The Press Box - Why Is Facebook So Bad at Moderation? | Damage Control (Ep. 507)

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs discuss the "bad actors" that Facebook recently removed from the platform (1:03) and the contradictory ways in which they decide to handle controversial, high-profile figures like Alex Jones of InfoWars (12:35). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nib. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Info Wars about Info Wars. Conspiracy theorist Shock Jock, Alex Jones, finally got sort of punished

for spreading lies on the internet recently, and we're going to talk about whether it made a difference. But first, we're going to talk about another social media scandal because the internet is a garbage can full of demon waste. This week, Facebook announced that it had discovered evidence of quote-unquote bad actors attempting to influence Americans online. What it actually found is a lot more complicated.

We'll explore it all on this week's damage control. Okay, I know it's like at this point extremely hard to keep track of all of Facebook scandals. I'm like continually very confused about it because it just, there's a new one all the time and there's a new one this week. So Facebook announced it had removed pages and posts from what it referred to as bad actors. It didn't say Russians, but they kind of meant Russians, which we'll get to in a minute. And it removed these pages and posts and accounts because it said that they were running what Facebook referred to as band coordinated inauthentic behavior. So they took down your page? Shut up.

I'm sorry to hear about. I didn't know we're doing a whole segment about them taking your Facebook page down. What's the point of having a podcast? No, explain this. A coordinated inauthentic behavior. What is that? I know. So it's an extremely vague term, and that's deliberate because Facebook basically can't come out and say what it wants to say, which is that it took down, like, Russian trolls' pages.

What it can say is that it took down pages it thinks are up to no good. And so that's why it's using the phrase coordinated inauthentic behavior. But why can't it say the first thing you just said? I don't think they don't have, they don't have hard proof. Okay. You know, they have some evidence that suggests that these pages are somehow involved with Russian troll farms, but they don't have enough evidence to come right out and say it. So they're using this soft language.

Right. Okay. And this sounds good. I mean, when I first read it, I was like pretty happy about. about the news because in 2016, Facebook didn't really catch on to the fact that Russian trolls and other foreign actors were like using Facebook to try to destroy American democracy. People got really mad about it. And so the fact that Facebook was coming out and announcing that it had removed these posts.

Proactive. Yeah, it seems like good news on the surface, right? So did you have a chance to look at Facebook's announcement about this? It did. Did you see what it actually removed? Because this is where things get a lot weirder. Yes. So it removed content from four main pages.

They were, the pages were called resistors. They were called Black Elevation, Aslan Warriors, and then Mindful Being. It's very Facebook names for things, by the way. Especially mindful being. And mindful being is a weirdest one. So, like, the best way I can describe mindful being to listeners is, like, if you are friends with any hippies on Facebook, like any hippies at all. Like gate nubs. Shut up.

You'll be familiar with these memes. They're that sort of, like, new agey arts where there's, there's, like, inspirational quotes. It does not seem like what you would. think when you would think democracy destroying propaganda. Right. But so the reason why Facebook announced this, Cheryl Sandberg said there was a specific reason. It was because this Sunday there's going to be a white supremacist rally in Washington, D.C., called Unite the Right. It's going to be the sequel to the original Unite the Right rally, which was the rally in Charlottesville that obviously turned violent.

Very bad. Killed one bystander, injured people last year. Unite the Right 2. Instead of being... Well, Unite the Right 2 wanted to do a coordinated one rally in Charlottesville, one rally on the National Mall in D.C. They've had some trouble and they've had a lot more... I mean, God, there were counter-protests, obviously, at Unite the Right Charlottesville last year. But I think this year they faced a lot of super preemptive counter-organized.

from anti-fascist protesters. Yes. And so the weird, complicated thing about this news is that the reason why Facebook went public with this was not to stop this white supremacist rally. It was to stop counter protests to the white supremacist rally. Right. Because they think that the counter protests were being helped by, quote unquote bad actors. Right.

Or that, isn't it that Facebook specifically suspected that the bad actor slash potential Russian trolls had infiltrated the Facebook organizers? Yes. And so they were saying, don't, this is fake. Don't go to the counter protest. I wanted to talk to you about this because I think it's like a really clear example of how insanely messy. like the insane mess that Facebook has gotten itself into. Because it has to be on the lookout for bad actors. And the results so far has been it telling people not to protest white supremacists.

Right, right. Or it really, it feels like Facebook has to discern between foreign bad actors or like state, bad state actors and just weird actors maybe in this sense. Because it's on the one hand, the counter protest to unite the right to includes this suspected troll group. Yeah. On the other hand, Chelsea Manning is associated with the protests. Like, is one of the organizers associated with the protests? I should say that like since this happened, a lot of, you know, American, not Russian trolls, real people have come out and been like, no, we are organizing counter protest because we do. don't believe in white supremacy, but Facebook.

A lot of real people who, importantly, are protesting a rally of white supremacists. Okay. And then this also got me thinking, they're saying that these trolls are trying to provoke discord amongst people in America. Like, is it always bad to have discord? Like, shouldn't we have counter-protests? It just seems like Facebook is now in this insanely complicated position where not only does it have to moderate like fake news and hate speech and all this stuff, which we'll get to later.

But now it is also staked out the position where it has to determine the intent of people who have divisive opinions to make sure that they're not secretly trying to destroy America from the outside. Right. Like now it has put itself in this position where it's not only policing the content, it's policing the thought behind the content. Right, right. It's like the 2016 election hacking represented, like, the first couple levels of inception.

And now Facebook has dug itself to, like, the fifth level of inception. It just seems like there's absolutely no way it can possibly succeed in what it's trying to do. Right. It's standard seems so nebulous. I mean, Facebook standard seems so nebulous. nebulous. And they just don't seem to have nothing about Facebook in-house seems like they're just equipped to have any sort of political discernment at this level. Like they can barely figure out how to moderate, like, relatively straightforward examples of hate speech or like prominent people. So the idea of Facebook being so internally complex that they can discern between these like more atomic.

Yeah, these more atomic, populist examples of speech on its platform. It's just like I have zero. I have negative faith in Facebook to be able to have the level of discernment. Yeah. To distinguish between Chelsea Manning and like a Russian bot. Facebook has a track record of accidentally pulling down activist groups content. Like a long history. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I was just looking at this thing from TV. 2011 about how it had accidentally pulled down civil liberties groups. Like it has had problems with this for years. And now that it's going a step further and trying to police the intentions of content, I don't. I just am worried that this is going to end up putting us in a situation where Facebook is now shutting down posts that are at all critical of America. Right.

I mean, I think part of the problem, too, is that, If you, I'll tell you what, I hate the Russia discourse so much because I think it's this weird, like, post-James Bond discourse that just seems so kooky and, like, unrestrained sometimes. But it is genuinely hard to, it's hard to talk about Russia gate. Yeah. And the Russian hacking and all of that stuff in a way that, if you try to describe what the Russian government. was supposedly trying to accomplish by its interference in the, like, the U.S. elections, it all sounds very nebulous, right? Because it's sort of the broad strokes isn't just that, oh, you know, the Russian government

was trying to influence the election against Hillary Clinton in 2016. I think the broader stroke is, regardless of outcomes, the Russian government is trying to undermine America's own faith in its democratic processes and its democratic institutions, right? And that's such a nebulous thing that when you hand that description to Facebook and ask Facebook, because at that point, you're not telling Facebook, we want you to, we want you to hunt down these particular kinds of actors or like, we want you to hunt down hackers. That seems like a simple mandate. Telling Facebook, we want you to police the demoralization of American democracy.

It's just such a broad thing. Especially when apparently what they're doing to demoralize us is literally hippie memes. Right. I'm like, what? And I don't mean to, like, I think that we should be taking the threat of Russian interference seriously. But I do think that perhaps a bigger threat than hippie memes is like them actually hacking into our voting machines or whatever. I just have no faith in Facebook's ability to be nuanced about this at all. Right.

And in fairness, the reason that it's hard to muster up that faith is because this is the genuinely difficult level. This is the genuinely like mumble core level of what is even happening with all of these like weird digital actors that it's just hard to know what to make of that. And the thing that make, I mean, that's a genuinely difficult issue. In our next segment, we're going to talk about the ways that the big social media platforms have a tough time exercising their best judgment. Even in cases where the actors aren't these obscured bots but are actually super prominent figures who are working with hate speech and stuff that seems relatively easy to flag on these platforms. like, say, Alex Jones of Info Wars. If you looked at the amount of demonization attacks on Info Wars in the last 23 years, it starts out of a trickle and then just exponentially goes up by 2016

and then goes into stratospheric straight-up convulsions in the last six months. And now tens of thousands of articles, news programs, local shows, fake letters to the editor, the entire leftist deep state, the entire foundation combine, is launching attacks on Info Wars, the likes of which you only see before the country is tricked into invading some third world country. It's war-level propaganda. But see, Info Wars has been chosen as the test case for everybody else's speech to be taken. Alex Jones is a very real, very prominent right-wing troll, indisputably a troll.

I don't even think he would dispute that. And Alex Jones remains on Facebook. He remains on YouTube. Somehow he means on Spotify. The man's on Periscope. Alex Jones remains on all of these platforms, despite anyone's better judgment about incendiary political content. and misinformation in the digital age. So he has been punished a little bit recently, right?

Yes, and we should talk about what he's been punished for. Yes. Because he's like, he's one of those people who you could put a rap sheet up, right? It's like it's like one of those old timey wanted posters and you just have all the charges. And I mean, even just the past year, right? Like he's peddled conspiracy theories about Seth Rich, who is like the murdered DNC staffer, who there's a whole like right-wing conspiracy. threat around.

Yes. And Sandy Hook. Yeah. He's been... Right. He's not just peddled conspiracy theories about school shootings, especially Sandy Hook and especially the Parkland shooting, but he's antagonized the families of survivors and survivors themselves.

He's caused so much distress and harm, like real life harm. Like morally unambiguous. It's not like, oh, it's divisive. You're not talking about, like, this isn't stuff. where we can agree to disagree. Like, he's antagonized school shooting survivors. Yes. Right?

And he's antagonized these people, and he's peddled these conspiracy theories from the comfort of YouTube and Facebook. Here's the thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around with Alex Jones. Because Alex Jones is in a sort of lineage, right? He's in a lineage of a sort of concern. He has this, like, bark to him, and his segments are, like, two hours long. He's just, like, this gruff guy who's in the lineage of, I would say, first Rush Limbaugh, right? who's a radio guy.

And then Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is sort of a crossover radio Fox News guy, right? Oh, yeah. But then you get to Alex Jones. And Alex Jones is an Austin radio guy. But I think in terms of his national base, he really is native to YouTube and other social media. That's where he blew up for sure.

Yeah. Which was the internet. Right. And you know, he has, like, millions of subscribers. Like he, his virality, his footprint

in American political culture is on these platforms. And so Alex Jones is strange because he's this menace in American political culture. And yet, like, without YouTube and without Facebook, Alex Jones virtually doesn't exist.

And so to me, that creates this fascinating question of like, what is, what is the duty of Facebook and YouTube as companies with regard to his content? Because again, it's like if you go to infowars.com, right? Even on, like, it's not like if you go to infowars.com, there are the videos that you see on his YouTube page, but they're hosted natively to the web page.

Like, no, they all link out to YouTube. Like, all of that content is YouTube content, whether YouTube likes it or not. Yeah. But YouTube and Facebook, none of these places really want to deal with that. want to sort of ride the line between like on the one hand having content moderation policies but on the other hand pretending that this is a liesy fair regime and they just have nothing there's nothing they can do they just they have no choice but to host a guy who uses these platforms to harass the families of dead kids yeah and it's really clear that they do have a choice

they just don't want to deal with it because you know they're they're very good good at policing other types of content. If you put up a picture of someone naked on Facebook, it'll get taken down quickly. If you put up something that is infringing on copyright on YouTube, that will get pulled down in a second. In light speed. If it's copyright infringement, YouTube is on it. Yeah.

And so, I mean, I think we both agree that they have a responsibility to decide whether, like, They have the power to decide whether or not Alex Jones uses their platform. And they've chosen to allow him to use their platform. Except recently they've been sort of inching towards punishing him. Can you? So who, yeah, who did what? Like, what did Facebook do to him? What did YouTube do to him?

Well, there was like a weird semi-transparency recently in the past couple weeks. YouTube, let's start with YouTube because YouTube was a sort of first mover in this latest case. YouTube issued what is known as a strike against Alex Jones. Like three strikes in your out? Three strikes in your out, right? Like that's the policy. YouTube has a strikes policy that applies to both copyright infringement and to like flagrant content. Okay.

It's called a strikes policy. It's outlined on the website as you get three strikes of violating community guidelines. And if you get three strikes, you're out. but there's the rub here, which is that you have to get the three strikes basically within six months of each other. And so what you have a lot of examples of in, or what you have prominent examples of

in the history of YouTube is people who get a lot of first strikes and maybe even second strikes, but it's so it's a system that because it gives you the grace period of after a certain point, the strikes get erased from your record, it becomes this like bizarreo-sisyphine feet

of being an established bad actor on these platforms, but never getting banned because you space out all of your bad action. Right. And so it's why, for instance, like Alex Jones was getting flagged for like various school shooting conspiracy theories that go against like YouTube's hateful content policies and other policies. But the problem is like the, the strike. aren't cumulative. Like at the end of the day,

like, you mostly just keep getting first strikes. Like, that's the weird irony of YouTube is that as much as they have this three strikes policy, you can be in account with a million first strikes.

And as long as they're all first strikes, you never get banned from YouTube. And that, and it's endlessly frustrating to me for this reason. I think right-wing media, I think right-wing activists, have become exceptionally good at gaming,

like of any given platform, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. They've basically made a sport of gaming stuff like that, of gaming's porous content guidelines. So basically in six months from now, we can expect, like, Alex Jones to do something especially heinous until no. Right. It's like these people,

they're good enough actors that, they can ride up to the line and not get banned and get their strikes reset and then continue to like theorize that you know people are running child sex rings out of pizzerias you know um and again it's i think in a sensible system and i actually asked youtube about this and they just they just referred me back to the rules that are listed on the website you'd think in a sensible system at some point someone with some level of adult judgment would enter the equation and they would look it out Alex Jones. They look at the Info Wars account on YouTube and they say, hey, this guy is just a habitual line step where he makes content that's just not consistent with their policies.

Yeah, maybe his bad actions are spread out enough that like technically he's not tripped up to three strikes. But also he's just a bad actor and he's like he's defying the spirit of the law. Get him off the website. You know what I mean? Like a sensible system, I feel like that would happen. For sure. So that brings me to the question. Why isn't that happening? I feel like there's something here that's about tech companies specifically and the culture of these companies that makes them sort of incoherent when it comes to content moderation. I mean, I think there's a few reasons.

The first is that a lot of these companies, when they were younger, they would say, you know, we believe in free speech. you can express yourself on here. And because Alex Jones is, the bad things he does involve speech, it's what he says. The tech companies are just weird about policing language. They're a lot weirder about policing language than they are about, like, policing images. Right. And then the other thing is that, like, for a long time, before, like, backlash started against him, like, Alex Jones is super popular on YouTube and Facebook. So it was in their best interest to keep a popular account active, keep people engaged.

Now, YouTube and Facebook are scared of backlash from a very small but very vocal minority of far right-wing personalities. So I think that's also why they're hesitant to police these conspiracy theorists. Can we talk about that word, though, backlash? I think that's what I struggle with the most because I theoretically understand it. It's a it's a totally logical concern, right? If you ban popular right-wing YouTube broadcast personality Alex Jones, people will be mad. For sure. For sure. But

what about people being mad about like it's offensive content. I get that people will be mad. I get that an outsized portion of people will be mad because he's popular. But, like, what is the consequence? It's people will be mad and thus. Like, what is the actual substantial thing that these platforms have to be afraid of? Apart from just people will be mad. Like, I'm mad all the time.

You know what I mean? Like, I'm mad about stuff these companies do all the time. Isn't the upshot, though, that, like, people are mad at social media companies all the time, but also people are lazy and don't actually do anything? Like, the point is, like, there's a, there's a right. thing to do in the situation. The right thing will displease a lot of people. But what I'm trying to suss out is what is the thing, what is the other shoe that would

drop that is the specific thing that Twitter or YouTube or Facebook is afraid of? Like, are they afraid people are going to leave the service? I don't think that's true. I think everything in the history of social media platform suggests that no one actually has the wherewithal to answer. decisions that they don't like that the companies make by actually stopping using the service. Like, people are suckers. People use social media despite themselves. I don't think there is an actual other shoe. I think especially with Facebook and YouTube,

which is owned by Google, they have no meaningful competitors. Not only are people probably not going to leave them because they... Like Alex Jones hasn't left them. Alex Jones has all these videos where he's complaining about even the prospect of being band, but they're all YouTube videos. You know, if Alex Jones himself hasn't left YouTube, I don't know why anyone thinks that, like, yeah, Miley Anopoulos is going to fleet a Vimeo. Like, I don't, that's not a real thing.

So that's why it seems so strange to me that these social media companies are afraid of anything or anyone. It is, it is weird. I think their position is they come from a place where the less they do, the better it is for them. For a long time, they were laissez-faire, because. because it was by far the easiest option. And so since they've been getting backlash about their content moderation,

they've been stepping it up in response, but they're not trying to do more than they have to. I think they're going to end up banning him. I do think that. Why? Because I think that people are just going to keep being pissed off about this, and he's going to keep pumping out horrible content, and eventually it's going to come to a head.

So then should have backlash to the companies themselves, What do you think will happen? Because to me, that's, I mean, it's an interesting hypothetical, right? Like, let's say we wake up tomorrow morning. YouTube and Facebook have simultaneously banned Alex Jones. I'll be happy. You'll be happy. And it's, if you're a right-wing thinker, it's tempting to think this is where some vaguely

randian sort of mobilization happens and YouTube stakes, or Alex Jones stakes out, and he recreates his own platform from scratch. But, like, that's not going to happen. Like, I just struggle to understand. Like, I actually think that if he got banned, it would mostly just decimate Alex Jones. And it would be, he'd be 18 months out from being as irrelevant as Glenn Beck is now. He would just be a guy with no platform. And it would actually be a pretty storybook ending, you know.

But I think the counter narrative is banning Alex Jones would turn him into this immortal martyr. Yeah. I think it would be still better for everyone if he was banned. Yeah. Like, it will incite some Alex Jones as a martyr for free speech rhetoric. I don't think he would, like, completely lose his fan base, but I do think that, like, cutting off his main channels of distributing his horrible shit would be good for, like, the world. For sure.

For sure. I mean, it's weird, because I actually think that we're at a late enough stage in a lot of this post-digital. right-wing agitation that there are case studies, and the case studies are favorable to what we think should happen, which is that the social media company should get over it and ban him. I remember when everyone thought that booting Chuck Johnson from Twitter would turn him into like, if you strike me down, I'll become more powerful than you could ever imagine. And then Chuck Johnson got booted from Twitter, and then within like 12 months, everyone forgot who Chuck Johnson even is.

He's that guy who shit on the floor, right? Yes, he's the redhead, weird, goofy-looking millennial conservative guy. And the same thing happened with Milo. It's like once Milo got booted from mainstream discourse, yeah, his brand just kind of tanked. He became irrelevant outside of like esoteric, probably like right-wing organizing spaces, but he didn't have this outsized national public profile. Yeah, and then I also think because he was in a weakened position, when the stuff came out about him making jokes about pedophilia,

that was like a death blow for him that wouldn't have been quite as destructive if he still had a more active fan base. Right. But specifically if he had a sturdier platform to manage the sort of damage control of that. It was important that those platforms undermine him and had started to kick him off

so that when that happened, he couldn't mobilize. Yeah. A defense. So basically, like, I, I 100% think that they should ban Alex Jones. They have great, plenty of evidence to justify it. It seems like an open and shut case that if Facebook and Google's YouTube wanted to do something good for the world, they would ban this man's platform, his ability. Okay, they haven't.

And that's what makes me so worried about everything in general. Like with what we were talking about earlier with them now, Facebook now trying to ban these meme groups that may or may not be linked to Russian trolls. Like, I just don't, if they can't do something so open and shut, I don't trust them with the nuanced stuff. Right. Yeah, it's like the stuff that I can't even think through immediately like that. It's like I can think through.

Alex Jones, they can't even do that. That seems like the, I mean, that's like pre-SAT. And whereas like the, yeah, the troll farm stuff is AP calculus two. I'm not trusting you do AP calculus two when you couldn't do the pre-SAT. Yes. Like the stuff with the foreign, the bad actors is so much more complicated and will require. like a much deft or touch to figure out how to how to separate what's authentic and what's not authentic, et cetera. And then we have something like Alex Jones and it's like, man, if you can't get this right, you got to go back.

Zuckerberg needs to do a Billy Madison situation. Like he got to go back to school. To prove to dad that he's not a fool. Yeah. All right, that's it from us this week. I'm Facebook co-founder Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. My other Facebook co-founder.

That's it from us. And you'll hear from us again in two weeks.