Media Echo Chambers: Ana Kasparian

um and one of the issues is that media
06:12
has become like hyper-specialized
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and so with the way algorithms are set
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up on social media
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you’re exposed to a very specific bias
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based on what you’ve read and what
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you’ve been interested in watching
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those algorithms learn your behavior and
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then they just like continue spitting
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out
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like content that reinforces what you
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already believe so your
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your own views never get challenged
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unless you make a
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real effort uh to listen to perspectives
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that differ from your own
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that’s why even now even though it makes
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me sick every time i do this
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i i make an effort to hear what
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conservatives are saying what are their
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arguments
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and it’s good to know what their
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arguments are because very rarely they
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might have a point but that’s rare
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honestly and you should investigate what
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they’re saying because they might have a
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good point
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but more often than not in the process
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of investigating
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what their claims are you became you
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become better prepared
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to uh support and defend where you stand
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on the issues
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but here’s the thing like most americans
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don’t have time for that and and
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there needs to be a real discussion
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about uh media literacy media
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uh consumption i don’t even know how to
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tackle it at this point uh because there
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are moneyed interests that play a huge
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role in how
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social media operates so i think that’s
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a huge problem
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and yeah i think that there’s like this
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culture on the right of
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owning the libs while they’re really
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just owning themselves they’re finding
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themselves in terrible economic crises
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uh you know they’re seeing their own
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family members die from a virus that
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they did not need to die from
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and it’s all because of you know their
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avid support for someone who does not
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care about them never has and never will
07:58
want to win a free electric scooter
07:59
while our partners at aspiration
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and zoom electric are making it possible
08:04
all you have to do is head to tyt.com

Jack Dorsey Has Floated Decentralized Fact-Checking at Twitter. Here’s What That Could Look Like

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, recently re-tweeted a call for fact-checking through open-source tech rather than new intermediaries like Twitter.

Dorsey’s message came at the end of May, after Twitter fact-checked tweets by President Donald Trump about mail-in voting, leading Trump to sign an executive order attacking Section 230 protections. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from civil liability for the content on them and has enabled companies such as Facebook and Twitter to thrive.

A decentralized approach to fact-checking is likely to be popular in the blockchain community, which has long championed ideas like the “verified web.”

“It shouldn’t be tech companies per se getting into fact checking,” Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor, entrepreneur and former CTO of Coinbase,  tweeted. “It should be open source technology. Free, universally available code and data for epistemology. Take a piece of text, parse it, extract assertions, compare to explicitly specified knowledge graphs and oracles.”

“Agree this should be open source and thus verifiable by everyone,” Dorsey replied.

Facts are a flashpoint on the political stage right now, and given Dorsey’s quasi-endorsement of a tech “solutionism” approach to fact-checking, it begs the question: What would such a system look like?

Thousands of people commented on Srinivasan’s and Dorsey’s tweets, referring to projects they thought might serve as future models.

Newsblocks

One project is called Newsblocks, based in Glasgow, Scotland, and was conceived as a way to organize data for Newslines, a sister project. Newslines creates interactive news timelines about any topic. Think of it as a kind of “Wikipedia for news.” 

Here is an example for Conor McGregor, which has almost 2,000 events in it.

Mark Devlin is the CEO of Newsblocks and has been in publishing for years. He founded Metropolis, one of Japan’s top English-language magazines and Japan Today, a popular Japanese news site in English. His claim to fame: He was the first person anywhere to place reader comments directly under news stories.

Devlin realized the news he was collecting was actually data. For example, an article about Yoko Ono holding an art exhibition today will likely mention that she was married to John Lennon, who was murdered in 1980. That’s three pieces of data that can be extracted from the article and then used in different ways.

“Once news is data then the data can be used to make all kinds of new products. You can sort the data to create timelines and newsfeeds,” said Devlin. “You can compare the meta data, like the data’s sources and other factors to enable verification and fake news detection, and you can compare data with other data to do automated fact-checking by comparing pieces of data.”

As an open platform everyone can use the same data, companies can create news verification systems, such as credit agencies for news, and could be used by social media companies, like Twitter.

The idea of news-as-data led Devlin to blockchain technology, which can collect, verify, store, price, and distribute such data, in something like a news data marketplace.

Ideamarket

Ideamarket, a Los Angeles-based startup, aims to provide more objective rankings of information or ideas and move beyond traditional gatekeepers like media companies. It launched its prototype in November of 2019, and is built on Ethereum.

“Idea markets use investment to establish credibility for ideas and narratives without trusting a centralized third party,” said founder Mike Elias in a blog post. “Fundamentally, idea markets use price discovery to advance discovery.”

Ideamarket functions somewhat similarly to Reddit, in which people can upvote various media brands, including independent journalists. But instead of having no cost, upvotes cost money and increase in cost as vote count increases, meaning that people have to put their money where their mouth, or itchy retweeting trigger finger, is.

THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO PAY HEED ARE THOSE WHO ARE OPEN TO QUESTIONING WHAT THEY HEAR

“It makes credibility expensive, said Elias. “For media corporations it makes it equally expensive for everybody in the same way that bitcoin makes money equally as expensive for central banks as it is for you and me. It creates true competition for credibility and incentivizes the public to do due diligence and seek undervalued ideas.”

In addition to investing in and earning interest on the sources they trust, users could also sell the ones they don’t, and earn money off that as well. Elias likened it to a stock market, but for ideas.

Elias’ plan is to launch a browser extension that would include the ranking of the news source next to articles from it on social media. 

So, for example, depending on how the market shakes out, CNN might sit at 10th and Brietbart at 90th. Anyone can see how much trust a publisher has earned. Such a system could rank news sources on a platform like Twitter, without a single company having control over them and having to be the dreaded “arbiter of truth”.

“Rather than say this is true or false, which doesn’t really respect the readers free will and ability to make different judgments, we’re saying the market has put this at this rank,” said Elias. “And you can interpret a low ranking as fake news or an opportunity, because it’s undervalued.”

Any time soon

All of these models are at the early-early stage. Ideamarket is in the middle of raising its first round of angel investment, and Devlin has been unable to find funding for Newsblocks despite seeing significant interest in it, which he finds disheartening.

Another obstacle may also be the frustration of people trying to create platforms for facts in the current political environment. I reached out to Andrew Lippman, associate director of the MIT Media Lab and the senior research scientist on a project called Defacto, for this article. Defacto is a decentralized crowdsourced news verification system.

He said he wished he could help but the dilemma he faces is that Defacto is preaching to the converted. This is not a new problem, said Lippman, but is intensified by the low friction and high speed of current platforms.

“We can develop all the mechanisms in the world to check facts and propagate results, but the only people who pay heed to that are those who are open to questioning what they hear,” said Lippman. “

As Jonathan Swift said 300 years ago, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”

Trump’s Response to Twitter Is Unconstitutional Harassment

His executive order aimed at social media companies should be ignored.

Last week Twitter began for the first time to suggest that some of President Trump’s tweets might lack a factual basis. It did so by attaching warning labels to messages in which Mr. Trump made false claims about mail-in ballots. The labels were not to the president’s liking, so he complained about them, accusing Twitter of “interfering” in the 2020 presidential election and “stifling” free speech.

Mr. Trump is free, under the Constitution, to complain all he likes. But he didn’t stop there. He also issued an executive order, which named Twitter numerous times, meant to potentially expose the company to considerable legal liability by weakening the legislative protections that social media platforms enjoy for user conduct. Before issuing the order, Mr. Trump warned on Twitter that Republicans “will strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down” if they continue to “silence conservatives voices.”

By retaliating against Twitter for what it said in its warning labels, Mr. Trump violated the First Amendment. Official reprisal for protected speech, as the Supreme Court has put it, “offends the Constitution.”

It is crucial to stand up to this kind of bullying. For the sake of what remains of America’s constitutional order, Mr. Trump’s executive order must be regarded by all law-abiding parties as null and void — as “no law at all,” as the legal maxim goes. To act otherwise, to give it one iota of influence, is to grant the president an alarming authority he is not supposed to have: to use the power of the state against speech with which he disagrees.

The two government agencies responsible for carrying out the executive order — the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — should politely ignore it (or in classic Washington style, put the matter under indefinite consideration). By design, neither agency has a legal duty to obey the president. Their chairmen, Joseph Simons of the F.T.C. and Ajit Pai of the F.C.C., cannot be fired for disagreeing with Mr. Trump, and they have a higher duty to uphold the Constitution.

Those targeted by Mr. Trump’s order — Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and any other host of content on the internet — should take this as an opportunity to demonstrate that they cannot be intimidated by groundless threats. Twitter, to its credit, has taken this path, having declined, so far, to budge. Facebook, less honorably, has reacted to the threats by taking great pains to assure the White House that it thinks it wrong to fact-check politicians. That may be the company’s genuine position, but its assertion in the face of threats is cowardly.

It is worth noting that the problem with the executive order goes beyond the issue of retaliation. The order is also what the law calls a “prior restraint” on the speech of other social media companies that might consider adopting policies similar to Twitter’s fact-check labeling. In addition, the order is an effort to rewrite a congressional statute — the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is the source of the liability protections at issue — which is a power the presidency does not have. Finally, the order evokes statutory authority that the Federal Communications Commission lacks and asks the Federal Trade Commission to take actions that are likely to violate the Constitution.

In short, the order is a legal dumpster fire. Any second-year law student could tell you this, and in a more responsible administration, the White House Counsel’s Office would regard it as its duty to prevent such an order from seeing the light of day. But the order was issued, and the danger is that even if and when it fails in court, it may nonetheless have succeeded in its goal of intimidating social media companies into not doing what the First Amendment gives them the right to do.

This is not to say that Twitter’s labeling and fact-checking policies necessarily strike the right balance between censure and tolerance of user conduct. The speech policies of internet platforms have been disputed and discussed at length since the 1990s, and for good reason: Getting content moderation right is not easy. Different platforms approach the problem differently.

But no one who believes in the importance of free speech wants the president, equipped with the censorial power of government, to be able to dictate what speech policy should be followed by social media companies nationwide. Independence in such matters has now become the equivalent of the editorial independence of the press. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook, both now clearly part of the media, need to show that they will not be cowed by illegitimate threats.