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free speech and privacy

IT’S THE (DEMOCRACY-POISONING) GOLDEN AGE OF FREE SPEECH

Jan 16, 2018

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-new-censorship/

My note: the author uses the 1960 military junta in Turkey as an example. Here it is the 2014 “modern” ideological fight of increasingly becoming dictatorial Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan against his citizens by shutting off Twitter: http://time.com/33393/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan-twitter/
Here is more on civil disobedience and social media: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=civil+disobedience

until recently, broadcasting and publishing were difficult and expensive affairs, their infrastructures riddled with bottlenecks and concentrated in a few hands.

When protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, a single livestreamer named Mustafa Hussein reportedly garnered an audience comparable in size to CNN’s for a short while. If a Bosnian Croat war criminal drinks poison in a courtroom, all of Twitter knows about it in minutes.

In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots?
My note: see the ability to create fake audio and video footage:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/07/15/fake-news-and-video/

HERE’S HOW THIS golden age of speech actually works: In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers

They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.

in reality, posts are targeted and delivered privately, screen by screen by screen. Today’s phantom public sphere has been fragmented and submerged into billions of individual capillaries. Yes, mass discourse has become far easier for everyone to participate in—but it has simultaneously become a set of private conversations happening behind your back. Behind everyone’s backs.

It’s important to realize that, in using these dark posts, the Trump campaign wasn’t deviantly weaponizing an innocent tool. It was simply using Facebook exactly as it was designed to be used. The campaign did it cheaply, with Facebook staffers assisting right there in the office, as the tech company does for most large advertisers and political campaigns.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

more on free speech in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=free+speech

social media and freedom of speech

the use of social media, personal versus institutional, or personal in the context of an institutional repercussions, is a complex and thorny issue. How much can one criticize the institution in their personal social media? And if the institution responds, when does it become silencing the social media as expression of free speech?

Is the article below touching only a specific [political] issue, or academia, as an institution, goes beyond this issue in imposing on freedom of speech?

Why I Was Fired

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Was-Fired/233640

My tweets might appear uncivil, but such a judgment can’t be made in an ideological or rhetorical vacuum. Insofar as “civil” is profoundly racialized and has a long history of demanding conformity, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication. This choice is both moral and rhetorical.

Academics are usually eager to contest censorship and deconstruct vague charges of vulgarity. When it comes to defending Israel, though, anything goes.

Students are capable of serious discussion, of formulating responses, of thinking through discomfort. They like my teaching because I refuse to infantilize them; I treat them as thinking adults. My philosophy is simple: Teach them the modes and practices of critical thought and let them figure out things on their own.

Professors are often punished for disrupting convention in informal ways, however. My case is interesting because administrators ignored the de facto standards that regulate our behavior and exercised their power directly. This should be worrisome to any scholar who isn’t a sycophant.

The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here.
Benjamin Ginsberg points out that in the past 30 years, the administrator-to-student ratio has increased while the instructor-to-student ratio has stagnated. The rise of untenured, or non-tenure-track, faculty exacerbates the problem; a significant demographic in academe lacks job security or the working conditions that allow them to maximize their pedagogical talent. Over a recent 10-year period, spending on administration outpaced spending on instruction. At American universities, there are now more administrators and their staffers than full-time faculty. In the past 10 years, administrative salaries have steadily risen while custodians and groundskeepers suffer the inevitable budget cuts — as do the students whose tuition and fees supplement this largess.

When so much money is at stake, those who raid the budget have a deep interest in maintaining the reputation of the institution. Their privilege and the condition of the brand are causally related. The brand thus predominates. Its predominance often arrives at the expense of student well-being.

critical thinking is a terribly undesirable quality in the corporate world, much more damning than selfishness or sycophancy. Let us then be honest about critical thinking: On the tongues of cunning bureaucrats, it is little more than an additive to brand equity, the vainglorious pomp of smug, uptight automatons who like to use buzzwords in their PowerPoint presentations.

Critical thinking by faculty is even more undesirable. In research institutions, we are paid to generate prestige and to amass grant money; in teaching-centered colleges, we enjoy excess enrollments according to fine-tuned equations that maximize the student-teacher ratio. (In elite liberal-arts colleges, we pamper the kids with simulations of parental affection.) Critical thinking is especially harmful to adjuncts, reliant as they are for income on the munificence of well-paid bosses who cultivate a distended assemblage of expendable employees.

more on social media in this IMS blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=social+media&submit=Search

academic freedom

What is academic freedom?

there is too little understanding of what academic freedom means. It is not absolute and it is not the simple equivalent of “freedom of speech.” All citizens have, or should have, the latter, but only individuals who have specified educational and professional qualifications are entitled to academic freedom within universities. In the words of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), they are granted the “freedom to teach and discuss; freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof; freedom to produce and perform creative works; freedom to engage in service to the institution and the community; freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works.”

Internet freedom

Save

Parler

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/14/934833214/conservatives-flock-to-mercer-funded-parler-claim-censorship-on-facebook-and-twi

Parler, founded in 2018, touts itself as “the world’s premier free speech platform.” On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately owned company’s early investors is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has been a backer of President Trump and is also a major donor to conservative causes, including Breitbart News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon.

It has hit 10 million members — more than double the 4.5 million it had last week, according to Jeffrey Wernick, the company’s chief operating officer.
Still, that is just a tiny fraction of Twitter’s 187 million daily users and Facebook’s nearly 2 billion.

Experts say “free speech” approach lets false claims flourish
Gab, an alternative social network that has become notorious for hosting anti-Semitic and white nationalist content. It was used by the accused 2018 shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

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more on echo chambers in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=echo+chamber

Harper’s Letter

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

July 7, 2020

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

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A Deeply Provincial View of Free Speech

Many prominent writers and thinkers seem invested in the notion that simply facing strong public criticism is a threat to free speech.

HANNAH GIORGIS

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/harpers-letter-free-speech/614080/

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The Harper’s Letter, Bari Weiss And Tucker Carlson: Why Are We Still Talking About ‘Cancel Culture?’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2020/07/14/the-harpers-letter-bari-weiss-and-tucker-carlson-why-are-we-still-talking-about-cancel-culture/#70e071ac39ca

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Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and the Harper’s letter: the case for open debate

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/17/opinions/harpers-letter-free-speech-bari-weiss-andrew-sullivan-avlon/index.html

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Public letter in Harper’s sparks furor

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/506846-public-letter-in-harpers-sparks-furor

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Cancel Culture

Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/illiberalism-cancel-culture-free-speech-internet-ugh.html

Haas, L. (2019). ETTU?: Notes on Cancel Culture. The New Republic, 250(7-8), 40–. https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/ppvqcp/cdi_gale_infotracacademiconefile_A594089998

GIL TROY. (2019). Cancel the “Cancel Culture” phenomenon with sincere self-scrutiny. In The Jerusalem Post (Online) (English ed.). The Jerusalem Post Ltd.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/ppvqcp/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_2299562101

Nya Bentley. (2020). Fresh Talk: Does cancel culture even work? In Hartford Courant (Online). Tribune Publishing Company, LLC.

https://mnpals-scs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01MNPALS_SCS/ppvqcp/cdi_proquest_miscellaneous_2370756493

fluctuations in social media

WhatsApp loses millions of users after terms update from r/worldnews

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/24/whatsapp-loses-millions-of-users-after-terms-update

A poorly explained update to its terms of service has pushed WhatsApp users to adopt alternative services such as Signal and Telegram in their millions.

Apps like Signal, Telegram, Wickr, and WhatsApp offer privacy features ranging from end-to-end encrypted data transfer to ‘self-destructing messages’.”

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Fast-Growing Alternative To Facebook And Twitter Finds Post-Trump Surge ‘Messy’

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/958877682/fast-growing-alternative-to-facebook-twitter-finds-right-wing-surge-messy

MeWe markets itself as privacy forward. It doesn’t harness users’ data to sell ads or decide what content to show them. My note: but has to charge somehow, so, differently from FB Messenger, one needs to pay, in order to do audio call in MeWe.

MeWe’s Weinstein resists the comparison to Parler or Gab, which tout themselves as free-speech sites. For one thing, he says, MeWe is serious about putting limits on what people can say.

The tech website OneZero uncovered right-wing militia groups on MeWe as well as a “Stop the Steal” group that discussed shooting people. The company removed the groups after OneZero flagged them.

“I think we all still treat social media companies like they’re these inexpensive startups, but maybe they need to be treated more like starting an airplane company or a company that makes cars,” said Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies online extremists. “You’ve got to think about seat belts.”

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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media

Hong Kong and technology

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more on facial recognition in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facial+recognition

more on surveillance in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=surveillance

break up Facebook

https://nyti.ms/2LzRzwq

Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.

It is time to break up Facebook.

America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances.

More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable.

Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective.

American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurshipstalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility.

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.

The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network. The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.

unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it. (opyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).

The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.

Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.

Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.

Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

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We Don’t Need Social Media

The push to regulate or break up Facebook ignores the fact that its services do more harm than good

Colin Horgan, May 13, 2019

https://onezero.medium.com/we-dont-need-social-media-53d5455f4f6b

Hughes joins a growing chorus of former Silicon Valley unicorn riders who’ve recently had second thoughts about the utility or benefit of the surveillance-attention economy their products and platforms have helped create. He is also not the first to suggest that government might need to step in to clean up the mess they made

Nick Srnicek, author of the book Platform Capitalism and a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, wrotelast month, “[I]t’s competition — not size — that demands more data, more attention, more engagement and more profits at all costs

 

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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook

Jeremy Bailenson VR

presence (VR different from other media), virtual pit, haptic devices and environment

4 min: what’s the point?…
VR is a paradox, no rules,
what should you do and what to avoid
Ketaki Shriram dissertation
addiction
Gerd Bruder observed the other German person confused between VR and real world.
Common Sense Media – when children can VR and for how long
Jackie Baily worked with children VR Sesame street Grover
impossible, counterproductive, rare/expensive, dangerous are the 4 reasons to use it. Not ubiquitous!
12 min. empathy
Tobin Asher “Becoming Homeless” blame the situation or the character (min 17)

counterproductive:
June Lubchenko, 2013. NOAA. min 19. natural disasters, not trusting self-report, but actions.
Fio Micheli. counter productive to fly children to the coral in Italy, but VR makes it possible. learning efficacy. Motivation to learn. min 21.
min 26. MOOC – materials are for free. not replacing field trips, just making them more often.
min 27. spherical video to practice football with VR
min 29. Walmart – “academies” Mark Gill the nursing home simulation.

dangerous:
learning to drive.
freedom speech over all media but VR is specific, different. If you won’t do it in the real world, don’t do it in VR

questions
min 33. what is the iPhone for VR.
Fred Brooks

min 37. disentization. how many times to do something to have effect. Kathy Mayhew and Mark Gill research

min 38. AR and psychology – not much resources. virtual person breaks physics – walks through chairs. Greg Weltch Central Florida – AR breaks physics study.

min 42. if his lab gives grants for art content creation. Immersive Journalism, storytelling syllabus. Mark Gill for our class, Bill Gorcica . Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Mayday Foundation

 

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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virtual+reality

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