- Front-line workers: Whether it’s groups or just regular Facebook content, one of the main weapons the company has against the problem are the thousands of moderators it employs to review flagged content, most of whom work for third-party contractors. In a new book, researcher Sarah Roberts writes about how artificial intelligence is not a solution to the content moderation problem.
- The privacy dilemma: I wrote for CJR’s print edition about the challenges that Facebook faces as it tries to come up with a process for deciding what kinds of content it should host and what is unacceptable. Misinformation researcher Renee DiResta told me that hoaxes, hate speech and propaganda could be even more difficult to track and remove as more discussion moves into private groups.
- Crackdown backfiring: Facebook has been trying to take action against groups that contain problematic content by removing and even banning them, but some of those efforts are backfiring as trolls figure out how to game the process. Some groups have been forced to go private after malicious actors posted hate speech or offensive content and then reported the groups to Facebook moderators in an attempt to get them removed for misconduct.
- A fine for failure: Germany’s federal Office of Justice has handed down a fine of $2.3 million against Facebook for not acting quickly enough to remove hateful and illegal content. Under the country’s internet transparency law (known as NetzDG), companies like Facebook have to remove posts that contain hate speech or incite violence within 24 hours or face fines of as much as $35 million. They are also required to file reports on their progress every six months.
- A report from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab says that some of the accounts and pages that were recently removed from Facebook for what the social network calls “inauthentic behavior” were operated on behalf of a private Israeli public-relations firm called The Archimedes Group, and appeared to be trying to stir up dissent in Honduras, as well as Panama and Mexico.
- Soraya Roberts, a culture columnist with Longreads, writes about the controversy that was sparked on media Twitter when New York Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner confessed in an interview that she made $4 a word for her celebrity profiles. Roberts says the point of the uproar was that one journalist makes several times what the majority do, despite the industry complaining that it “has nothing left to give.”
- CJR is publishing articles from the latest print version of the magazine on our website this week, including a piece on what remains of the free press in Turkey, a special report on Benjamin Netanyahu’s relationship with the media in Israel, and a note from CJR’s editor Kyle Pope about how in the current environment, all news is global.
- A report from a group of newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times report says that China’s border authorities routinely install an app on smartphones belonging to travelers who enter the Xinjiang region, including journalists. The app gathers personal data from phones, including text messages and contacts, and checks whether devices contain pictures, videos, documents, and audio files that match a list of more than 73,000 items stored within the app, including any mention of the Dalai Lama.
- Vice News says that Google’s Jigsaw unit (formerly known as Google Ideas), which was originally designed to help promote a free and independent internet, has turned into a “toxic mess.” Among other things, anonymous sources who spoke with Vice said that founder Jared Cohen “has a white savior complex,” and that the mission of the Google unit is “to save the day for the poor brown people.”
- In a recent interview, British politician Boris Johnson, a leading candidate to take over for Prime Minister Theresa May, asked what he does to relax, said he manufactured model buses out of old wine crates, a comment many observers found a bit bizarre. Glyn Moody of Techdirt thinks part of the reason Johnson confessed to such a strange pursuit was that it was a way of tricking the Google search algorithm into smothering other unflattering news items from Johnson’s past.
- Virginia has become one of the first states to impose criminal penalties on the distribution of non-consensual “deepfake” images and video. The new law amends an existing law that defines the distribution of nudes or sexual imagery without the subject’s consent (sometimes called revenge porn) as a Class One misdemeanor. The new bill updates the existing law by adding the category of “falsely created videographic or still image” to the text.
- Media Matters writes about how a rumor spread during recent protests in Portland, Oregon that anti-fascist demonstrators were throwing milkshakes made of quick-drying cement at right-wing groups. The rumor was picked up by alt-right commentators including Jack Posobiec, the site says, and eventually was cited in headlines by a number of news outlets, including Fox News, despite the fact that there was no evidence that it was true.
- A programming note from CJR: The daily newsletter will be taking a hiatus for the July 4th holiday, but will return next week.
Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.