Will TAKE IT DOWN Take It Down?

Deepfake porn, that is.  Last week, Republican Senator Ted Cruz held a news conference in which he supported passage by the U. S. House of a bill called "TAKE IT DOWN," which was passed by the Senate on Dec. 4.  Together with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, he has called for the House of Representatives to pass the bill, which would provide federal criminal penalties for those responsible for putting up deepfake porn, as well as requiring the platforms that host it to take it down within 48 hours of receiving requests to do so. 

 

Several victims of deepfake porn testified about the life-shattering harm that deepfake porn causes.  Elliston Berry, who was 14 in October of 2023, woke up one morning to find that a fellow high-school student had created pornographic images with her face on them and posted them on Snapchat.  While she and her parents immediately set about trying to get Snapchat to remove the images, it took eight months and phone calls to Sen. Cruz's office to achieve that. 

 

Another tragic story involving deepfake porn was related by U. S. House representative Brandon Guffey of South Carolina.  In 2022, scammers used Instagram to contact Rep. Guffey's 17-year-old son Gavin.  The scammers pretended to be a young woman interested in nude photos of the boy.  After he complied with this request, the scammers demanded blackmail payments from him.  Tragically, Gavin committed suicide within two hours of these threats, and his father was mystified until the scammers began texting him and other relatives for cash too.  Sen. Klobuchar has counted over 20 such "sextortion" suicides between October 2021 and March of 2023.  Both she and Sen. Cruz are urging the House of Representatives to schedule an early vote on their bill before more teenagers die, according to a story in the Austin American-Statesman.

 

We hear a lot about how polarized politics is and how each party will ostracize any member who has any dealings with the other side.  Perhaps this rule doesn't apply to senators who aren't running for re-election again soon, but last week's news conference is an example that belies that rule. 

 

Death knows no political affiliation, and the unstable minds of teenagers are fertile grounds for sowing seeds of digital manipulation and criminal exploitation.  The TAKE IT DOWN act has severe criminal penalties for anyone who creates deepfake porn without the victim's consent, or uses such material for criminal purposes, including fines and imprisonment of up to 30 months for intimidating minors. 

 

What I was curious about was the penalties spelled out for the platforms which harbor such evil.  What would have happened to Snapchat, for example, if the TAKE IT DOWN act had been enacted and they still dawdled eight months before removing the deepfake porn that used Elliston Berry's image? 

 

The worst that could happen to the company is that it would be found in violation of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule.  Violating FTC rules is not something as familiar to me as a speeding ticket, for instance, so I had to look it up.  The main way the FTC enforces its rules is by levying fines, and indirectly, by raising a stink with bad publicity.  Now fines to a multibillion-dollar-revenue company can easily be written off as just a cost of doing business.  Bad publicity is less easily dealt with sometimes, but its effect is uncertain and depends on what else is going on in the media universe at the time.  While the penalties for laggard companies are there, they don't impress me as being rigorous enough to ensure that deepfake porn will really be taken down inside of 48 hours once the bill is passed.

 

Nevertheless, the bill is a step in the right direction.  We are in a situation with regard to teenagers and social media that is comparable to the situation we were in around 1970 when scientific evidence was accumulating that smoking led to lung cancer, but the tobacco companies were stonewalling that the evidence was insubstantial and refused to take responsibility for the millions of additional deaths that smoking caused every year. 

 

The remarkable thing about the smoking-and-health issue was that not only did tobacco companies eventually pay big in monetary terms, but the climate of social opinion turned largely from one that favored smoking as a romantic and adult thing to do, to one that opposed smoking as both harmful to oneself and others.  And that change has persisted to this day.

 

There are hints that something similar may happen with social media's use by children and teenagers.  Schools and parents are increasingly realizing that any superficial benefits of social media are vastly outweighed by the potential and actual harms it works on the developing minds of young people.  Many schools now collect smartphones at the beginning of a school day and prohibit their use until kids leave for home.  I don't know many people who have school-age children, but the ones I know give a great deal of thought to how old a teenager should be before they get a smartphone, and none of them let children under 12 have one, as far as I know.

 

The day may come when letting someone under 18, say, use social media—at least social media as it is today—will be regarded as, well, I'm trying to think of something that everybody agrees kids shouldn't do.  Bungee-jumping over the Grand Canyon?  My point is, laws can follow public opinion as well as mold it.  If the great majority of adults raising kids in the U. S. conclude that letting social media corrupt their children's minds is simply wrong, we almost don't have to worry about the laws, because the parents will deal with it themselves.  But we need laws to keep sneaky teenagers from evading their parents' prohibitions, and the TAKE IT DOWN act will help tremendously in this regard.

 

The fate of any piece of legislation is uncertain until it's signed, but the indications are hopeful that this bill will make it into law.  It will be only one brick in the wall of protection that we need to erect to keep social media from wreaking more havoc, misery, and death upon children and teenagers.  But every brick counts.

 

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman online edition carried a story entitled "US House Urged to Ban Deepfake Porn" on Dec. 12, 2024.  I also referred to the draft version of the bill itself at https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4569/text, the story of Gavin Guffey's suicide at https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/us/rep-brandon-guffey-instagram-lawsuit-cec/index.html, and the Wikipedia article on Snapchat.  I previously blogged on deepfake porn at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/deepfake-porn-nadir-of-ai.html and https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2024/09/deepfake-porn-rest-of-story.html.

 

Free Speech In the Age of Government-Influenced Facebook

 

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman, and CEO of MetaPlatforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, recently sent a letter to Jim Jordan, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  Zuckerberg is a busy man, and this was no bread-and-butter socializing note, but more along the lines of a confession. 

 

In the note, Zuckerberg admitted that in 2021, Facebook had caved in to government pressure, specifically from the Biden White House, concerning certain posts relating to COVID-19, "including humor and satire."  The company was also guilty of "demoting" stories about Hunter Biden's laptop when it chose to believe the FBI's claim that it was Russian disinformation in 2020.  In both cases, Zuckerberg says basically we were wrong and we won't do it again.

 

The most generous interpretation of this letter is that here is an upstanding citizen, who also happens to be the fourth richest person in the world, admitting that he and his people did some things that in retrospect might not have been the best choice, given what he knows now.  But hey, he's learned from his mistakes, and we should all feel better that Zuckerberg and his companies have admitted they messed up in what were understandably hard circumstances. 

 

Ranged against this rather anodyne letter are some cherished U. S. traditions such as freedom of speech and the rule of law.  Let's talk about the rule of law first.

 

In a recent issue of Touchstone magazine, professor of law Adam J. MacLeod outlines how the idea of rule by law rather than men arose during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (485-565).  Justinian caused twelve ivory tablets to be placed on public display, tablets that contained a concise summary of the laws of the land.  All disputes were to be decided on the basis of reasoning from what the tablets said, not from what somebody in power said.

 

In placing reason above power, the rule of law placed everyone on a much more equitable footing.  The peasant who could reason out law was now able to defend himself against a powerful lord who wanted to take his land, if the peasant could show what the lord was trying to do was against the law.  MacLeod admits that since the late 1800s, jurisprudence has largely abandoned the fundamentals that supported the rule of law, but in practice, vestiges of it remain.  No thanks to Zuckerberg, however, for those vestiges.

 

Although Facebook is not a branch of government, in bowing to White House pressure it acted as a government agent.  And its near-monopoly on social media channels makes it a powerful player in its ability to censor unfavored speech, such as people making fun of Anthony Fauci or other prominent players in the COVID-19 follies.  So where was the ivory tablet to which a satirical outfit such as the Babylon Bee could appeal when its posts disappeared?  Their only option was to mount a lawsuit that might take years, would certainly cost tons of money, and might in the end amount to nothing.  So much for the rule of law.

 

Some counter the claim that the principle of freedom of speech does not apply to private companies such as Facebook, because a private entity can allow or disallow anything it likes and be as capricious about it as they want.  If Facebook had the reach of my town paper, the San Marcos Daily Record, this argument would carry weight.  One little outlet being arbitrary about what it publishes is no big deal.  But Facebook, although not the only social-media show in town, is by far one of the largest, and its censorship, or lack thereof, hugely influences public discourse in the republic that is the United States, as it does in many other countries of the world with less of a tradition of free speech. 

 

Once again, while Facebook is not a government entity, when it takes actions that the government pressures it to do (either through legal means or simply jawboning), it becomes an agent of that government.  And while it is perhaps true that Facebook did not violate the letter of the First Amendment which prohibits only Congress from making a law that abridges the freedom of speech, the spirit of the law is that the Federal government as a whole—executive, judicial, or legislative—should refrain from suppressing the freedom of the people to express themselves in any way that is not comparable to yelling "Fire!" falsely in a crowded theater. 

 

There are two extremes to which we might go in this situation, at opposite ends from the muddled middle in which we presently find ourselves.  One extreme would be to treat near-monopolies such as Facebook as "common carriers" like the old Ma Bell used to be.  With very few exceptions, nobody regulated what you could say over the telephone, and in the common-carrier model, Facebook would fire all its moderators and only retain the engineers who would keep hackers from crashing the entire system.  Other than that, anybody could say anything about anything.  Zuckerberg wouldn't censor anything, and I bet he'd be relieved to be rid of that little chore.

 

The other extreme would be to regulate the gazoo out of all social media and set up explicit "twelve-tablet"-like rules as to what can and can't be said on it.  We have something like this model in the way the Federal Communications Commission regulates what can be said or shown over the (public) airwaves (not cable).  The FCC is mostly concerned with obscene or indecent content, but that's just a historical fluke.  In a republic you can vote to regulate anything you want.  This would be a return to the pre-deregulation days of inefficient but reliable airline and phone service.  It would be duller and more predictable, but there are worse things than dull.

 

Neither of these extremes will come to pass, but the present near-total governmental inaction in either direction leaves a political vacuum in which Mark Zuckerberg, emperor of social media, will continue to do what he thinks best, and the rest of us simply have to deal with it.  And the rule of law and freedom of speech will continue to suffer.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article "Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some COVID-19 content during the pandemic," at https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-biden-facebook-covid19-463ac6e125b0d004b16c7943633673fc.  Zuckerberg's letter to Congress is at

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/1, and I also referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.  Adam J. MacLeod's "How Law Lost Its Way" appeared on pp. 22-28 of the Sept/Oct 2024 issue of Touchstone.

 

Will Facebook Kill Holly?

 

I have to be careful about how I write today's column.  I do not want to betray any trusts.  But on the other hand, a topic that up to now has been an abstraction for me has become personal.  A statistic has turned into someone I know by only two degrees of separation.  To protect anonymity, I have changed names and some details of what I will write here.  But I assure you that what I am going to write is based on facts as personally told to me yesterday by someone I will call Holly, who is a twelve-year-old girl.

 

Facebook, which has now renamed itself Meta, has been in the news a lot lately, and in this column as well, because of revelations by a whistleblower named Frances Haugen.  Haugen is a former Facebook employee who has made thousands of pages of internal company documents public, and has testified to Congress that Facebook's own research showed how harmful Instagram and other Facebook services are to teenagers (girls especially) at the same time that Facebook's CEO (and owner of 55% of Facebook's voting stock) Mark Zuckerberg was saying that his firm did not have such data.  The blowback from articles in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets detailing the hypocritical actions of Zuckerberg and his company have been so severe that the firm dropped plans it had announced to develop a new service for preteens called Instagram Kids. 

 

A recent article on the Mind Matters website described these problems and quoted results of a 2017 survey by the UK's Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement that showed, among other damning evidence, that the average age at which a child creates an Instagram account is 10, even though the software says you must be at least 13 to join.  Among users aged 14 to 24, all but one of the social-media platforms surveyed showed a negative score for well-being. 

 

With all this as a background, let me introduce Holly.  My wife and I have known her slightly for at least a couple of years, and when she was ten she invited us to see her elementary school's production of Peter Pan, which for an older couple with no children was quite a treat.  Although she has since moved to a nearby town, she has the opportunity to visit us now and then, and yesterday was one of those visits.

 

Holly is one of those girls who will rattle on about whatever she's doing if you just stand there and look interested, so my wife and I invited her in and we listened to what she had to say about what she'd been doing since we saw her almost a year ago.  She talked about horses, a vacation trip her family took back East, and then school.  She attends school in a medium-size town that has a reputation for old-fashioned conservative family values, and if something bad is happening there, it's probably happening everywhere else too. 

 

She had her smartphone with her, of course, and as she took it out she said her parents have put some controls on it to limit her social-media use.  While I cannot recall her exact words, the following is substantially what she said next, when we asked her how things have gone at school with COVID-19. 

 

"Oh, it's been bad.  One of my friends committed suicide over the summer.  They were bullying her and it just got so bad she couldn't take it anymore.  That's why I don't mind my folks doing what they did to my phone."

 

After Holly left and I had a chance to think about the enormity of what she told me, it began to sink in that here was a twelve-year-old girl having to deal with the suicide of a personal friend of hers, caused at least in part by the baleful influence of social media. 

 

I don't know anything about this incident other than what Holly told me.  Scientists would call this "anecdotal evidence" and dismiss it as useless for analytical purposes.  But it brings home the diabolical influence of social media on children in a way that no amount of statistics or studies have done for me.  Somewhere there are parents of the sixth-grader who committed suicide who will never see their daughter reach adulthood, get married, or have children of her own.  And during the girl's lifetime, because she was one of the twenty-two million users of Instagram or whatever social media platform contributed to her death, she enriched Mark Zuckerberg personally by some amount of dollars he could charge for ads on her phone.  I hope he enjoys them now, because he won't get a chance to enjoy them where he's going.

 

Holly, at the tender age of twelve, already seems to have a realistic sense of how dangerous social media can be.  And, Lord willing, this sense will preserve her from the hazards of using Facebook products when one is a teenage girl.  But she has all of her teenage years to negotiate ahead of her, and she is not out of the social-media woods yet.

 

We live in an age that is hostile to children and teenagers in many ways.  If a child manages to survive the first nine months of its existence in the womb without being aborted, as about 600,000 children are each year in the U. S., she or he becomes a kind of hobby that our economy tolerates but does not encourage—a "lifestyle choice" that burdens the otherwise ideal worker with expenses and obligations that distract him or her from being totally devoted to the job and to consumption of products and services such as Facebook.  Upon entering school, an institution that was formerly safeguarded from commercial exploitation back in the 1960s when I experienced it, the child becomes the target of 24/7 ads from streaming services, the various entertainment platforms such as video games, and eventually from smartphones.  Arrayed against each individual child is the Big Tech oligopoly of world-class expertise that extracts the last drop of attention with manipulative artificial-intelligence-enhanced algorithms that do things no ordinary human being can understand, algorithms that can intensify social interactions into a tornado of abuse that makes death at one's own hand look like the only alternative. 

 

We prayed with Holly before she left, for protection from the many dangers that life as a girl in America presents today.  God is more powerful that Mark Zuckerberg.  But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to think so.

 

Sources:  I thank Denyse O'Leary for drawing my attention to the article "Facebook's . . . Er, Meta's Instagram Problem" by Heather Zeiger, which appeared at https://mindmatters.ai/2021/12/facebookser-metas-instagram-problem/. 

Should Kids Use Instagram?

 

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files," a series of investigative reports that was partially based on internal documents leaked by a whistleblower.  The overall impression left by the revelations is one of hypocrisy:  a company saying in public how seriously they take their responsibility to protect their users from harm and police their content, but in private giving free passes for certain favored "whitelisted" users and conducting research that reveals how harmful Instagram can be to teenagers, especially girls.

 

Just how harmful is it?

 

Time Magazine's summary of the WSJ articles includes such tidbits as the following.  Internal research presented at Facebook showed in 2019 that "Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."  Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, "6% of American users traced the issue to the photo-sharing app."  Eating disorders and depression are also linked to Instagram use by young people, which according to the article comprise about half of Instagram's user base.  "Young" was not defined, but presumably we are talking about people in their teens and early 20s.

 

In a Congressional hearing held Sept. 30 in response to the revelations, Facebook's Antigone Davis, the firm's global head of safety, disagreed with how the WSJ characterized the company's research.  She emphasized that users benefit from Instagram, which helps them in dealing with the hard issues that beset teens.  The reason for the research, she said, was "to make our platform better, to minimize the bad and maximize the good, and to proactively identify where we can improve."  But on Monday, the firm announced that it was pausing its work on a product tentatively called Instagram Kids, designed for users under 13.  Of course, anybody who is old enough to type and read can say they are 13 and try to get an Instagram account today, and millions have succeeded. 

           

One Senator drew a parallel between Facebook and the tobacco industry, which concealed internal research for years showing that smoking caused lung cancer and publicly denied the facts it knew about privately.  Suicide isn't lung cancer, but dead is dead.  While it's unlikely that a statistically significant number of teen suicides can be definitely linked to Instagram, it is an unvarnished fact that teen suicides in the U. S. have risen dramatically since the early 2000s, rising from a rate of about 10 per 100,000 in age group 15-19 to 14.5 per 100,000 by 2017, the latest year for which national numbers are available.  And COVID-19 has not improved matters in that regard.

 

Correlation is not causation, and there are many factors besides Instagram that make it hard for teenagers to negotiate life these days.  But the question before us is this:  does the harm done by Instagram (and similar photo-based media) to teenagers outweigh whatever perceived benefits the services provide?

 

Phrased that way, the question implies that the proper way to analyze this issue is a cost-benefit study.  But I'm not at all sure that's the right way to do it.  For one thing, the benefits are of many different kinds, as are the costs.

 

The most obvious benefit is financial, to Facebook, its investors, and similar media giants, along with their advertisers who pay Facebook gargantuan fees to sell goods and services.  Another category of benefit is whatever good feelings, sensations, and experiences users get from using Instagram and similar products.  The parallel to tobacco is relevant, because studies both by Facebook and outsiders show that social-media use is highly addictive, and is purposely designed to be that way.  This is an open secret, deplored even by some developers of social media, but it is well known and needs to be considered in any discussion. 

 

It's one thing if a mature, responsible adult decides to indulge in an addictive product, but there are reasons that states have minimum ages for purchasing tobacco and alcohol.  Society has made a judgment that teenagers below a certain age need to be protected from these substances, because their ability to judge such matters as alcohol or tobacco use is not yet fully developed.  Having been a teenager myself, I can vouch for the truth of that statement.

 

Some states such as Texas have already taken steps to restrict certain social-media firm activities such as banning individuals based on political content.  If we as a society decide that the benefits of Instagram to teens are not worth the harms, we could try to make it illegal for them to use it.  Under the present social dispensation, that idea sounds almost ludicrous.  But in 1965, who would have imagined that a scant thirty years or so later, smokers would be a disdained minority, unable to light up in workplaces, restaurants, or bars, and condemned to puff in freezing weather at least twenty feet from the nearest entrance?  Yet it happened, and a big factor in the social turn against smoking was the blatant hypocrisy the tobacco firms indulged in, as investigations later showed.

 

I have had at least one young person talk to me wistfully about what it was like growing up without social media, saying that he thought his smartphone was one of the biggest differences between my generation and his, and not a good one, either.  As powerful as the tobacco interests were, their wings were clipped, and they paid huge sums to states in retribution for the harms that were caused. 

 

I don't know what's going to happen to Facebook in the future with regard to their teenage customers.  In the Greek myth about Antigone, she got into trouble with a king who had defeated and killed her brother in battle, and who didn't want anyone mourning for him or burying him.  She tried to anyway, and ended up committing suicide. 

 

Facebook's Antigone Davis may be trying to bury some facts that refuse to stay buried.  With regard to the whistleblower who leaked internal data to the press, she said, "We've committed to not retaliating for this individual speaking to the Senate."  But a lawyerly reading of that sentence shows it says nothing about not retaliating for anything else the person did.  And if the experience of other whistleblowers is any guide, that person's career in social media is over, and they might as well start studying for their real-estate license or something else they can do on their own.

 

Sources:  I refereed to an NPR article on the Facebook revelations and Antigone Davis's remote testimony before Congress at https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041864356/instagram-kids-safety-congress-hearing, as well as a Time article at https://time.com/6097704/facebook-instagram-wall-street-journal/.  The statistics on teen suicide are from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/7/11/18759712/teen-suicide-depression-anxiety-how-to-help-resources. 

Why Instagram for Kids?

 

Depends on who you ask. 

 

If you ask Instagram, which is part of Facebook, which is run by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you will hear things like the following.  Despite our posted lower age limit of 13 for the regular Instagram image-sharing service, we know a lot of kids younger than that are lying to get on it.  We would prefer to create a new service designed just for pre-teenagers so we can customize it with parental controls and so on, and bring Instagram to those younger users who currently have to lie to use it.

 

If you ask the attorneys general of forty U. S. states, they will cite sociological studies that link social-media use to depression, anxiety, and bullying in young people.  Following the news in March that Instagram was contemplating this new service, the National Association of Attorneys General got together and issued a letter  in May to Mark Zuckerberg asking him not to do this thing.  That's as far as the letter went—they didn't say what they'd do if he went ahead and did it anyway.  But the implication is clear that lawsuits might be in the offing if the proposed new service causes problems in its targeted age group.

 

Way back in the dark ages of social media, shortly after 9/11/2001, I wrote an article speculating on the ethical implications of electronic communication.  The immediate context was the fact that during the Twin Towers attack that day, the radio systems that first responders were relying on to coordinate their uniquely challenging rescue efforts largely broke down.  At the time, I concluded that, other things being equal, more communication among human beings was better than less.  But back then, Facebook wasn't even a gleam in Zuckerberg's eye, and hardly anybody imagined the huge economic and social forces that growth of social media would lead to.

 

Some questions are like diamond drills.  If you keep asking them they just keep going deeper and deeper and sometimes reveal unexpected things.  One of these questions is the innocent-sounding, "What's the point?"

 

If you ask Mark Zuckerberg that question about Instagram for those under 13, I think the bottom-line answer must be to make more money.  There is a thin veneer of public service that social media likes to coat their enterprises with.  And there is justification for this veneer:  billions of people (yes, billions) successfully use social media for largely innocent activities such as keeping in touch with relatives and friends.  Because the vast majority of users do not pay for the service, Facebook and Instagram have to manipulate things so that their advertisers reach their intended audiences.  The user is the product and the advertiser is the customer.

 

Right off the bat, that step has strayed into a swamp that philosopher Immanuel Kant warned us against.  I am told that he said in effect, "Don't treat people as means, but only as ends."  That is to say, using people solely as a means to something else is wrong. 

 

Of course, every business enterprise in the world could be accused of such a thing, and so providers of goods and services should not treat their customers only as a means to make money.  And if Instagram goes ahead with its plans for the under-13 crowd, I'm sure they will make efforts to protect their users against some of the worst abuses that social media can be used for:  stalking, sexual predation, bullying, and other criminal activity.  But if they don't make money at it, they will have failed, because they are not a charity—they are a publicly-owned profit-making organization, and the point of such organizations is to make money.

 

There is a reason that Instagram currently says its users must be 13 or over.  Historically, at least within the last century or so, children were regarded as especially worthy of protection and special safeguards.  Just to give you an antiquated example, I attended the Fort Worth Independent School District from 1960 to 1972.  At that time, both teachers and parents made strenuous efforts to keep commercial enterprises and advertising out of public schools.  The only exception to this that I can recall is that in grade school, the teachers offered to let us practice saving money, and gave us little envelopes with the name of the First National Bank of Fort Worth printed on them.  That's it:  no TV, no sponsored commercial films, no nothing. 

 

I am told that things are different now.  History may judge our time as a peculiarly child-hostile period.  The ideal of a child being raised to adulthood by his two biological parents—one male, one female—is receding into the past as other situations arise that are more convenient to the parents, maybe, but shortchange the kids.  And I need not mention abortion as the ultimate child-hostile policy, but I did anyway.  In an era of declining birthrates, more people than ever are asking "What's the point?" about the whole business of childbearing in the first place, and coming up with a negative answer.

 

For a time, advertising on children's TV shows was also controversial, but that battle has receded into the distant past as TV itself turns into a bewildering array of shape-melding forms that anybody can access, even the baby in the nursery.  Short of getting laws passed that prohibit Instagram for kids under 13, even the state attorneys general can't do much more than write letters saying that they won't be happy if Instagram goes ahead with its plans.

 

Rather than further erode the influence and authority of parents over their children by taking even more of the child's attention away from the live human beings who care for them and using them as a means of profit as well as providing a dubious service that so far they have done fine without, I hope that Zuckerberg listens to the attorneys general and declares the under-13 set sacrosanct from further intrusions by his firm.  But to do so would indicate that he is getting a different answer to the question of what the point is than he's gotten up to now.  And so far, he's given no sign of doing so.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on the Instagram plans at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-for-children-under-13 and the reaction of the attorneys general at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2021/may/11/instagram-for-kids-the-social-media-site-no-one-asked-for.  Their letter to Zuckerberg can be found at https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/naag_letter_to_facebook_-_final.pdf.  I heard about this issue on the Drew Mariani Show, a feature of the Relevant Radio network.

Revenge Porn and Technological Progress

Nonconsensual image sharing, also known as revenge porn, has affected the lives of millions around the globe.  A 2016 survey of 3,000 U. S. residents showed that one out of 25 Americans has either been a victim of revenge porn or has had someone threaten to publicize a nude or nearly nude photo of them without their consent.  If you’re a woman under 30, the chances you’ve been threatened this way rise to 1 in 10.  About 5% of both men and women between 18 and 29 have had this happen to them at least once.  Consequences of revenge porn range from the trivial to the tragic, and more than a few cases of revenge porn have been implicated in a victim’s suicide.

This is a nasty business, and just listing all the things wrong with it would take more space than I have.  But I would like to focus on one aspect of the problem:  the way technological progress, or what’s generally regarded as progress, has taken an immoral act that once required expensive and elaborate planning and turned it into something almost anybody can do in seconds. 

Spoiler alert:  if you’re a fan of mid-twentieth-century hardboiled detective fiction, but you haven’t seen the Bogart-Bacall movie “The Big Sleep,” haven’t read the novel by Raymond Chandler on which the movie is based, or plan to read Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective tale “The Scorched Face,” you might want to skip this paragraph.  The reason is that both stories involve schemes in which women were tempted to do, shall we say, inappropriate things while inadequately draped, and the criminals used hidden film cameras to obtain photos that were later used to blackmail the victims.  In these fictional tales, the victims were generally wild daughters of wealthy fathers who could afford to hire private detectives, but that was just to move the story along.  It’s unlikely that Hammett and Chandler cooked up these crime stories without there being some factual incidents behind them in news reports.  My point is that even in the dark pre-Internet ages, there were some people around who contrived to gain an advantage—in this case, a financial one—over a victim by using photography of intimate scenes and actions. 

But it was a lot of work.  For one thing, you had to develop your own film.  Most consumer photos back then were developed by local enterprises such as drug stores, and if you tried to get prints made of naughty images, the druggist was likely to call the cops on you, or at least refuse your business.  For another thing, your victim had to have enough social standing and money to make it worth your while to blackmail them.  In short, only the most dedicated and systematic criminals could successfully mount an indecent-photo blackmail scheme, and the crime was consequently rather rare.

Fast-forward to 2018.  Not only can intimate pictures now be taken with a device that is as commonly worn as underwear, but once taken, these pictures can be duplicated ad infinitum and publicized to the world using multi-billion-dollar facilities (e. g. Facebook and Instagram) that cost the user nothing.  And anonymity is easy to achieve on the Internet and hard to penetrate.  Besides which, I suspect the barrier that once existed in people’s minds between what is appropriate to photograph in an intimate setting and what is not has changed over the years. 

In addition, both the sexual act and the act of photography have been somewhat trivialized.  Before the widespread use of birth-control pills (another technology, by the way), there was always the chance of pregnancy.  While this didn’t stop people from doing what comes naturally, it added an existential significance to the act which it commonly lacks today.  And in the old days, taking a photo indoors required either a bulky camera with a flashbulb—not exactly adding to the mood of the thing—or bright photoflood lights, again not something that two people doing intimate acts are likely to want. 

The drive toward ease of use that has steered so many aspects of technology has become a goal in itself, and we have in many cases ceased to ask what it is that we are trying to make easier, and whether some things can be made too easy.  Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that Facebook simply wants to bring people closer.  The trouble is that closeness by itself is not always a good thing.  And when intimate relationships fall apart, as they so often do, photos taken easily in the heat of the moment can become time bombs that one partner can deploy against another.

There are laws against such things in many states and countries, but the widespread nature of the crime made so easy by technology vastly outstrips the ability of law enforcement to prosecute the perpetrators.  Only the worst cases that end in suicide or exploit multiple victims for money get prosecuted, and often the criminal escapes by means of the anonymity that the Internet provides. 

Fortunately, revenge porn can be prevented, but it requires judgment and trust:  judgment on the part of anyone who is involved in an intimate relationship, and trust between those involved that no one will forcibly or surreptitiously take pictures of intimate moments.  Unfortunately, I suspect that I don’t have a lot of readers in the under-30 group.  But if you’re in that category, please save yourself and your friends and lovers a lot of grief.  Put away your phones before you take off your clothes, and you won’t have to worry about any of this happening to you. 

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article on revenge porn, a news item carried by the website Business Insider on Dec. 13, 2016 at http://www.businessinsider.com/revenge-porn-study-nearly-10-million-americans-are-victims-2016-12, and the Data & Society Research Institute study available at https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/Nonconsensual_Image_Sharing_2016.pdf.

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Rumor Mills and World War III: "(The Russians Are Coming)^2" Revisited

Pardon the geek typography ("^2" means "squared" or "repeat a second time"), but there wasn't enough room to put the movie's full title—"The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming" in the headline comfortably.  Made in 1966 at the height of the Cold War between the old Soviet Union and the U. S., the film portrays what might have happened if a small Soviet submarine ran aground by accident near the shore of a rustic vacation island off the coast of New England.  I date myself when I confess I saw it when it first came out, and it's one of the few comedies I saw as a child that still seems funny to this 60-year-old.

The humor may be timeless, but the plot is not.  It hinges on the fact that with one exception, the most advanced communications technology on the island is the telephone office whose sole manual switchboard is run by grandmotherly Alice Foss, who knows everybody's name in town and takes eccentric Muriel Everett's report of being attacked by Russians with a large grain of salt—at least until Muriel's phone line goes dead.  But by then, the nine Russian sailors who came ashore to find a boat big enough to tow their sub off the rocks have cut the phone wires to that section of town (it was apparently a party line), so the only way word can travel after that is if a person carries it himself.  In the process of spreading the word, the rumor-mill game starts, and a report of one Russian sailor attacking Muriel distorts into a whole troop of Russian parachutists taking over the island's airport.  Most of the rest of the film follows the five-man police force and a separate vigilante mob led by a self-appointed death-and-glory war veteran, who each think the Russians are somewhere different, and charge around town sowing confusion and more misinformation wherever they go.  The mixups are augmented when the Russians make their way to town, tie up Mrs. Foss, and axe the main phone cables.  A rather sentimental and unlikely incident near the end of the film unites all the town's residents with the Russians, but the whole thing nearly ends up starting World War III anyway when the war vet gets to the only two-way radio in town and calls the U. S. Air Force into action.  Universal holocaust is averted only when the townies escort the sub out to sea with their own boats, which leads the Air Force fighters to call off their attack, and the day is saved. 

Try to update the plot to 2014, and you run into trouble right away.  The first American who spots the Russians is the ten-year-old son of a vacationing writer, who refuses to believe his boy when the kid tells Dad there's nine men in black in the garage with Tommy guns.  If something like that happened today, said son would have posted the guys' photos on whatever it is you post photos on when you're ten years old and have a cellphone these days, and inside of five minutes the FBI might have been on the case.  And the same goes for the creaky old plot device of cutting phone lines, which was laid to rest when the first cellphones (mobile phones, as they are called in world outside the U. S.) came out.  Ironically, rather than helping matters, the only wireless link in the movie—the two-way radio—nearly leads to disaster when it's used to call in the Air Force.

It may seem trivial to note the passing of a slower mode of life in which news sometimes had to be carried by hand, so to speak.  But the same thing has happened to our lives that has happened to that fifty-year-old plot.  Those who want to know what is going on in the lives of significant others these days can keep up with them almost constantly with no time lag via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, and there is some concern that excessive indulgence in such things can be an addictive hazard for some people. 

Back in the 1850s, when the electromagnetic telegraph first began to send news around the country at nearly the speed of light, critics worried that life was simply getting too fast and there would be adverse consequences.  Well, whatever the consequences were, we seem to have adapted to them just fine, and in some ways the habit of keeping in constant touch with others via electronic media is perhaps a return to a very primitive way of life.  An anthropologist I read years ago (and have since lost the reference to) noted that in tribal societies, where work such as farming and handicrafts are done in groups, people chat all the time about other people, mostly, and this is the normal way life goes.  So after an industrial interlude of 150 years or so in which workers left the farm for factories and offices where you were expected to deal silently with your job unless it required you to talk, maybe we are using social media and electronics to return to what used to be normal.  At least, some people are. 

Yours truly does not have a Facebook page.  I have never posted an Instagram, or tweeted, or used a hashtag, or any of that other stuff, though my wife keeps me posted on notable doings of people we know who do those things.  I refrain from these modes of communication not out of any principled objection, but mainly because the payoff doesn't seem worth the effort, at least to me.  Blame it on my Y-chromosomes and the fact that males in general, and engineers in particular, often deal more easily with things than with people.  If I'm going to put in an hour or two learning new software, as a result I'd rather be able to analyze plasma spectra, say, as opposed to finding out that some guy I knew in high school has opened a new restaurant.

To those who enjoy social media and the ease of instant global communication, I say:  good for you.  Go ahead and enjoy them in reasonable moderation.  Only be careful not to start World War III.

Sources:  I referred to the Internet Movie Database listing of "The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming" at www.imdb.com.