiting for their buses to arrive to take them home. As you can see, some of the students (including Sandmann) are wearing MAGA hats. Phillips, an activist and Omaha tribal elder, had participated in The Indigenous Peoples March earlier in the day. A third group, members of the Black Hebrew Israelites sect, were also present and a factor in what transpired.

A real problem here is that many made up their minds about what happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday based on very little evidence…and evidence that may have been carefully selected to present a particular narrative. If you are willing to invest a bit of time to dig a little deeper, and are willing to keep an open mind, you may find out that your initial gut reaction is not entirely supported. In fact major news organizations are updating their initial posts and writing new commentaries to include evidence that became available in a number of long, unedited, videos posted to YouTube. You can find links to these videos in a commentary posted at the Reason.com website.

This week we’ll explore issues related to social media including: viral videos, manufactured outrage, public shaming, and doxing. This weekend’s events contains all of these and more. Later in the semester we’ll explore “fake news” and how confirmation bias and uncritical thinking are key factors in how so many are so easily misled by propaganda and biased reporting.

The screen shot on the left includes a tweet from Michael Green, a film and television screen writer. The commentary before and after the tweet is by Rod Dreher, an author and writer. You might consider the fact that Green and Dreher are modern-day storytellers and mass media heavyweights. They are shaping our culture and telling us how to think about the issues of the day. But they clearly see things from very different perspectives.

Former CNN host Reza Aslan appears to be endorsing violence as an appropriate response

On this day set aside to honor the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., it is important to remember that racial bigotry remains and must be confronted at every opportunity. But as Reverend King reminded us repeatedly, only love drives out hate. Hatred is easy, fast, and decisive. Love is hard, slow, and often unsure. The choice is ours.

September 30, 2018

Who’s Telling the Truth?

Perhaps you spent a good part of your day on Thursday listening to sworn testimony about something that is alleged to have happened at a house party more than thirty years ago. Media coverage of the hearings and breathless commentary about the credibility of the two witnesses has been nearly worthless in helping us better understand what did or didn’t happen. Conflicting testimony, both offered with 100% assurance of confidence and accuracy, leave us with an empty feeling that we may never know the truth. What we do know is that lives hang in the balance and no one will emerge unscathed.

Truth is slippery. Many who are certain that they know the truth are either too blind or proud to acknowledge their own ignorance. A famous quote (often mis-attributed to Mark Twain but actually sourced to Josh Billings) says…

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

But just because truth is difficult to pin down doesn’t mean that it’s a mirage. Journalists, of all people, need to stay optimistic about the power of unbiased research to yield facts that will eventually point the way. But unless you’re an opinion writer or commentator you’ll need to work doubly hard to set aside your personal views and biases when covering a story as emotional and significant as this one.

This internet meme (see image below left) circulated a few years ago and makes a point about the relative nature of perception. If you ask untrained observers to evaluate a situation they may offer very different observations. But as the updated text on the right indicates, the truth of the matter is not subject to interpretation. The symbol on the ground doesn’t care where you’re standing or what you “think” it means. The truth just is…and it is up to us to figure it out.

In response to the Kavanaugh hearings I found several comments on social media that seemed to want to have it both ways.

I am unwilling to accept the idea that these testimonies are just wildly different interpretations of a shared event. And while FBI investigators may be able to shed light on the “facts” of the alleged incident, responsible reporters should be careful to report facts and avoid offering opinions about whose testimony is more “believable.”

July 23, 2018

What Constitutes a True Threat?

threatening gesture — Looking For A Fight

My social media feed is filled with partisan bickering and that is pretty much par for the course. Recently I have observed a debate about a couple of letters to the editor published by my local paper, the Pueblo Chieftain. I’ll refer to the two letter writers as Citizen A and Citizen B to protect their identity, and to try to provide some space between the debate over their statements and the debate over this particular political disagreement.

Citizen A wrote a letter that was published on June 30th in which he took a stand on a highly contentious issue that is currently in the news. Here is an excerpt taken out of context (in order to minimize bias depending on your stand on the issue). “Silence is more than complicity. Silence is violence. The coming war must be fought by all means necessary, by the pen and by the sword.”

In response, Citizen B wrote a letter in which he quoted the last line of the above quote and then added this: “This guy is the kind of cancer who there needs to be a cure for. I have a cure, but it is illegal.”

While the First Amendment protects citizens’ rights, including the right to free speech or free expression, there are well-known exceptions to that protection. For example one cannot claim protection for speech that is defamatory, violates copyright, or incites violence. It is why you’ll likely be arrested if you talk about having a bomb while you’re in an airport (or other public spaces). Which brings us back to the discussion playing out on my Facebook page. Do either of these letters to the editor cross that line? Is either one a “true threat”? Are either/both of them protected speech, or does one or the other fall outside of the protection of the First Amendment and potentially place the “speaker” in legal jeopardy?

The statement by Citizen A is a vague call to violent action but is not directed at anyone specifically. The statement by Citizen B addresses a specific individual, but recognizes the legal constraint imposed on the implied action. One does not need to read between the lines to come to the conclusion that the “illegal” cure is physical harm directed at Citizen A.

Legal precedent is does not provide a clear answer to these issues. Whether one applies the “incitement to imminent lawless action” standard or considers whether the speech constitutes a “true threat” as interpreted by a “reasonable person,” much remains unsettled.

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a response to a pair of cross-burning cases collectively known as Virginia v. Black (2003), upheld the Virginia law making it illegal to intimidate others by burning a cross. Such actions constituted a “true threat” and could be deemed illegal. According to her opinion,

‘True threats’ encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true threats protect[s] individuals from the fear of violence and from the disruption that fear engenders, in addition to protecting people from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.

The jury is still out, but some on Facebook have reached their conclusions. In fact, some reached their conclusions largely on the basis of the original political debate…long before the threatening language was introduced. And that, sadly, is the real tragedy on display.

March 25, 2018March 3, 2019

Regulation of Cyberspace

Social media, and by that I mostly mean Facebook, is a mess. We all know that it wastes too much of our time, makes us more agitated and irritable than we should be, and collects information about us and uses that intel to manipulate us. We’ve known most of that for some time now. But seeing the undercover Channel 4 video of the Cambridge Analytica executives has shaken people who had been fully in the techno-utopian camp when it came to the internet and Web 2.0 services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Suddenly the brave new world of the internet doesn’t look so bright and shiny.

In preparation for teaching a unit on new media and regulation I was reviewing my notes about the history of regulation of the internet…which is pretty short. Not that there haven’t been attempts to regulate “cyberspace”…but as early observers already noted, the internet does not take kindly to outsiders telling it how to go about its business. The early credo, “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” is testimony to the structural logic of the internet and explains the technical challenge of controlling something that was built to withstand external attacks.

Much of the early rhetoric was hyperbolic and now seems a bit silly. As the luster and new-car-smell has faded, we look back on those early utopian ideals as innocent and naive. Here’s an example from 1996. The speaker/author of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace is John Perry Barlow; a cattle rancher, techno-philosopher, and lyricist for The Grateful Dead.

While many of the early attempts to regulate were focused on the content of the internet, e.g. the Communications Decency Act, other legislation focused on intellectual property and piracy, e.g. SOPA and PIPA.

The most recent piece of legislation, H.R. 1865 aka FOSTA-SESTA, if signed by President Trump, will modify the 1996 Communications Decency Act Section 230 which has provided cover for internet companies and shielded them from legal repercussions related to the actions of users on their sites.

So, what does Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have to do with any of this? Simply that users are starting to question whether big internet companies can be trusted to do the right thing without oversight. (Others aren’t so sure).

But if it is time for regulators to tell Craigslist, Reddit, and Backpage (among others) to clean up their Personal/Massage/Dating ads in the interest of combating sex trafficking, perhaps it’s also time for regulators to tell Facebook when it is and isn’t okay to harvest and sell our data to political operatives.

No one naively believes that this will end the sex trafficking problem…just as no one believes that Zuckerberg’s promise to do a better job handling the personal data of 1.5 billion users will end the kinds of abuse exposed by last week’s investigative journalism. But it may be a start.

Update (April 9, 2018): Since this was initially posted, Craigslist has eliminated its Personals section as a response to FOSTA-SESTA. Also, the FBI shut down Backpage and charged its founder Michael Lacey. Backpage has seen strong growth after Craigslist closed its Erotic Services section in 2010.

March 20, 2018

Democracy, Data, and Dirty Tricks

It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because actually it’s all about emotion.

This is just one quote from an investigative report conducted by Channel 4 News in the UK. The person quoted above is an employee of Cambridge Analytica. You may have heard of the big data marketing company when their use of data harvested from 50 million Facebook users was revealed this week. The use of big data in political campaigns is not new, but it is being pushed to new heights by companies who appear to be unconstrained by established ethical norms. Here’s the entire Channel 4 video…

While opposition research is not new, there appear to be new efforts to push the limits of op research to include entrapment, bribery, and investigative reporting motivated by a political agenda. This is not just muck raking, but rather “muck making.”

Just to be clear, the use of Facebook’s data is not a data breach or hack. This is how big data works and everything you do online is being scooped up by someone who wants to use that information to advance their agenda. It might be selling you something like a new pair of socks, or maybe a health insurance policy, or maybe…a president.

Want to make sure that your data on Facebook won’t end up compromised? Electronic Frontier Foundation has you covered with this explainer on how to change your Facebook API settings.

I’ll leave you with one more quote from the video above…just to make it clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher.

“… we just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda’, because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’, the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?’.”

More at Nieman Labs.

February 17, 2018

How NOT to Cover a School Shooting

Being a journalist today is hard work. While getting it right and working under intense deadline pressure has always been part of the challenge, journalists today face increasingly difficult expectations from newsroom bosses, attacks from members of the increasingly partisan audience, and social media minefields where a misstep is rewarded with professional injury or death.

The school shooting this week gave us plenty of examples of good journalism performed by dedicated journalists. It also gave us reason to pause and reflect on what can go wrong when journalistic ethics are compromised. Let’s start with the good.

Data journalism and interactive technologies give us new ways to visualize old problems. The Washington Post gave us an excellent example in the form of a webpage that updates statistics about mass shootings.

Some of the reporting was done by students who were under attack. To better understand the horror experienced by students, read this series of text messages exchanged between two sisters.

But when students were contacted by members of the media while still in an active shooter situation, objections were raised…and justifiably so. Putting people at risk for the sake of a scoop is clearly unethical and directly contradicts the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, specifically the directive to Minimize Harm.

Another problem with using source material generated by eye-witnesses is that there may be graphic images and sounds that may contribute to the trauma experienced by survivors. Poynter, a leader in journalistic ethics, provided a very thoughtful analysis of Wednesday’s coverage and asked important questions that all journalists need to consider before rushing to publish.

And finally there is the increasingly distressing problem created by fake news. Some of the fake news is predictable “spinning” by political agents or PR hacks advocating for their particular cause or position. One example is the claim circulating on social media that there have been 18 school shooting since Jan 1, 2018. That claim was debunked by a story in the Washington Post. There’s also been reporting of Russian troll farms using the event to further their campaign intended to divide and mislead the American public.

But perhaps the most alarming instances of fake news related to the Florida school shooting are the fake tweets that were intended to implicate a working journalist in the very kind of unethical behavior described earlier in this post. According to Poynter,

One of Harris’ early replies quickly went viral. Within 45 minutes, she was getting a barrage of harassment from random Twitter users. Someone made a screenshot of a fake tweet alleging that she had asked someone for photos or videos of dead bodies. She decided to ignore the hoax and report it to Twitter instead.

According to Jane Lytvynenko of Buzzfeed,

While traditional fake news stories have a financial incentive, amassing advertising revenue by monetizing page views, Lytvynenko said the motivation for creating fake tweets is less clear. While creating them could be politically motivated, there’s also the possibility that the people behind them are just bent on destruction.

There is virtually NO defense against misinformation motivated by that kind of animus.

January 17, 2018

Facebook’s Fraught Future

Facebook’s failed attempt to foil Fake News while fortifying financial fortunes at the expense of friends’ futures finally finds itself facing fearless foes. Okay, I can’t keep that up but I hope you get the idea. After an amazing decade of growth and incredible buy-in from more than 2 billion users, Facebook is finally getting some push-back. Investors and executives who have since left the company are publicly saying what others have wondered for some time: is Facebook too big and too focused on monetizing audience members’ attention for our own good? Here’s what some are saying:

In response to the criticism Facebook announced a change to the algorithm that dictates the contents of your news feed. According to Facebook,

…we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.

We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.

As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.

While some may criticize this change as too-little, too-late, others may question whether these are mere cosmetic changes simply designed to deflect criticism. But it is fairly clear that several things are going to happen as a result: time spent on Facebook and engagement will both decline, (resulting in lower revenue for Facebook), and media companies that have relied on Facebook to distribute their content far and wide will have to find other ways to reach their audience.

But look on the bright side: that change will provide new opportunities for media-savvy storytellers who know how to reach an audience with compelling content. And that person could be you!