What? Twitter Neutral?

 

Back when I started this blog in 2006, the phrase "social media" was hardly used by anybody, according to Google Trends.  It began to climb above 1% of its current frequency of use around 2008, possibly in connection with the elections of that year, and has been climbing ever since. 

 

Twitter, the social-media format that has become the default medium of choice for announcements by Presidents on down, was also founded in 2006.  From an obscure techie-speak term, it has turned into a routine and near-universal medium of expression that its leadership has claimed is as neutral as they can make it.  But a recent article by political scientist Wilfred Reilly details how the medium's claim of neutrality is false. 

 

Specifically, in 2018, Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said, in response to accusations that the firm was silently suppressing or banning certain conservatives, that "We don’t shadow-ban conservatives — period."  Similar assertions were made by company officials testifying before Congress and in other public venues.

 

Then along comes reporter Bari Weiss, who used Elon Musk's recently released Twitter files last month to demonstrate dozens of examples in which Twitter silenced or suppressed certain accounts. 

 

Weiss found a variety of ways Twitter can cripple the reach of a given account.  One way is by making the person unsearchable, which is more effective these days than the class of untouchables maintained in some cultures.  Encumbering tweets with warnings, suppressing the sharing of certain tweets—the list of technical means goes on and on.

 

As wonky as I am about engineering details, I'd like to pull back to examine a broader question:  has Twitter behaved unethically in (a) saying they don't "shadow-ban" while clearly doing so, and (b) favoring some tweets and suppressing others?

 

We can dispense with (a) pretty quickly.  Unless Dorsey wants to play a Clintonesque definition game with the phrase "shadow-ban" ("It depends on what you mean by 'shadow-ban.'"), it's obvious that he and his corporate minions have lied repeatedly about how they treat certain accounts.  Companies lie about what they do for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes it's simple ignorance—nobody told the boss what was going on.  That seems hardly likely in this case.  Sometimes it's a deliberate strategy to avoid public embarrassment and financial loss.  That would explain Dorsey's behavior, certainly, and imagining what would have happened if he'd said, "Well, yes, we think we have a duty to the public to protect it from some opinions, and so we do shadow-ban," I can see why a lie would be appealing. 

 

Reilly makes the point that we shouldn't be surprised when we find that Twitter or any other social-media outlet shapes its content to suit its own purposes, whether those be profit, a desire to shape the political landscape, or other things perceived as of more value than telling the truth about what one is up to.  What is disappointing, if not surprising, is the ease and frequency with which Twitter lied about it, and the gullibility of much of the dominant media to believe them, and to criticize so-called conspiracy theorists for claiming that certain stories and outlets—the Hunter Biden laptop episode comes to mind—were intentionally suppressed.  Musk's revelations of internal Twitter documents basically confirm many of these claims that were so scornfully dismissed before.

 

What about (b)?  Regardless of whether they are honest about it, should Twitter mold and shape their content by hyping some tweets and squashing others?  And we shouldn't limit the scope of the question to Twitter.  Facebook, search engines such as Google, and the whole megillah of social media and the way we look for information these days should be included in this question.

 

Most people would agree on certain outer limits to stuff that people post or tweet.  Blackmail, bullying, the lowest dregs of the human imagination—these things should not be allowed into the public arena.  The problem comes when you ask about the rest of what comes into a place like Twitter for potential publication. 

 

Strictly speaking, Twitter and virtually all other social media are private companies which are, and probably should remain, in control of what they publish.  Twitter is not like a public park, paid for with taxes and therefore available to any taxpayer who follows some basic rules.  It's more like a private estate in that sense, where once you are allowed in on the owner's terms, almost anything goes that doesn't break the law.  There is no intrinsic right to express yourself on Twitter or any other private platform.

 

The practical problem is that in replacing the old-fashioned print and one-way electronic media, social media have become the default public square.  Stuff that used to be announced in press conferences before cameras and reporters now gets tweeted routinely first, and press conferences come later, if at all. 

 

The legacy media repressed things silently too.  I can't recall the details, but I remember reading about some reporters who showed up at the house of a prominent public official to ask him something.  His wife came to the door drunk as a skunk, and the code of behavior back then (this was in the early 1960s, I think) made them ignore her state and behavior, and they went away without any story at all.  These days, of course, a live video of her would go viral from the reporter's phone, likely as not.

 

So the news that Twitter shapes tweets to suit itself isn't really news in the sense of a radical new thing happening.  What needs to happen is that people who use social media—and for most of us, that means readers rather than the relatively few producers of viral tweets—need to be aware that everything is biased:  Twitter, Facebook, Google, the newspapers, and even emails from your friends. 

 

With your friends, you probably know them well enough to allow for whatever biases they bring to the table.  And with Musk's revelations about Twitter, we are effectively learning more about Twitter's personality—what things it likes and what things you aren't likely to hear from it.  The bad part of this is that if you want to says something that Twitter doesn't like, you are going to have to find another way to say it.  And that's a problem, but as Reilly pointed out at the end of his article, there's always dictionaries and encyclopedias, and I'd add snail-mail to that, too.

 

Sources:  Wilfred Reilly's article "The Conspiracy Theories Were Real, and Other Revelations" appeared on the National Review website on Dec. 30, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-conspiracy-theories-were-real-and-other-revelations/. 

A Musk-Owned Twitter: Threat or Promise?

 

After buying nine percent of outstanding Twitter shares recently, Elon Musk has announced his intention to buy Twitter and take it private.  The financial details are still in flux, but two numbers tell the story:  Musk is the world's richest man (estimated net worth north of $200 billion) and the largest money numbers Wikipedia associates with Twitter (assets and equity) are less than one-tenth of that.  So no matter what the SEC, shareholders, and even Twitter's board says or does, it's very likely that if Musk wants to buy Twitter, he'll be able to do it.

 

Then what?

 

On the face of it, why a serial entrepreneur and latter-day Tom Swift like Musk would want to buy a not-very-profitable social media company is not clear.  On Wikipedia's list of the ten most-followed tweeters (I don't use it myself, so excuse the linguistic infelicities if I don't use quite the right words in discussing Twitter), Musk is No. 8, just ahead of Narendra Modi (India's prime minister) and just behind Lady Gaga.  No. 1 is Barack Obama, who more than two years after stepping down from the presidency still has a twitter-hold on 136 million followers.  No. 2 is Justin Bieber, who Wikipedia dryly lists as "musician."  Musk is the only businessman in the top ten, but he's not just a businessman.  He's also an instinctive showman who has somehow managed to retain a teenage boy's "hold my beer and watch this" attitude while transforming whole industries—aerospace and automobiles, in particular. 

 

It's not in Musk's nature to lay out his plans in any coherent news-release way.  But my sense is that he thinks Twitter does too much censorship and suspension of accounts, and maybe also doesn't exploit their position as the globe's largest short-message service of its kind as effectively as they could.  Surprisingly for a company with over 200 million active users (and many more who receive tweets), they lost money in 2021.  So Musk's interest in the firm may be purely financial, and he may think he can just run it better.  If he buys it, he will have the opportunity to find out.

 

Twitter is a novel phenomenon in the history of communications.  Sociologists, political scientists, and historians are still sorting out its manifold effects on society, and many of the intellectual class worry that Musk's takeover bid will make things worse.  They fear that Musk, who has shown libertarian tendencies in the past, will reduce Twitter's efforts to monitor and control its content, as it famously did when it permanently blocked President Trump on January 8, 2021, thus ending what was perhaps the most-watched Twitter account ever. 

 

What is the worst-case scenario for a Musk takeover of Twitter, at least short of him shutting the whole thing down and dissolving the company (which Twitter has done to smaller rivals in the past)?  The greatest fear seems to be that Twitter will turn into some sort of common-carrier technology that literally anyone can use for anything—pornography, incitement to riot, murder threats, you name it. 

 

Twitter already allows pornographic messages but insists on labeling them as such.  So that wouldn't be much of a change.  I can imagine some changes in Twitter's policies that would make the free-for-all prospect less threatening.  I don't know what legal boilerplate one has to agree to in order to use Twitter (and probably nobody but a few lawyers understands it all anyway), but if there was some clause to the effect that Twitter will fully cooperate with any law-enforcement officials in the investigation of illegal doings using Twitter, that would allow the organization to point its fingers at wrongdoers, or at least their accounts.  Tracking down bad guys on the Internet is always hard, but to pretend that Twitter is the main security threat to Internet users is to ignore all the other cybercrime that goes on without it.

 

My point is that right now, Twitter seems to be pretty free, and if Musk made it totally free it would be a rather small and incremental change.  And on the plus side, allowing completely free speech on Twitter would comport better with the First Amendment rights guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution, although technically, as a private company Twitter can (and still could) censor anything and everything it wants to. 

 

Money is power, and we see here a fabulously rich and therefore powerful man attempting to control another center of power, or at least conduit of power, which Twitter as a prominent social-media outlet represents.  But what little I know about Musk tells me that his intentions, while they may have a touch of silliness now and then, are basically benign. 

 

There is a growing trend on the part of some to view certain ideas and discourse as so threatening that it should be suppressed, whether by Twitter censors or some other means.  Those of us raised long enough ago that freedom of speech was presented to us as grade-schoolers in a positive and un-ironic way tend to believe that such freedom is one of the bedrock foundations of U. S. democracy.  And if we start going down the path of censorship—whether it's called that or "stopping disinformation" or "countering fake news"—the consequence will be less freedom and a move toward tyranny. 

 

The technology of the Internet and social media have given rise to something that we as societies are still trying to figure out:  a way of reaching millions or billions of people that is potentially uncontrolled by any central authority.  This is a truly new thing in the world.  Some regimes have decided that Twitter is so bad in its current form that they won't allow it at all.  Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are on that list, and Nigeria banned it for a year after it deleted tweets from the Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari. 

 

That list suggests to me that whatever Twitter is doing, the good may well outweigh the bad.  In trying to buy Twitter, I think Musk is only trying to make it better.  And I for one am willing to see what he means by better.

 

Sources:  NPR carried a report on Musk's plans to buy Twitter at https://www.npr.org/2022/04/21/1094020022/elon-musk-twitter-money.  I also referred to a brief piece on the New Yorker website at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-would-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter and the Wikipedia article on Twitter.  For those who do not recognize the reference to Tom Swift, he was a fictional young inventor featured in dozens of novels published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate in the early 1900s aimed primarily at teenage boys. 

Trump, Twitter, and Section 230

 

The events in Washington, D. C. last Wednesday, and the subsequent permanent suspension by Twitter of the account @realDonaldTrump, throw into a spotlight glare the question of how responsible social-media companies are for the material that users post by the technical means that the companies provide.  They add urgency to a question that was already being raised:  should Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 be modified or repealed?

 

The critical part of Section 230 has been hailed as "the twenty-six words that created the Internet," which is also the title of a book by Jeff Kosseff.  In case you're wondering, the twenty-six words are, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”  To see how these words apply to, for example, the thousands of tweets from President Trump, read "Twitter" for "provider . . . of an interactive computer service" and "President Trump" for "another information content provider." 

 

What this section did was to place the then-infant Internet in the category of common-carrier communications providers such as telephone companies, and not in the category of news providers such as the New York Times.  The traditional "old media" (newspapers, radio, TV) were regarded in law as the originators of what they printed or broadcast, and could be sued if their material proved libelous or otherwise harmful.  But if a blackmailer, for instance, called his victim on the phone and made a threat, the idea of suing the phone company because of the blackmailer's actions would be regarded as ridiculous.  So for the next two decades or so, the industries spawned by the Internet—notably Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their ilk—grew without concern for possibly crippling lawsuits regarding the content that their users posted.  Legally, it wasn't their fault what people put on their sites, generally speaking.

 

Few people (or lawmakers, who are also people) anticipated that the main source of news and information for millions of U. S. citizens would shift from the old-media world to the social-media world, but that is exactly what happened.  The techno-optimists who foresaw a brave new world of egalitarian news sharing have been disappointed to find that lies get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its pants.  (Neither Winston Churchill nor Mark Twain apparently wrote that, but it's worth saying anyway.)  In particular, the elaborate structure of lies coming from @realDonaldTrump since the Nov. 3 Presidential election has convinced many millions of people that (a) the election results were manipulated by evil conspirators who managed to hide their tracks from everyone except a few off-the-wall news sources and President Trump himself, (b) President Trump actually won the election and deserves to be president for another four years, at least, and (c) the alternative is the end of America, as the evil Biden administration takes charge and sends us all straight to perdition in a wicker container. 

 

After concocting increasingly incredible lawsuits challenging state vote counts, the President issued a call via Twitter for his followers to show up in Washington on Jan. 6, when a joint session of Congress would count the Electoral College votes and certify the result.  He fraudulently claimed that Vice-President Pence had the power to discard the results and reinstate the President, whereas nowhere in the Constitution or elsewhere does the Vice-President receive this power.  But by the technique of saying lies and repeating them over and over in the echo chamber of the Internet where people who like certain kinds of material get more of it, the President drew a crowd of thousands to Washington last Wednesday.  He spoke to them in person in a long, inflammatory speech that repeated many of the lies he originated over the past two months, and then sent them down the street to disrupt, invade, and vandalize the building where the duly elected representatives of these United States were legally carrying out their Constitutional responsibilities.  And Twitter helped him do it.

 

On Friday, Jan. 8, Twitter announced that they were permanently suspending @realDonaldTrump, citing that the President had violated their "Glorification of Violence policy."  To those who would say that Twitter is violating the President's freedom of speech, I would counter along with Justice Holmes that that someone who is "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic" has forfeited his right to free speech, at least with regard to that particular statement.  And the President has abundantly shown that he is incapable of tweeting without straying into falsehood sooner or later.

 

But in doing so, Twitter has admitted that they do indeed bear the responsibility for the effects of information provided by another information content provider.  In a world where the main source of news for the bulk of the public is social media, social media can no longer pretend that they are a small, insignificant, hobby-type operation that people use mainly for amusement and sharing cookie recipes.  They now play a critical, essential role in the conduct of public affairs, and their increasing censorship of one kind or another (of which the strangling of @realDonaldTrump is only the chief example) amounts to rump editing, essentially no different from what the ink-stained newspaper editors of yore did with their letters to the editor columns.  To choose one letter is to reject all the rest, and to censor one tweet is to accept all the rest.

 

I have no easy solution to the problem of Section 230, but it is clear that things cannot go on the way they are now.  As for President Trump, I hope that Congress has sense and guts enough to impeach him with the penalty of never holding a federal office again.  But social media firms cannot have it both ways.  They must not enjoy the financial and cultural benefits of being the main purveyors of news while shirking the responsibility for the news (and lies) that pass through their hands. 

 

In calmer times, I would have taken notice in this space of the Boeing 737 that crashed off the coast of Jakarta on Jan. 9, but as of this writing there are few details available, and it will have to await a future column.

 

Sources:  The Twitter announcement of the banning of President Trump's account appeared at https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Twitter and Section 230.  The author of the "truth getting its pants on" quote is unknown, but researchers have traced the saying back at least to the 1700s.

Twitter Hack Revelation: People Are Still Human

Last Wednesday, followers of the Twitter postings of famous people such as Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Kim Kardashian all received some variant of the following message, which came from the Apple Twitter feed:  "We are giving back to our community. We support Bitcoin and we believe you should too!  All Bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled!"  This incident has brought to my mind a series of hoary epigrams, and the fact that enough people actually responded to this transparent scam to enrich the hackers by an estimated $110,000 reminds me of the first one:  There's a sucker born every minute. 

Twitter staff responded quickly, first by blocking the accounts on which the fraudulent tweets appeared, and then by briefly freezing the ability of all registered users to tweet anything.  (So for a few minutes on July 15, 2020, we had a Twitter-free world again, but not for long.)  Eventually, Twitter got things straightened out and life went back to what passes these days for normal.

How was this done?  Details are still scarce at this point, but apparently, it began when the hackers mounted what Twitter calls a "coordinated social engineering attack" on the organization.  That's techspeak for a trick like the following:  a bunch of emails or other messages purporting to be from someone in authority and asking for the victim to do something that they normally wouldn't do.  I partly fell for something like this myself once one Saturday when I received an email allegedly from the dean of my college at the university, asking me to contact her.  I emailed back and the hacker then said she was in need of some gift cards for a meeting, and would I please go and buy some and email them to her?  Only then did I realize I was dealing with a scam.

So by some similar means, the hackers were able to access internal Twitter administrative tools.  In other words, they were in the driver's seat and they proceeded to push the pedal to the metal.  First, they located all the famous Twitter names they wished to hack.  (Republican politicians, strangely enough, were apparently immune from this attack, for reasons that remain to be determined—maybe the hackers didn't think anybody would believe Republicans would give away money.)  Then they changed the accounts' email addresses so the real account owners couldn't access their own accounts.  And then the hackers did something really stupid, which was to ask victims to send money to a Bitcoin account.

According to one authority at a law firm that specializes in cryptocurrency matters, U. S. law enforcement authorities can trace Bitcoin transactions pretty well, so the chances that the hackers will get away with their ill-gotten gains for good are not high.  On the other hand, Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are well known for the shady and illegal transactions that people use them for, so it's hard to say what the truth is here as to how easily they can be caught.  Overall, though, people involved with Bitcoin thought the net fallout from this incident would be favorable for cryptocurrency, because as one spokesman said to a Slate reporter, "Can you imagine if an advertiser wanted to ask all of these people to post about their company in one fell swoop? It would be an impossible purchase; you couldn’t even buy that much media."  Which brings to mind the second hoary epigram:  There's no such thing as bad publicity.  That is to say, just getting your name or product before the public is more important than exactly what causes the publicity in the first place, whether it reflects upon you favorably or otherwise.

The next epigram I will bring to your attention sums up what this incident tells us about human nature:  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. ("The more things change, the more they stay the same.")  While the technology in this incident may be new, the aspects of human nature it exploited are as old as humanity itself. 

The hackers, who are simply criminals with some tech savvy, used their knowledge of human nature to get into the Twitter controls in the first place.  No matter how many seminars on computer security you make employees sit through, if your organization is large enough and if the hackers are clever enough, at least one person is likely to have a lapse of judgment when a hacker mimicks an authority figure and asks the victim to do something that would otherwise be against their better judgment.  And one is sometimes all it takes.

And on beyond that, the fact that enough Twitter users were gullible to the extent of sending thousands of dollars' worth of Bitcoin to Joe Biden or Apple or whoever, not stopping to wonder why the object of their admiration would first want them to send cash before returning twice the amount sent—well, it's people like that who keep con artists in business.  And of course, the millions of followers each of the famous people or organizations have, increased the chances that the hackers would find those few very special folks who both had the money and couldn't resist the thought of missing out.

A story in Physics Today, of all places, confirms that even people who are brilliant in one department can nevertheless be duped like anybody else.  Late in life, Sir Isaac Newton was a well-off government official (he ran England's mint) who others sought out for advice about financial investments.  In the spring of 1720, a government-chartered outfit called the South Sea Company (sort of like the British East India Company that profited from colonial trade, but less successful) began issuing stock.  Joint stock companies were a new thing back then, and Newton first bought some South Sea shares, but then decided there was something fishy about the setup and sold his stock, although at a handsome profit.  The South Sea Company operators were basically operating a Ponzi scheme, but as they were some of the first to hit on the idea of paying off investors who were promised high returns with the money from sales to later investors, few people other than Newton smelled a rat. 

All through the summer of 1720, South Sea stock soared, and the psychological pressure of seeing other people apparently getting rich from their purchases proved too much for Newton, who turned around and put almost all his free cash into the stock again in June and July.  In August, the bubble began to burst, and by the end of September Newton had lost his proverbial shirt, along with everybody else who hadn't gotten out in time.  So even the most brilliant scientific mind of the eighteenth century was taken in by a stock scam.

That may not make anybody who sent a thousand bucks to Kim Kardashian in hopes of financial gain feel much better.  But it confirms the fact that human nature hasn't changed that much in three hundred years, and whether the means are goose-quill pens or Twitter accounts, this final epigram is still true:  If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Sources:  I referred to articles on the Twitter hack and scam that appeared in Slate at https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/why-cryptocurrency-advocates-think-the-twitter-hack-could-help-bitcoin.html and the website www.techcrunch.com at https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/15/twitter-accounts-hacked-crypto-scam/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Twitter.  Andrew Odlyzko's article "Isaac Newton and the perils of the financial South Sea" appeared in the July 2020 issue of Physics Today, pp. 30-36.

Should Social Media Be Regulated?

Last month, the youngest U. S. Senator, Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican from Missouri, filed a bill called the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act.  The purpose of the act is to do something about the harmful effects of addiction to social media.

What would the bill do?  I haven't read it, but according to media reports it would change the ways companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google deal with their customers.  The open secret of social media is that they are designed quite consciously and intentionally to be habit-forming.  So-called "free" media make their money by selling advertising, and advertising is worthless unless someone looks at it.  So their bottom line depends on how firmly and how long they glue your eyeballs to their sites.  And they have scads of specialists—psychologists, media experts, and software engineers—whose full-time job is to squeeze an extra minute or two of attention from you every day, regardless of whatever else is going on in your life. 

Writing on the website of the religion and public life journal First Things, Jon Schweppe says the SMART Act may not be the one-stop cure-all for our social media problems, but it's a step in the right direction.  It would  prohibit certain practices that are currently commonplace, apparently including one that has always reminded me of what life might be like in Hell:  the infinite webpage.

It used to be that when people first figured out how to make a web page scroll, it was only so long.  You could always get to the bottom of it, where you might find useful things like who wrote it or other masthead-and-boilerplate information.  Well, that doesn't always happen anymore.  The infinite webpage pits the pitiful finite mortal human against the practically unlimited resources of the machine to come up with more eye candy, as much as you want.  You keep scrolling, it will keep showing you new stuff. 

This particular feature reminds me of a passage from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe featuring the candy called Turkish Delight.   The wicked-witch Queen of Narnia offered the boy Edmund his favorite type of candy to convince him to betray his friends.  The candy she offered him was enchanted so that whoever ate it always wanted more, and "would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves."  No matter how much time you waste on an infinite website, there's always more.

The SMART bill would also give users a realistic option to voluntarily limit their own use of social media with daily timers, prohibits "badge" systems (which is evidently a kind of special-privilege feature that gets rewards heavy users and encourages them even more), and would prohibit or modify other addictive features. 

The Federalist's John Thomas sees the SMART bill as the first step in what may be a turning point in the history of social media.  He likens it to the Parisian reaction to brightly-colored advertising posters enabled by the then-new lithography process in the 1860s.  Pretty soon, a good percentage of all available vertical flat surfaces were covered with posters, and the town fathers decided to regulate how and where posters could be displayed. 

This may be the point at which the U. S. citizenry stops merely wringing its hands and saying there's nothing you can do in the face of rising teen depression and other ill effects of social media, and starts to take action.  As Thomas points out, though, there are few grass-roots organizations taking up the control-social-media banner. 

This may be because the dangers social media pose for mental health are insidious and gradual rather than abrupt and catastrophic.  Suppose that every person had an intrinsic social-media limit:  say after viewing X hours of social media (and X would be different for each person), your brain would literally explode and you'd die.  Well, you can bet that after two or three of these incidents, governments would come down on Facebook, Google, and company like a ton of bricks with all sorts of restrictions, up to and including an outright ban.

But nobody's brain literally explodes from doing too much Facebook.  The negative consequences of social-media use are much less obvious than that, but are nonetheless real.  Even the most tragic cases of teen suicides that result from peer persecution over social media can be blamed not just on the media, but on the cruelty of other teens.  Nevertheless, the nominal anonymity and ease of use that social media offer can turn what might be fairly well-behaved peers in person into abominable monsters on Facebook. 

Some writers oppose the SMART Act and similar legislation on the free-market principle that government is more likely to make things worse with legislation than otherwise.  While that can happen, it is foolish to take the hyper-libertarian position that if a good or service is bad, people just shouldn't use it.  Back when ordinary glass was used for automobile windshields, it would turn into long razor-sharp shards that decapitated numerous drivers, and Congress invited Henry Ford to testify about a proposed law that would require the use of the more expensive safety glass in windshields.  Reportedly (and this is from memory), Ford said, "I'm in the business of making cars, I'm not in the business of saving lives."

When Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress not too long ago, he was self-controlled enough not to say anything that harsh.  But if the day has at last arrived when our elected officials are finally going to do something about the harmful effects of social media, one of two things (or perhaps a combination) is going to happen.  Either the social-media companies will have to get ahead of the proposed legislation and enact real, quantifiable reforms of their own and prove that they work, or they will have to change their ways in accordance with regulatory laws that they brought upon themselves. 

My own hope is that the companies will figure out a transparent and effective way to self-regulate.  But the choice is theirs, and if they brush off the SMART Act and think they have the raw power to squash such regulation, they may be in for a painful surprise.

Sources:  Jon Schweppe's article "Big Addiction" appeared on the First Things website on Aug. 13, 2019 at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/big-addiction.  John Thomas's article "Hawley's SMART Act Is the Beginning Of the Revolt Against Big Tech" is on the Federalist website at https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/13/hawleys-smart-act-beginning-revolt-big-tech/. 

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Twitter and Terrorism

On Feb. 5, the short-message-service Internet firm Twitter announced that since the middle of 2015, it has suspended 125,000 accounts because they appeared to be promoting terrorism or similar extremist activities.  While Twitter has long maintained rules against such content in tweets, this is the first time they have made public a specific number of account suspensions connected with terrorism.  This move and the associated problem Twitter is trying to deal with bring up important questions about the ethics of communications technologies and the way private organizations have displaced national laws as arbiters of free speech.

Historically, communications systems rarely arise in discussions of engineering ethics.  For example, I doubt that in the 1950s the Society of Motion Picture Engineers debated the question of screenwriters who were blacklisted during the McCarthy communism-scare era.  The question of a medium's content was seen to be almost totally distinct from the technology and engineering it used. 

But gradually that has changed as technical, managerial, and censorship roles have morphed and merged in the strange new cyberspace world of spam, viruses, and tweets.  The problem Twitter faces, of groups such as ISIS using Internet services to promote and coordinate terrorist activities, is real.  Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik apparently drew much of their inspiration for the attack in San Bernadino, California from Internet sites promoting jihad.   Their December 2015 attack killed fourteen and wounded twenty-two.  Even messages limited to 140 characters can be used to recruit and coordinate such things, although there is no evidence that Twitter was involved in that particular incident.

Nevertheless, Twitter, with only 3,900 employees, faces the daunting task of enforcing its Twitter Rules on all 300-some million active users every day.  Clearly, much of this task involves technology to sift through the millions of messages pouring through Twitter's servers.  It also involves the cooperation of groups concerned about terrorism, with which Twitter has teamed in an effort to find and suspend violators of Twitter's rule against promotion of terrorism.  But it also involves fundamental questions of free speech—questions that used to be debated mainly in the halls of legislatures and courts of law, not in the cubicles of software engineers.  Increasingly, it's the engineers—or people who work closely with them—making the on-the-ground decisions about who gets to tweet and who gets their beaks clamped shut.

The fact that Twitter has gone public with a specific number of account closures is a move apparently designed to send a message to those who would use the service for nefarious purposes.  It also serves to raise the status of the company in the eyes of those who are worried about misuse of the Internet for terrorist activities.  And it emphasizes the magnitude of the problem.  Suspending accounts can be compared to a medical test for a serious ailment.  If you get too many false positives, you'll be bothering healthy people with a diagnosis that later has to be reversed.  But if you get too many false negatives, you let people with a serious disease slip through without treatment, possibly leading to worse results later on.  So the challenge for Twitter is to find accounts that are being used to promote terrorism in some way and suspend only those, without cutting off people who are not trying to make trouble.

From a free-speech point of view, these suspensions could be viewed as censorship.  But even the courts recognize that free speech has limits—the classical example being the lack of a right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.  So Twitter's actions are justifiable on that basis in cases where the possible harm to others in the form of terrorist activity appears to outweigh the value of preserving free speech for all Twitter account holders. 

This is not a critique of Twitter, by any means.  They appear to be taking responsibility for a hard job and doing it as well as they can.  Looming in the background, of course, is the possibility that if a family of someone killed in a terrorist attack discovers that Twitter accounts were involved in planning the attack, the firm might get sued.  While I'm not aware of any such suits, such possibilities always have to be considered when you are dealing with a large-scale operation involving millions of people. 

But I think the most notable thing about this situation is the way that the practical basis of free speech, in this case anyway, has spread from the legal system to international private firms where the parties are mostly anonymous users, largely invisible software engineers, and company policy makers, in cooperation with various outside agencies who are all selected by Twitter.  The legal system hasn't entirely lost its influence, in that companies such as Twitter are still responsive to sustained large-scale legal challenges.  But in the wild-West environment of the Internet, such challenges are unusual and often politically inspired.  Preventing terrorism is a pretty uncontroversial position politically, and so Twitter doesn't seem too worried that it will get sued by a coalition of terrorist groups for what it's doing to their accounts.  Terrorists have other ways of settling such disputes, and I hope they don't use them.

It's a shame that evildoers have bent the Internet to their will to the extent that firms like Twitter have to spend a lot of time and effort whacking moles, which in many cases pop up again right away, either on Twitter or on other more private Internet communications setups.  But doing nothing would be irresponsible.  The knowledge that such suspensions can happen is what makes most Twitter users behave, not so much the actual suspensions, just as the knowledge that one is liable to get a speeding ticket makes most people obey speed-limit signs whether or not there is an actual traffic cop in sight.  Kudos to Twitter for kicking suspected terrorists off the telephone wires, so to speak, and let's hope that their very public stance against such things forces terrorists into corners of the Internet where it is harder to recruit people to their cause.

By the way, I have begun to do a weekly tweet summarizing each blog post.  My Twitter handle is @karldstephan, in case you want to follow me there.

Sources:  The New York Times carried an article by Mike Isaac entitled "Twitter Steps Up Efforts to Thwart Terrorists’ Tweets" on Feb. 5, 2016 at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/technology/twitter-account-suspensions-terrorism.html.  I also referred to the Twitter announcement of the 125,000 suspensions at https://blog.twitter.com/2016/combating-violent-extremism, the Twitter Rules at https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311#, and the Wikipedia article on Twitter.