Tim's journal

This post is the last in a 4-part series. The first three parts were "Defame and Blame", "Phone Books and Megaphones," and "Server-Side Economics."

Harassment as Externality

In part 3, I argued that online harassment is not an accident: it's something that service providers enable because it's profitable for them to let it happen. To know how to change that, we have to follow the money. There will be no reason to stop abuse online as long as advertisers are the customers of the services we rely on. To enter into a contract with a service you use and expect that the service provider will uphold their end of it, you have to be their customer, not their product. As their product, you have no more standing to enter into such a contract than do the underground cables that transmit content.

Harassment, then, is good for business -- at least as long as advertisers are customers and end users are raw material. If we want to change that, we'll need a radical change to the business models of most Internet companies, not shallow policy changes.

Deceptive Advertising

Why is false advertising something we broadly disapprove of -- something that's, in fact, illegal -- but spreading false information in order to entice more eyeballs to view advertisements isn't? Why is it illegal to run a TV ad that says "This toy will run without electricity or batteries," but not illegal for a social media site to surface the message, "Alice is a slut, and while we've got your attention, buy this toy?" In either case, it's lying in order to sell something.

Advertising will affect decision-making by Internet companies as long as advertising continues to be their primary revenue source. If you don't believe in the Easter Bunny, you shouldn't believe it either when executives tell you that ad money is a big bag of cash that Santa Claus delivers with no strings attached. Advertising incentivize ad-funded media to do whatever gets the most attention, regardless of truth. The choice to do what gets the most attention has ethical and political significance, because achieving that goal comes at the expense of other values.

Should spreading false information have a cost? Should dumping toxic waste have a cost? They both cost money and time to clean up. CDA 230 protects sites that profit from user-generated content from liability from paying any of the costs of that content, and maybe it's time to rethink that. A search engine is not like a common carrier -- one of the differences is that it allows one-to-many communication. There's a difference between building a phone system that any one person can use to call anyone else, and setting up an autodialer that lets the lucky 5th callee record a new message for it.

Accountability and Excuses

"Code is never neutral; it can inhibit and enhance certain kinds of speech over others. Where code fails, moderation has to step in."
-- Sarah Jeong, The Internet of Garbage

Have you ever gone to the DMV or called your health insurance company and been told "The computer is down" when, you suspected, the computer was working fine and it just wasn't in somebody's interest to help you right now? "It's just an algorithm" is "the computer is down," writ large. It's a great excuse for failure to do the work of making sure your tools don't reproduce the same oppressive patterns that characterize the underlying society in which those tools were built. And they will reproduce those patterns as long as you don't actively do the work of making sure they don't. Defamation and harassment disproportionately affect the most marginalized people, because those are exactly the people that you can bully with few or no consequences. Make it easier to harass people, to spread lies about them, and you are making it easier for people to perpetuate sexism and racism.

There are a number of tools that technical workers can use to help mitigate the tendency of the communities and the tools that they build to reproduce social inequality present in the world. Codes of conduct are one tool for reducing the tendency of subcultures to reproduce inequality that exists in their parent culture. For algorithms, human oversight could do the same -- people could regularly review search engine results in a way that includes verifying factual claims that are likely to have a negative impact on a person's life if the claims aren't true. It's also possible to imagine designing heuristics that address the credibility of a source rather than just its popularity. But all of this requires work, and it's not going to happen unless tech companies have an incentive to do that work.

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract between the provider and a service and the services' users that outlines what the users are entitled to expect from the service in exchange for their payment. Because people pay for most Web services with their attention (to ads) rather than with money, we don't usually think about SLAs for information quality. For an SLA to work, we would probably have to shift from an ad-based model to a subscription-based model for more services. We can measure how much money you spend on a service -- we can't measure how much attention you provide to its advertisers. So attention is a shaky basis on which to found a contract. Assuming business models where users pay in a more direct and transparent way for the services they consume, could we have SLAs for factual accuracy? Could we have an SLA for how many death threats or rape threats it's acceptable for a service to transmit?

I want to emphasize one more time that this article isn't about public shaming. The conversation that uses the words "public shaming" is about priorities, rather than truth. Some people want to be able to say what they feel like saying and get upset when others challenge them on it rather than politely ignoring it. When I talk about victims of defamation, that's not who I'm talking about -- I'm talking about people against whom attackers have weaponized online media in order to spread outright lies about them.

People who operate search engines already have search quality metrics. Could one of them be truth -- especially when it comes to queries that impinge on actual humans' reputations? Wikipedia has learned this lesson: its policy on biographies of living persons (BLP) didn't exist from the site's inception, but arose as a result of a series of cases in which people acting in bad faith used Wikipedia to libel people they didn't like. Wikipedia learned that if you let anybody edit an article, there are legal risks; the risks were (and continue to be) especially real for Wikipedia due to how highly many search engines rank it. To some extent, content providers have been able to protect themselves from those risks using CDA 230, but sitting back while people use your site to commit libel is still a bad look... at least if the targets are famous enough for anyone to care about them.

Code is Law

Making the Internet more accountable matters because, in the words of Lawrence Lessig, code is law. Increasingly, software automates decisions that affect our lives. Imagine if you had to obey laws, but weren't allowed to read their text. That's the situation we're in with code.

We recognize that the passenger in a hypothetical self-driving car programmed to run over anything in its path has made a choice: they turned the key to start the machine, even if from then on, they delegated responsibility to an algorithm. We correctly recognize the need for legal liability in this situation: otherwise, you could circumvent laws against murder by writing a program to commit murder instead of doing it yourself. Somehow, when physical objects are involved it's easier to understand that the person who turns the key, who deploys the code, has responsibility. It stops being "just the Internet" when the algorithms you designed and deployed start to determine what someone's potential employers think of them, regardless of truth.

There are no neutral algorithms. An algorithmic blank slate will inevitably reproduce the violence of the social structures in which it is embedded. Software designers have the choice of trying to design counterbalances to structural violence into their code, or to build tools that will amplify structural violence and inequality. There is no neutral choice; all technology is political. People who say they're apolitical just mean their political interests align well with the status quo.

Recommendation engines like YouTube, or any other search engine with relevance metrics and/or a recommendation system, just recognize patterns -- right? They don't create sexism; if they recommend sexist videos to people who aren't explicitly searching for them, that's because sexist videos are popular, right? YouTube isn't to blame for sexism, right?

Well... not exactly. An algorithm that recognizes patterns will recognize oppressive patterns, like the determination that some people have to silence women, discredit them, and pollute their agencies. Not only will it recognize those patterns, it will reproduce those patterns by helping people who want to silence women spread their message, which has a self-reinforcing effect: the more the algorithm recommends the content, the more people will view it, which reinforces the original recommendation. As Sarah Jeong wrote in The Internet of Garbage, "The Internet is presently siloed off into several major public platforms" -- public platforms that are privately owned. The people who own each silo own so many computing resources that competing with them would be infeasible for all but a very few -- thus, the free market will never solve this problem.

Companies like Google say they don't want to "be evil", but intending to "not be evil" is not enough. Google has an enormous amount of power, and little to no accountability -- no one who manages this public resource was elected democratically. There's no process for checking the power they have to neglect and ignore the ways in which their software participates in reproducing inequality. This happened by accident: a public good (the tools that make the Internet a useful source of knowledge) has fallen under private control. This would be a good time for breaking up a monopoly.

Persistent Identities

In the absence of anti-monopoly enforcement, is there anything we can do? I think there is. Anil Dash has written about persistent pseudonyms, a way to make it possible to communicate anonymously online while still standing to lose something of value if you abuse that privilege in order to spread false information. The Web site Metafilter charges a small amount of money to create an account, in order to discourage sockpuppeting (the practice of responding to being banned from a Web site by coming back to create a new account) -- it turns out this approach is very effective, since people who are engaging in harassment for laughs don't seem to value their own laughs very highly in terms of money.

I think advertising-based funding is also behind the reason why more sites don't implement persistent pseudonyms. The advertising-based business model encourages service providers to make it easy as possible for people to use their service; requiring the creation of an identity would put an obstacle in the way of immediate engagement. This is good from the perspective of nurturing quality content, but bad from the perspective that it limits the number of eyeballs that will be focused on ads. And thus, we see another way in which advertising enables harassment.

Again, this isn't a treatise against anonymity. None of what I'm saying implies you can't have 16 different identities for all the communities you participate in online. I am saying that I want it to be harder for you to use one of those identities for defamation without facing consequences.

A note on diversity

Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other social media and search companies are notoriously homogeneous, at least when it comes to their engineering staff and their executives, along gendered and racial lines. But what's funny is that Twitter, Facebook, and other sites that make money by using user-generated content to attract an audience for advertisements, are happy to use the free labor that a diversity of people do for them when they create content (that is, write tweets or status updates). The leaders of these companies recognize that they couldn't possibly hire a collection of writers who would generate better content than the masses do -- and anyway, even if they could, writers usually want to be paid. So they recognize the value of diversity and are happy to reap its benefits. They're not so enthusiastic to hire a diverse range of people, since that would mean sharing profits with people who aren't like themselves.

And so here's a reason why diversity means something. People who build complex information systems based on approximations and heuristics have failed to incorporate credibility into their designs. Almost uniformly, they design algorithms that will promote whatever content gets the most attention, regardless of its accuracy. Why would they do otherwise? Telling the truth doesn't attract an audience for advertisers. On the other hand, there is a limit to how much harm an online service can do before the people whose attention they're trying to sell -- their users -- get annoyed and start to leave. We're seeing that happen with Twitter already. If Twitter's engineers and product designers had included more people in demographics that are vulnerable to attacks on their credibility (starting with women, non-binary people, and men of color), then they'd have a more sustainable business, even if it would be less profitable in the short term. Excluding people on the basis of race and gender hurts everyone: it results in technical decisions that cause demonstrable harm, as well as alienating people who might otherwise keep using a service and keep providing attention to sell to advertisers.

Internalizing the Externalities

In the same way that companies that pollute the environment profit by externalizing the costs of their actions (they get to enjoy all the profit, but the external world -- the government and taxpayers -- get saddled with the responsibility of cleaning up the mess), Internet companies get to profit by externalizing the cost of transmitting bad-faith speech. Their profits are higher because no one expects them to spend time incorporating human oversight into pattern recognition. The people who actually generate bad-faith speech get to externalize the costs of their speech as well. It's the victims who pay.

We can't stop people from harassing or abusing others, or from lying. But we can make it harder for them to do it consequence-free. Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Analogously, codes of conduct don't prevent bad actions -- rather, they give people assurance that justice will be done and harmful actions will have consequences. Creating a link between actions and consequences is what justice is about; it's not about creating dark corners and looking the other way as bullies arrive to beat people up in those corners.

...the unique force-multiplying effects of the Internet are underestimated. There’s a difference between info buried in small font in a dense book of which only a few thousand copies exist in a relatively small geographic location versus blasting this data out online where anyone with a net connection anywhere in the world can access it.
-- Katherine Cross, "'Things Have Happened In The Past Week': On Doxing, Swatting, And 8chan":

When we protect content providers from liability for the content that they have this force-multiplying effect on, our priorities are misplaced. With power comes responsibility; currently, content providers have enormous power to boost some signals while dampening others, and the fact that these decisions are often automated and always motivated by profit rather than pure ideology doesn't reduce the need to balance that power with accountability.

"The technical architecture of online platforms... should be designed to dampen harassing behavior, while shielding targets from harassing content. It means creating technical friction in orchestrating a sustained campaign on a platform, or engaging in sustained hounding."
-- Sarah Jeong, The Internet of Garbage

That our existing platforms neither dampen nor shield isn't an accident -- dampening harassing behavior would limit the audience for the advertisements that can be attached to the products of that harassing behavior. Indeed, they don't just fail to dampen, they do the opposite: they amplify the signals of harassment. At the point where an algorithm starts to give a pattern a life of its own -- starts to strengthen a signal rather than merely repeating it -- it's time to assign more responsibility to companies that trade in user-generated content than we traditionally have. To build a recommendation system that suggests particular videos are worth watching is different from building a database that lets people upload videos and hand URLs for those videos off to their friends. Recommendation systems, automated or not, create value judgments. And the value judgments they surface have an irrevocable effect on the world. Helping content get more eyeballs is an active process, whether or not it's implemented by algorithms people see as passive.

There is no hope of addressing the problem of harassment as long as it continues to be an externality for the businesses that profit from enabling it. Whether by supporting subscription-based services with our money and declining to give our attention to advertising-based surfaces, or expanding legal liability for the signals that a service selectively amplifies, or by normalizing the use of persistent pseudonyms, people will continue to have their lives limited by Internet defamation campaigns as long as media companies can profit from such campaigns without paying their costs.

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This post is the second in a 4-part series. The first part was "Defame and Blame". The next part is "Server-Side Economics."

Phone Books and Megaphones

Think back to 1986. Imagine if somebody told you: "In 30 years, a public directory that's more accessible and ubiquitous than the phone book is now will be available to almost everybody at all times. This directory won't just contain your contact information, but also, a page anyone can write on, like a middle-school slam book but meaner. Whenever anybody writes on it, everybody else will be able to see what they wrote." I don't thin you would have believed it, or if you found it plausible, you probably wouldn't have found this state of affairs acceptable. Yet in 2016, that's how things are. Search engine results have an enormous effect on what people believe to be true, and anybody with enough time on their hands can manipulate search results.

Antisocial Network Effects

When you search for my name on your favorite search engine, you'll find some results that I wish weren't closely linked to my name. People who I'd prefer not to think about have written blog posts mentioning my name, and those articles are among the results that most search engines will retrieve if you're looking for texts that mention me. But that pales in comparison with the experiences of many women A few years ago, Skud wrote:

"Have you ever had to show your male colleagues a webpage that calls you a fat dyke slut? I don’t recommend it."

Imagine going a step further: have you ever had to apply for jobs knowing that if your potential manager searches for your name online, one of the first hits will be a page calling you a fat dyke slut? In 2016, it's pretty easy for anybody who wants to to make that happen to somebody else, as long as the target isn't unusually wealthy or connected. Not every potential manager is going to judge someone negatively just because someone called that person a fat dyke slut on the Internet, and in fact, some might judge them positively. But that's not the point -- the point is if you end up in the sights of a distributed harassment campaign, then one of the first things your potential employers will know about you, possibly for the rest of your life, might be that somebody called you a fat dyke slut. I think most of us, if we had the choice, wouldn't choose that outcome.

Suppose the accusation isn't merely a string of generic insults, but something more tangible: suppose someone decides to accuse you of having achieved your professional position through "sleeping your way to the top," rather than merit. This is a very effective attack on a woman's credibility and competence, because patriarchy primes us to be suspicious of women's achievements anyway. It doesn't take much to tip people, even those who don't consciously hold biases against women, into believing these attacks, because we hold unconscious biases against women that are much stronger than anyone's conscious bias. It doesn't matter if the accusation is demonstrably false -- so long as somebody is able to say it enough times, the combination of network effects and unconscious bias will do the rest of the work and will give the rumor a life of its own.

Not every reputation system has to work the way that search engines do. On eBay, you can only leave feedback for somebody else if you've sold them something or bought something from them. In the 17 years since I started using eBay, that system has been very effective. Once somebody accumulates social capital in the form of positive feedback, they generally don't squander that capital. The system works because having a good reputation on eBay has value, in the financial sense. If you lose your reputation (by ripping somebody off), it takes time to regain it.

On the broader Internet, you can use a disposable identity to generate content. Unlike on eBay, there is no particular reason to use a consistent identity in order to build up a good track record as a seller. If your goal is to build a #personal #brand, then you certainly have a reason to use the same name everywhere, but if your goal is to destroy someone else's, you don't need to do that. The ready availability of disposable identities ("sockpuppets") means that defaming somebody is a low-risk activity even if your accusations can be demonstrated false, because by the time somebody figures out you made your shit up, you've moved on to using a new name that isn't sullied by a track record of dishonesty. So there's an asymmetry here: you can create as many identities as you want, for no cost, to destroy someone else's good name, but having a job and functioning in the world makes it difficult to change identities constantly.

The Megaphone

For most of the 20th century, mass media consisted of newspapers, then radio and then TV. Anybody could start a newspaper, but radio and TV used the broadcast spectrum, which is a public and scarce resource and thus is regulated by governmental agencies. Because the number of radio and TV channels was limited, telecommunications policy was founded on the assumption that some amount of regulation of these channels' use was necessary and did not pose an intrinsic threat to free speech. The right to use various parts of the broadcast spectrum was auctioned off to various private companies, but this was a limited-scope right that could be revoked if those companies acted in a way that blatantly contravened the public interest. A consistent pattern of deception would have been one thing that went against the public interest. As far as I know, no radio or TV broadcaster ever embarked upon a deliberate campaign of defaming multiple people, because the rewards of such an activity wouldn't offset the financial losses that would be inevitably incurred when the lies were exposed.

(I'll use "the megaphone" as a shorthand for media that are capable of reaching a lot of people: formerly, radio and broadcast TV; then cable TV; and currently, the Internet. Not just "the Internet", though, but rather: Internet credibility. Access to the credible Internet (the content that search engine relevance algorithms determine should be centered in responses to queries) is gatekept by algorithms; access to old media was gatekept by people.)

At least until the advent of cable TV, then, the broader the reach of a given communication channel, the more closely access to that channel was monitored and regulated. It's not that this system always worked perfectly, because it didn't, just that there was more or less consensus that it was correct for the public to have oversight with respect to who could be entrusted with access to the megaphone.

Now that access to the Internet is widespread, the megaphone is no longer a scarce resource. In a lot of ways, that's a good thing. It has allowed people to speak truth to power and made it easier for people in marginalized groups to find each other. But it also means that it's easy to start a hate campaign based on falsehoods without incurring any personal risk.

I'm not arguing against anonymity here. Clearly, at least some people have total freedom to act in bad faith while using the names they're usually known by: Milo Yiannopoulos and Andrew Breitbart are obvious examples. If use of real names deters harassment, why are they two of the best-known names in harassment?

Algorithm as Excuse

Zoë Quinn pointed out on Twitter that she can no longer share content with her friends, even if she limits access to it, because her name is irrevocably linked to the harassment campaign that her ex-boyfriend started in order to defame her in 2014, otherwise known as GamerGate. If she uses YouTube to share videos, its recommendation engine will suggest to her friends that they watch "related" videos that -- at best -- attack her for her gender and participation in the game development community. There is no individual who works for Google (YouTube's parent company) who made an explicit decision to link Quinn's name with these attacks. Nonetheless, a pattern in YouTube's recommendations emerged because of a concerted effort by a small group of dedicated individuals to pollute the noosphere in order to harm Quinn. If you find this outcome unacceptable, and I do, we have to consider the chain of events that led to it and ask which links in the chain could be changed so this doesn't happen to someone else in the future.

There is a common line of response to this kind of problem: "You can't get mad at algorithms. They're objective and unbiased." Often, the implication is that the person complaining about the problem is expecting computers to be able to behave sentiently. But that's not the point. When we critique an algorithm's outcome, we're asking the people who design and maintain the algorithms to do better, whether the outcome is that it uses too much memory or that it causes a woman to be re-victimized every time someone queries a search engine for her name. Everything an algorithm does is because of a design choice that one or several humans made. And software exists to serve humans, not the other way around: when it doesn't do what we want, we can demand change, rather than changing ourselves so that software developers don't have to do their jobs. By saying "it's just an algorithm", we can avoid taking responsibility for our values as long as we encode those values as a set of rules executable by machine. We can automate disavowal.

How did we get here -- to a place where anyone can grab the megaphone, anyone can scribble in the phone book, and people who benefit from the dissemination of this false information are immune from any of the risks? I'll try to answer that in part 3.

To be continued.

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