Democracy – Page 5

Facebook gearing up for French presidential elections

Facebook says it has targeted 30,000 fake accounts linked to France ahead of the country’s presidential election, as part of a worldwide effort against misinformation.

The company said Thursday it’s trying to “reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts.”

It said its efforts “enabled us to take action” against the French accounts and that it is removing sites with the highest traffic.

ABC News: Facebook targets 30,000 fake France accounts before election »

A free and open society?

Once again, a senseless terror attack.

Once again, politicians are telling us that we must stand up for a free and open society.

Of course we must. But do they?

Western democracy is slowly being hollowed out. It’s getting ever more secretive and less transparent. Power is being centralized and is moving further away from the people. It is getting ever more difficult to participate in and to scrutinize the decision-making process. Free citizens are being reduced to subordinates.

Civil and human rights are being eroded – e.g. when it comes to the rule of law and the right to privacy.

Free speech is being curbed, the Internet is being censored and people are being told what to think. The so-called fake news is being fought by trying to limit free information instead of giving people more, different sources.

Of course, terrorists and religious fanatics are very real threats to a free and open society. But so are our politicians.

/ HAX

Full circle…

A Spanish court on Wednesday sentenced a young woman to jail for posting jokes on Twitter about the 1973 assassination of a senior figure in the Franco dictatorship.

Even the granddaughter of Carrero Blanco attacked the move by public prosecutors to charge Vera and put her on trial, saying in a letter sent to daily El Pais in January that while the jokes were in poor taste they were not worthy of such legal action. “I’m scared of a society in which freedom of expression, however regrettable it may be, can lead to jail sentences,” Lucia Carrero Blanco wrote.

The Guardian: Spanish woman given jail term for tweeting jokes about Franco-era assassination »

California to make »fake news« illegal?

From a proposed Californian law:

18320.5. It is unlawful for a person to knowingly and willingly make, publish or circulate on an Internet Web site, or cause to be made, published, or circulated in any writing posted on an Internet Web site, a false or deceptive statement designed to influence the vote on either of the following:

(a) Any issue submitted to voters at an election.

(b) Any candidate for election to public office.

EFF comments…

In other words, it would be illegal to be wrong on the internet if it could impact an election. The bill is unconstitutional under U.S. Supreme Court case law (see our opposition letter for more information on that), and likely to draw immediate and costly lawsuits if it is signed into law.

EFF: California Bill To Ban “Fake News” Would Be Disastrous for Political Speech »

Fake news is nothing new

The debate on »fake news« might be new to some. But for us who are activist when it comes to a free and open internet, privacy and civil rights – this is what we have been fighting for a very long time.

Governments strive towards »total information awareness« has always been excused with e.g. the war on terror, the war on drugs, child protection, fighting organized crime and national security.

The same arguments – and some other, like hate speech – have been used to restrict free speech and freedom of information.

Then we have the corporatist battle over copyright vs. the Internet – sacrificing a global, free flow of information to save outdated business models.

When activists find out and go public, the reaction from politicians and bureaucrats is normally that we have got it all wrong. But the swarm is resourceful, and often we find some sort of a smoking gun. In a few cases, we manage to stop what is going on (like ACTA). In some cases, we manage to change details (like the EU telecoms package). But normally we loose. Then the proposals become law. And most things we warned people about is actually happening.

Told you so.

(In some very rare cases – like EU data retention – the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights objects strongly enough to stop what is happening in its’ tracks.)

Today the concept of total information awareness is a reality in countries like the U.S., the U.K., and France. In Germany, it has just been legalized.

And after decades of legal battles, it seems as if Big Entertainment is getting closer to having the Internet Service Providers to police the Internet – leading to extrajudicial filtering and censorship without the possibility to redress.

During the processes leading up to all of this – politicians and bureaucrats have labeled resistance as delusions and activists as tin foil hats. Doing so, they have managed to keep their plans under the radar, away from the public eye and the media. Until it’s too late.

I have seen lots of disinformation, faked news, and cover-ups trough the years. It has been used by politicians, governments, and special interests – forcing their restrictions on our free and open internet, undermining a democratic society and disturbing the free market.

The concept of fake news might have become a bit more obvious lately – but it is nothing new. The only reason it’s such a big thing at the moment is that it has been used by others than governments, mainstream politicians, bureaucrats and special business interests.

/ HAX

Meanwhile, in Iran…

Iran’s hardline former president Mahmud Ahmadinejad became the latest leader to join Twitter on Sunday, despite having been instrumental in getting it banned from the country.

News18.com: Iran’s Ahmadinejad Joins Twitter Despite Being the One to Ban it »

Zuckerbergs thoughts on how Facebook might rule the world

Ten days ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a very long policy letter, that has been nagging my mind ever since. (Link»)

The ambition is – of course – to make Facebook even bigger and more important in our lives. This also means making the totally dominant social media player even bigger and more important in our lives. I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with that.

Facebook is a very special sort of social engineering, an invisible force guiding us trough social relations, news, politics, community activities, business, and culture. And here I get the impression that Facebook would like to become the curator of our lives.

Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall. This will require not only helping people connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to create more meaningful groups for people to connect with.

So, some Facebook groups are to be more important than others? One factor to define a »meningful group« seems to be »real« off-line events. For me, who am a small player in an international network promoting a free and open internet along with civil rights and liberty, this is a disheartening approach. Almost all our work is done online, with the occasional international conference. Nevertheless, together we make a difference – and our work is often the only way to make a real impact when it comes to politics and law making in these fields. Should we matter less?

And what about this:

The guiding principles are that the Community Standards should reflect the cultural norms of our community, that each person should see as little objectionable content as possible, and each person should be able to share what they want while being told they cannot share something as little as possible. The approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.

For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum. Ofcourse you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime.

I see the point. But wouldn’t this be creating new »filter bubbles« based on geography and cultural traditions? Will this not hamper human intellectual evolution? Will this not contribute to conformity? Isn’t the beauty of the Internet that it is truly global? Ars Technica dubs the approach outlined by Zuckerberg being »gerrymandering the Internet«.

I would also say that this would be a way to subordinate the individual to majority rule by default settings. Thus, reducing freedom and moving power away from the private person to a faceless collective. And – are we really comfortable with AI handling such delicate matters?

Wouldn’t this be a dream for totalitarian regimes – to be able to single out the ones who have changed their settings in ways that are no longer in line with most other people?

Ars Technica makes another valid point:

Zuckerberg adds that he’s thinking of creating “worldwide voting system” for Facebook users which could then be used as a template for how “collective decision-making may work in other aspects of the global community.” That’s a vague formulation. But coming on the heels of his comments about politicians with Facebook engagement, he sounds like he’s floating the idea of turning Facebook into the infrastructure for managing elections.

Putting our democratic system in the hands of Facebook? Really? I don’t think so.

And don’t forget to put the Zuckerberg manifesto in context. This is a company who has the creator of a very powerful tool for mass surveillance analysis (used by e.g. the FBI, CIA, NSA and GCHQ) – who also happens to be an advisor to the illustrious US President – on its’ board of directors.

I fully understand that running an operation like Facebook is a highly complicated and delicate task. Maybe even impossible.

But the real answer must be competition. Not that many years ago Facebook didn’t even exist. And in an unknown number of years ahead there will be something else – or, I hope, a multitude of alternatives. That is hopeful. But it doesn’t exclude Facebook from scrutiny right now, right here.

We simply do not want the Skynet experience.

/ HAX

• The Zuckerberg manifesto »
• Ars Technica (Op-ed): Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a political trainwreck »

Trump, CIA, NSA, Palantir, Facebook & the common denominator

In the demo, Palantir engineers showed how their software could be used to identify Wikipedia users who belonged to a fictional radical religious sect and graph their social relationships. In Palantir’s pitch, its approach to the VAST Challenge involved using software to enable “many analysts working together [to] truly leverage their collective mind.” The fake scenario’s target, a cartoonishly sinister religious sect called “the Paraiso Movement,” was suspected of a terrorist bombing, but the unmentioned and obvious subtext of the experiment was the fact that such techniques could be applied to de-anonymize and track members of any political or ideological group.

The Intercept describes the (partly CIA financed) Palantir mass surveillance analysis software.

As if the above is not chilling enough, consider that Palantir owner Peter Thiel has become an advisor to President Trump and is on the board of directors at Facebook.

The Intercept: How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped the NSA spy on the whole world »

/ HAX