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    [post_content] => Frances Haugen's policy proposals are modest at best, amounting to little more than what Facebook has already proposed or supported. 

In the summer of 2014, the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-afilliated Palestinians sparked a seven-week sustained Israeli military assault on Gaza, with the military wing of the Islamist organization simultaneously launching rockets into Israel. By the time a ceasefire was implemented, around 2,200 Palestinians were dead and more than 10,000 wounded, the vast majority of them civilians. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and six civilians were killed. The physical destruction in Gaza was immense, with entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. It was one of the deadliest conflicts in the region’s history.

Social media—which was by then a popular tool for activism used by both Palestinians and Israelis (as well as the Israeli state)—played a significant role in the conflict. Israelis used social media to draw attention to the kidnapping and murder of the three boys and to the fear wrought by Hamas’s rockets, while Palestinians sought to draw the world’s attention to the Israeli military’s use of immense force against civilians. Everyone used memes, hashtags, and videos to amplify their messaging.

Facebook, which was a key tool for the activists who organized the uprisings that rocked Tunisia and Egypt in 2010-12, was still a young platform. It had instituted its first community standards only three years prior. Now it was a key site for online conflict.

That summer, concerned Palestinian activists brought a Facebook page to my attention. It featured a sniper’s target, with the title, in Hebrew:  “Kidnapped: Until the boys come back, we shoot a terrorist every hour.” The page had been created by Israelis who advocated vigilante justice; they posted the photographs and names of various Palestinian political prisoners, calling for them to be shot in retribution for the killing of the three Israeli boys who had been abducted.  

There is no question that page was inciting for retributive violence; language in the ‘about’ section read: “We must use a strong hand to fight violent and life-threatening terror. The weakness shown by the Israeli Government, which released thousands of murderers has only increased their drive and led to the kidnapping of the teens. The only way to bring the teens back is to instill fear in our enemies and make them understand that they will suffer. We support executing a terrorist every hour until the teens are released.”

In Israel, killing Palestinians as revenge for an unconnected incident is known colloquially as a “price tag” killing; the US State Department has condemned the act as terrorism. The Facebook page objectively called for murder, which violated one of the precepts of the platform’s community standards: “Safety is Facebook's top priority. We remove content and may escalate to law enforcement when we perceive a genuine risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety. You may not credibly threaten others, or organize acts of real-world violence.”

But the company refused to delete the page, overriding multiple reports from users. One Facebook policy staffer defended the decision by saying that the page administrators were calling for violence against terrorists, as though branding a person a terrorist justified advocating their extra-judicial murder. The page objectively violated Facebook’s own policy, but the company refused to admit it. Monika Bickert, who was then Facebook’s head of Global Policy Management, asserted in an interview that the page did not violate the company’s policy against hate speech.

This incident encapsulates Facebook’s policies in dealing with content across the Middle East and North Africa, for nearly a decade. In my book, Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism, I describe several occasions on which Facebook either failed to act against threats, or acted in bad faith—disappearing valuable content that served as documentation of history.

In another egregious example of acting in bad faith, Facebook removed Egypt’s leading dissident page just a few months before the 2011 revolution. “We Are All Khaled Said,” named for a young man beaten to death by Alexandria police in 2010, had hundreds of thousands of followers. Ultimately, the organizers of the page put out a call for mass protests on January 25, 2011. The Tahrir Uprising, named for Cairo’s central square, lasted 18 days; it ended with the fall of the Mubarak regime. 

This is why global civil society activists were unsurprised at the revelations in the internal documents that Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released, particularly those that detailed the company’s abject failures in moderating content in the region. While American news outlets expressed shock at these stories, civil society organizations like 7amleh, the Palestinian civil society NGO that focuses on human rights in digital spaces, saw confirmation of what they had been reporting for years

Frances Haugen took a risk in releasing the documents, which provided important receipts for more than a decade of accusations against Facebook. But her policy proposals are modest at best, amounting to little more than what Facebook has already proposed or supported: She advocates the important intermediary liability proposals contained within Section 230, the law often dubbed “the most important law for online speech,” which protects companies from liability for what they choose to host (or remove). She has also spoken out against breaking up the increasingly monopolistic company, and told the French National Assembly that interoperability—allowing new services to “plug in” to existing, dominant ones, which is a core tenet of civil society proposals—won’t make a difference toward fixing our current conditions.  

In fact, all of these things—intermediary liability protections, competition, interoperability, as well as other fundamental concepts like transparency and accountability—are vital to a free and open internet. While companies can and should moderate content, proposals to reform Section 230 are not only likely to be unconstitutional; they also open up space for frivolous lawsuits against US companies, which are protected by the First Amendment for what content they choose to host (or not host). Interoperability would give users far more choice over how and what platforms they use, by enabling them not only to modify the services they use and communicate across services more easily, but also potentially enabling different models for content moderation. And if we want a landscape where people have more choice over where they interact, access information, and express themselves, competition is a key component of any reform. These solutions are not a panacea, nor a substitute for more holistic societal fixes, but they’re important pieces of the puzzle.

Meanwhile, media outlets outside the US and Europe are still struggling to obtain access to the Facebook company documents that Haugen leaked, so that they can report, with cultural competence and local knowledge, on the company’s shortcomings in a number of regions. In addition, Haugen’s publicity tour in the United States and Europe has prioritized talking to lawmakers rather than listening to potential allies. Many of those lawmakers ignored the demands of civil society experts, a notable number of whom are women of color; but they are willing to give their full attention to a former Facebook employee who is white and has a Harvard MBA.

Haugen isn’t entirely wrong: She understands that platforms need to be more transparent about how they create their policies and moderate content, as well as who is doing that moderation, and what sort of cultural and linguistic competencies those individuals have. Civil society actors, particularly those from the global south, have repeatedly emphasized the need for local expertise in content moderation—that is, the hiring of moderators with linguistic and cultural knowledge to tackle difficult speech issues and ensure that truly harmful content, such as incitement, doesn’t flourish while also making sure that content isn’t wrongfully removed. Here, her suggestions echo those of global civil society, although she has not given credit or consulted with those who have been making the same proposals for many years.

What Frances Haugen should have done—and still could do—is consult with the civil society experts, the activists and academics who have spent years studying and critiquing her former employer from the outside, painstakingly documenting its faults, and agitating for change. She needs to refocus her priorities to ensure that documents are made accessible to journalists around the world who have the lived experience and deep expertise to analyze them properly. Instead of assuming she has all the answers, she should be using her significant power to call for Facebook—and lawmakers—to bring them to the table. 
    [post_title] => The world's most famous Facebook whistleblower should amplify those who came before her
    [post_excerpt] => The internal documents Haugen leaked only confirmed what civil society activists and researchers have been saying for years. 
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The world’s most famous Facebook whistleblower should amplify those who came before her

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    [post_content] => Why white, cis feminists must not be the ‘default’ version of tech critique, or anything else.

In 2021 two former Facebook employees stepped forward as whistleblowers. One became an international media star, while the other is virtually unknown. Frances Haugen garnered global headlines after her 60 Minutes interview on October 3, during which she revealed that she was the anonymous whistleblower who supplied the internal documents for the Wall Street Journal’s investigative series, which showed that Facebook knew Instagram harms many teenage girls and that it was fully aware of the damage caused by its for-profit disinformation. Two days later, she testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing that was watched around the world.

In September 2020 Sophie Zhang blew the whistle on Facebook’s refusal to act against dictators who were creating fake accounts on a vast scale to manipulate their own citizens and steal elections. Facebook’s response was to fire her. Zhang promptly published a nearly 8,000-word memo detailing her concerns on her personal website, parts of which Buzzfeed excerpted —before Facebook pressured the company that hosted her website to delete both the site and her domain name.

When Zhang went public with her identity in mid-2021, journalist Julie Carrie Wong wrote a long feature report about her for The Guardian, while Karen Hao’s deep dive interview with the whistleblower was published by MIT Tech Review . But the Senate did not invite Zhang to a special Senate hearing; nor, until a recent outcry over the disparate treatment, did any high- profile television news shows ask to interview her. As Wong tweeted on October 12, “I’m glad people are paying attention to her now but it’s weird to retcon her into a secondary player in Haugen’s narrative.”

Why is Frances Haugen the default whistleblower to whom all others are compared—even those that came before her?

Zhang might have been shunted into a secondary role partly because she is “not charismatic”  and “not good at attracting or receiving attention,” as she told CNN reporter Donnie O’Sullivan in an interview broadcast on October 12.  “I am an introvert who wants to stay home and pet my cats,” Zhang said. Another factor that might be partly responsible for Zhang’s relative anonymity: Americans who work for the Wall Street Journal and convene Senate sub-committee hearings care more about Instagram’s possible effects on their adolescent daughters’ self-image than about stolen elections and human rights abuses in Honduras and Azerbaijan.

A year after Zhang published her memo, the claims and documentation that both she and Haugen provided are now central to a new push in the US to regulate Facebook. And yet Haugen is “the Facebook whistleblower” while, to some, Zhang is just “an ex-employee.” (The unspoken “disgruntled” in that last sentence is silent, but powerful.)

In this tale of two American whistleblowers, one was given the role of the princess, commanding attention and praise, inspiring king-makers in Washington D.C. to insist the time has finally come for regulation. And the other? I’m not going to say she played the step-sister, because I hope we’ve all come a long way from denigrating blended families, but Zhang’s reception made it clear she’s expected to be part of a different and much smaller story. If it were a house-party, she’d be the help, not the host. Meanwhile, the significant ongoing work to document, explain, and stop the systematic harms of tech companies has been carried out by women of color; and they have gone almost completely unnoticed.

The Facebook fiasco inadvertently shines a light on different strains of feminism, and the wildly disparate varieties of attention and support they receive both from the media and from policymakers.

At the top of the status game sits Sheryl Sandberg, a key inspiration for girlboss feminists, for whom victory simply means winning power, not challenging it. Corporate feminism, often the reserve of privileged white women, celebrates women who “lean in” to a man’s world, not those who insist it needs to change so that everyone has a fair chance. It’s about “diversity and inclusion”— i.e., same values, different faces. It’s about having a nanny taking care of your children in a private, dedicated playroom next to your C-suite office, rather than building an on-site daycare center for all the employees’ children—let alone mandating parental leave and ending discrimination against parents and caregivers at every socioeconomic level. It’s about the magazines covers, nonfiction bestseller lists, and keynote slots at conferences. It is about the stranglehold of soft-spoken, acceptable female power, everywhere.

When it comes to criticism of big tech, corporate feminists are OK with data-extraction and surveillance, so long as the women doing it earn almost as much as the men. Those with misgivings tend to be “reformist” critics who lament what they see as unintended consequences of the business model; and they suggest only the gentlest of nudges. As Meredith Whittaker, Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute at NYU, puts it, " ‘nuance’ is also a term heard increasingly from tech reformists, in reference to their prescriptions— usually adding oversight, transparency, accountability to the status quo. …more structural approaches like bans, breakups, redistribution, they imply, lack nuance.” In theory, not all corporate feminists are also tech apologists or, at best, reformists, but they all share a basic political stance that things are mostly OK, and just need a little tweaking at the edges. Call it “nudge criticism”; executives are just good people doing their best, and we just need a few rules changes to optimize the incentives of corporations. Nudge criticism gives establishment journalists and policymakers material for articles and legislative bills, but doesn’t change anything fundamental.

When Frances Haugen came forward as a whistleblower, she slipped smoothly into the role of the acceptable girlboss face of reformist tech criticism. This is not a criticism of Haugen, or her considerable PR resources, but of how media, policymakers and so many of us respond to her. Haugen is doing everything she can, and with all she’s got, but she’s never going to suggest lawmakers change the real rules of the game. And that, more than anything, is why she is center stage.

Sophie Zhang is a trans woman, and, echoing how trans feminists are forced to fight simply for their right to exist, she has sacrificed her physical and mental health, her relationships, her livelihood, status and peace of mind—just to be heard. None of this came easily to her, yet she has persisted far more than what is rational or reasonable, simply because she felt she must. Karen Hao’s painstakingly researched profile documents the physical and emotional abuse Zhang suffered as a teenager when she came out, and contains the quietly devastating reason why Zhang first tried so hard to change Facebook from within: “Ultimately, I decided that I was the person who stayed in imperfect situations to try and fix them.” Facebook fired Zhang for under-performance because, despite the company’s refusal to act against dictators who used the platform for political and electoral fraud, she kept on trying to fix it, in addition to doing the job she was officially paid to do, as a data scientist. Zhang knew from a previous experience of sexual harassment that she would be downplayed, discredited and disbelieved, so she documented every single claim she made.

It still wasn’t enough.

In July 2021, after almost a year doing everything she could think of to keep blowing the whistle, Zhang was disappointed by the lack of public and political response. Yet she couldn’t regret what she had done. It simply wasn’t in her character to do otherwise.

Zhang’s drive to broadcast the truth and protect people she’ll never meet, despite the high price she knew she would pay, is powerfully reminiscent of Chelsea Manning, who blew the whistle on the US military. Manning leaked videos and documentation of US abuse of detainees in Guantanamo and killing of civilians in Iraq to Wikileaks, amongst other materials, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. (President Obama, icon of gradualists and nuance-lovers everywhere, locked up more whistleblowers in eight years than all the presidents, cumulatively, before him. He commuted Manning’s sentence just before he left office, and she was finally able to transition.)

It cannot be a coincidence that two American trans women have been at the forefront of speaking truth to intensely coercive power. Holding fast to the truth despite the gaslighting denials of those who wield authority over them is integral to who they are. And knowing the truth was insufficient, they were compelled to act on it. Not all trans women are heroic truth-tellers, sure, but a surprising number of trans women I have known in public and private life are more courageous than anyone should need to be. I don’t know why trans sisters have been moved to risk and sacrifice so much, in different fields. I do know that the changes their revelations demand are not milquetoast solutions like “better oversight” or “more transparency.” The barriers and costs to these whistleblowers of speaking out are so much greater, and their critiques are indifferent to whether you like them or not.  These sisters know what power truly looks like before it dons a pantsuit, pussy-hat, and professional smile.

Zhang’s criticisms of Facebook stick to her area of specialist knowledge, cutting narrow but deep. Unlike Haugen, she doesn’t claim “Mark” (Zuckerberg) is doing his best but is in over his head. Zhang says that Facebook systematically downgrades the priority of poorer, less prominent countries, refusing to spend the resources necessary to stop dictators from exploiting the platform’s baked-in elements to manipulate their own citizens. This is a far more devastating criticism, affecting many millions of people around the world. It goes to the heart of the business model; if Facebook can afford to be present globally, it can afford to invest in protecting the world’s most fragile democracies.

People are finally catching on. A UK parliamentary committee just invited Zhang to give evidence. I hope they look further than the incremental solutions so beloved of the management class, and instead open their minds to the possibilities that appear when you understand that progress will only happen when you tear down its quiet coercion and unequal distribution, instead of merely changing its face. To truly understand the vindictive, velvet-gloved power wielded by Facebook, we all need to understand that the harms women like Zhang and Haugen have exposed as whistleblowers are not exceptional. They’re not “abuses” of the platform, but simply what happens when third parties use it as it was designed to be used. And it won’t be fixed by asking nicely, because asking nicely never brought down a rotten system.

If we roll with the obvious narrative, that acceptable tech critique is defined around a “default whistleblower”—a white, cis, middle management American woman who was fine with it all until one day she wasn’t— we choose to avert our eyes from the worst, most systemic harms. We choose to pretend that it’s just “too hard” to find structural solutions that would stop the slow violence of for-profit hate, which is precisely Facebook’s business model. By centering white, corporate feminism in all questions that affect all kinds of women and girls, we’ll make exactly the same, systemic error Facebook does: prioritize fixing more prominent but much less serious harms.

Zhang did what she had to do because she knew that power lies. Power lies, above all, to and through those who covet it the most. To honor Zhang’s courage, we should do as she has done: see things exactly as they are, and do what truth demands.
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Two Facebook whistleblowers leaned in, but only one became a media star

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    [post_content] => We know Facebook is hurting individuals and whole societies; but now we know that Facebook knows it, too.  

On Sunday, October 3, the Facebook whistle-blower, whose trove of internal research documents has made global headlines for weeks, revealed her identity on 60 Minutes, the prestigious American television news show. Frances Haugen, who quit her job at Facebook in May 2021, said “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart,” and that Facebook’s senior executives know this but refused to act. Haugen said she took a trove of internal documents to prove beyond doubt that Facebook’s research team and senior executives know exactly the damage the company inflicts but choose to prioritize advertising revenue. She said; “Facebook has realised if they make it safer, people spend less time on the site, click on less ads, they make less money.” She brought proof of what many outsiders have said for years: Facebook prioritizes revenue over public safety, and Instagram makes children—especially teenage girls - mentally ill.

Who is Frances Haugen? She is a 37 year-old American data scientist, a Harvard Business School graduate, who has worked for Big Tech for 15 years, including for Google, Yelp, and Pinterest. At Facebook, where she had worked for two years, Haugen led a small team working on counterespionage for civilians targeted by hostile states—for example, Taiwanese or Uyghur people being spied on by the Chinese government. Her team of just seven people was expected to provide enough protection for people around the world, and requests for more resources were refused. But Haugen says her personal trigger to blow the whistle was when she lost a friend radicalized by social media into far-right racism.

From early 2021, Haugen assiduously copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook’s own research about the harms it creates. She has worked with the Wall Street Journal — who reported on Instagram’s harms to teenage girls in September —and will testify to the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee later this week. Just as importantly, Haugen has filed several complaints with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator for companies. She alleges that Facebook is lying to the public and to shareholders when it says it’s making progress on how it deals with disinformation and hate. One internal Facebook study said “we estimate that we may action as little as three-to- five percent of hate… and 0.6 percent of violence and incitement on Facebook.” Facebook replied a full two weeks after Wall Street Journal reports based on Haugen’s leaked documents, to claim its own research was unreliable. (To be fair, one of the Instagram studies had a tiny sample size of just 40 teenagers.) But it did not address many of the factual claims made about the real, ongoing and fully known harms Facebook is perpetrating against children—and against democracy itself.

Of course, none of the claims made by Haugen’s leaks are new. Independent researchers have pointed out for years that Facebook profits from extremism and hate. Facebook’s 2018 change to the algorithm that decides which content users see was designed to aggressively monetize even more the fact that anger drives clicks. Another whistle-blower, Sophie Zhang, said in April 2021 that Facebook systematically under-resources the teams working to counter state manipulation of the platform by autocrats around the world. If it’s the US presidential election, election integrity is a priority and, as Haugen says, rules and system changes were introduced and heavily resourced, at least temporarily. But for countries like Honduras, Albania and Azerbajan? According to Zhang, not so much. Protecting election integrity from disinformation and organized hate in lower priority countries “felt like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper.” And academic researchers have for years provided evidence that Instagram drives eating disorders, suicidal ideation and self-harm. We know Facebook is hurting individuals and whole societies; but now we know that Facebook knows it, too.

Whistle-blowing is vital because it provides documentary evidence not just of harms, but of the culpability of those doing the harm. That’s why Haugen’s tens of thousands of pages are important. No doubt, Senators’ research staff and SEC investigators will be pouring over them, searching for the smoking gun, for whose finger was on the trigger and when. But it is vital that, despite the attraction of focusing on the whistle-blower themselves, we concentrate on what the documents say, and about whom. Attention must go to the independent researchers who have, all along, generated credible evidence of Facebook’s harms. That includes people who have had their access revoked to data Facebook had promised to share, including researchers at NYU just weeks ago, and social scientists around the world whose access to data via APIs was blocked in 2018. Focusing attention on independent researchers is crucial, as they provide context and depth for the claims of harm. Also, every time Facebook has a scandal, it promises to "do better" and be more transparent, but once the media attention relents, it pulls the plug.

Haugen has taken a great risk with her future career, and has provided the documentation that regulators and policymakers need. For this we should be grateful. But she is not the arbiter of what should be done. So far, when asked about solutions, she’s made vague gestures toward “regulation,” but in the context of her belief that “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart.” To this way of thinking, there is a reachable version of Facebook that would do less harm and be OK. This incremental approach is no surprise. Haugen has already worked for 15 years for companies with names that are synonymous with surveillance capitalism. She doesn’t have a problem with the basic business model of extracting people’s data to sell ads. She just has a problem with Facebook being the most egregious of a very bad bunch.

I’ve written before about the Prodigal Tech Bro, the generic guy who got rich working for Big Tech, but then saw the light and left, to decry its failings. The Prodigal Tech Bro converts his social and actual capital into big platforms to question how technology is used. It’s not just galling; it’s dangerous. Centring people who made the problems pushes aside the people— so often women of colour— who’ve been making independent, good faith critiques for years, with little status or money. And it spotlights incremental, milquetoast “solutions” that don’t fundamentally alter the structures and incentives of Big Tech; “The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent.” Haugen is far, far more courageous than the prodigal tech bro. For choosing to be a whistle-blower she will lose the rest of the career she prepared for and must have planned. She has literally put her money where her mouth is, and I applaud her. But what we need from her now is context, insider knowledge, facts and examples of how Facebook does what it does. We don’t need her to set the frame for what the solutions should be.

I have a lot of empathy for Mark, and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach. --Frances Haugen

Insider critiques are uniformly based on the feeling that “Mark” or “Sheryl” either don’t really understand the harms they do, aren’t sufficiently informed about them, or just want to do the right thing but are trapped in a system of wrong incentives. “It’s one of these unfortunate consequences,” Haugen says, “No one at Facebook is malevolent, right? But the incentives are misaligned.” But Facebook created its own incentives from nothing, hiring Sheryl Sandberg to build its data-extractive, advertising-based business model. Its focus on growth above all else is what made its platform an extreme amplifier of disinformation and hate, simply because that’s what drives clicks. And the amount of money the trillion dollar company spends on moderating content and following up on the direct incitements to violence it generates is miniscule. Facebook does what it does because that is who it is. It doesn’t change because, as Haugen encapsulates; “Facebook has realized if they make it safer, people spend less time on the site, click on less ads, they make less money.” Haugen’s simple, pithy summary of why we are where we are is the starting point for real change. The documents she has leaked and her upcoming Senate testimony will focus attention on the fundamental problems the company created. Now we need to listen to a wide range of people and gird ourselves for a course of radical, outsider-driven change. [post_title] => Blowing the whistle on Facebook is just the first step [post_excerpt] => Whistle-blowing is vital because it provides documentary evidence not just of harms, but of the culpability of those doing the harm. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => blowing-the-whistle-on-facebook-is-just-the-first-step [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-11-03 14:47:56 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-11-03 14:47:56 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3234 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Blowing the whistle on Facebook is just the first step

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    [post_content] => The crux of the problem with deplatforming: when it’s good, it’s excellent; and when it’s bad, it’s dangerous.

“Deplatforming works” has, in recent months, become a popular slogan on social media. When a widely reviled public figure is booted from a social media platform or a television channel, Twitter users repeat the phrase as a truism. And, indeed, there is evidence to support the claim that taking away someone’s digital megaphone can effectively silence them, or significantly reduce their influence.

After Twitter and Facebook permanently banned Donald Trump in January, for example, there was a noticeable and quantifiable drop in online disinformation. In 2016 Twitter took the then-unprecedented step of banning Milo Yiannopoulos, a notorious provocateur and grifter who disseminated hate speech and disinformation. Yiannopoulos tried vainly to mount a comeback, but never recovered from the loss of his bully pulpit. It appears his 15 minutes of fame are well over.

Alex Jones, the prominent conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder, was booted from multiple platforms in 2018 for violating rules against hate speech, among other things. Jones disseminated disgusting conspiracy theories like the claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax perpetrated to curtail gun rights, thus re-victimizing the parents of children who had been shot and killed at the Connecticut elementary school. His rants spawned fresh conspiracies about other mass shootings, like the one at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, which he said was staged by “crisis actors.” Jones boasted that banning him from mainstream platforms would only make him stronger. “The more I’m persecuted, the stronger I get,” he said. But three years later, his name has almost disappeared from the news cycle.

Experts on online hate speech, misinformation, and extremism agree that kicking extremist haters off platforms like Facebook and YouTube significantly limits their reach.

According to one recent study, “far right content creators” who were kicked off YouTube found they were unable to maintain their large audience on BitChute, an alternative video platform that caters to extremists. Another study found that a far-right user who is deplatformed simultaneously by several mainstream social media platforms rapidly loses followers and influence. In other words, toxic influencers who are forced off mainstream social media do have the option of migrating to secret platforms that specialize in hosting extremists, but if they are not on YouTube they will be starved of new targets to radicalize and recruit.

The removal of a Yiannopoulos or a Jones from the quasi-public sphere  can be a huge relief to the people they target. However, I am not convinced that censorship is an effective tactic for social change. Nor do I believe that it is in our best interests to entrust social media corporations with the power to moderate our discourse.

The negative effects of deplatforming have not been studied as thoroughly as the positive effects—which is not surprising, given that the phenomenon is only a few years old. But there are a few clear possibilities, like the creation of cult-like followings driven by a sense of persecution, information vacuums, and the proliferation of “underground” organizing—such as the organized harassment campaigns that are organized by “incel” (involuntarily celibate) communities on sites like 4Chan and then taken to more central platforms like Twitter.

Substack, the subscription newsletter platform, now hosts several “deplatformed” people who are thriving, like “gender critical” activist and TV writer Glen Linehan (who was kicked off Twitter for harassing transgender people), or Bari Weiss, the self-proclaimed “silenced” journalist who claimed in her public resignation letter from The New York Times that her colleagues had created a work environment that was hostile to her. Substack allows the author to set the terms for their newsletter by deciding on the subscription price, and whether they’d like the company to assign them an editor. The company has also been clear about its views on content moderation, with which I largely agree: free speech is encouraged, with minimal content moderation. My concern is that newsletters facilitate the creation of a cult following, while giving writers with a persecution complex a place to join forces in a self-congratulatory, circular way.

Of course, even Substack has its limits: I doubt that the platform would be happy to host Alex Jones or Donald Trump.

Deplatforming can also have a damaging impact on fragile democracies.

In early June Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari issued a threat, via his Twitter account, that he would punish secessionists in the Biafra region. Twitter decided the threat violated its policies and removed the tweet. In response, the Nigerian government blocked access to the social media company indefinitely and said those who circumvented the ban would be subject to prosecution—a situation that is, as of this writing, ongoing—although the government says it will restore access “in a few days.” Nigerian businesses are suffering from the ban, while those who do find a way to tweet risk arrest. This is a salutary example that illustrates how a social media company’s ostensibly righteous decision to censor world leaders can backfire.

The first time I heard the term “deplatforming,” it was used to describe student-led boycotts of guest speakers invited to campus. The mediator in these situations is the university administration, which responds to the demands of enrolled, tuition-paying students—who should have the ultimate say in who comes to speak at their university. But social media platforms are large multinational corporations. As I argue in my recent book, making corporations the gatekeepers for acceptable expression is deeply problematic.

In cases when the social media platform acts as an intermediary between external forces and an individual, the resulting scenario can resemble mob rule.

Chris Boutté, who runs a YouTube channel about mental health issues called “The Rewired Soul,” experienced the mob rule scenario firsthand. Boutté references pop culture in his videos about mental health and addiction, in which he talks about his own experience, often using illustrative examples from the world of YouTube influencers. He attracted angry detractors who believed he was causing harm by speculating about the mental health of popular YouTube stars. In an effort to silence Boutté, his critics attacked him in their own videos, which ultimately resulted in his receiving death threats.

“Everything I did was from a good place,” he told me during a recent conversation. “In their mind, I was so dangerous that I should not be able to speak. So that’s where my concerns with deplatforming come in, when you get a mob mentality [combined with] misinformation.” He added: “I’m not a big fan of the court of public opinion.” Boutté says that his angry critics’ efforts to get him deplatformed included “dislike bomb” campaigns, whereby users mass-dislike videos in an effort to trick the YouTube algorithm. According to Boutté, the tactic worked: His channel is no longer financially viable.

Mobs who take matters into their own hands, manipulating recommendation algorithms to get someone removed from a platform, have been around for a long time. In recent years, however, they have become more sophisticated; meanwhile, the public’s understanding of how platforms work has increased.

According to one recent Vice report there is a cottage industry of professional scammers who exploit Instagram’s policies to get individuals banned by making fraudulent claims against them. Want to get someone kicked off Instagram? Pay a professional to report them (falsely) for using a fake identity on their profile. Anyone can be targeted by these tactics. Repressive governments, for example, target the Facebook accounts of journalists, democracy activists and marginalized communities worldwide.

So here is the crux of the problem with deplatforming: when it’s good, it’s excellent; and when it’s bad, it’s dangerous. Deftly removing noxious propagandists is good.  Empowering ordinary people to silence a common “enemy” by manipulating an algorithm is not good. Silencing marginalized activists fighting repressive governments is very, very bad.

Finally: Is censorship really a meaningful strategy for social change? Surely the most effective means of routing hate speech is to tackle its root causes rather than hacking at its symptoms. The study of online misinformation and extremism are currently hot topics, the darlings of funders in the digital space, with millions of dollars doled out to academic institutions. Certainly, online hate speech is an important area of study, but the intense focus on this one issue can come at the expense of other urgent social issues—like online privacy, the declining right to free expression worldwide, and the ongoing struggles against repressive governments.

I suggest that deplatforming should be viewed and wielded with extreme caution, rather than presented as a means of fixing the internet—or, more importantly, our societies.
    [post_title] => The delights and the dangers of deplatforming extremists
    [post_excerpt] => The negative effects of deplatforming have not been studied as thoroughly as the positive effects—which is not surprising, given that the phenomenon is only a few years old. But there are several case studies that illustrate the risks of kicking extremists off mainstream platforms.
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The delights and the dangers of deplatforming extremists

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    [post_content] => Some assert that the now-disgraced Silicon Valley wunderkind has been singled out for prosecution because she's a woman.

All eyes were on Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the once high-flying Silicon Valley startup Theranos, when her much-anticipated criminal trial kicked off on September 8 in San Jose—the same day, coincidentally, that Fashion Week began in New York. Maybe that’s why it felt like the scene outside the California courthouse was itself a runway, as a throng of paparazzi cameras snapped the slim, tall, blonde Holmes arriving to face a dozen counts of fraud and conspiracy charges. 

Watching the choreographed spectacle of Holmes’s grand entrance, it occurred to me that she might as well have danced her way into the proceedings to the beat of M.C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This.” That’s exactly what she did at a 2015 company party, memorable footage of which wound up in HBO’s Holmes documentary, “The Inventor.” Grooving to the music with a distinct white woman’s overbite, Holmes was brazen and undaunted, celebrating an infinitesimally minor victory—the FDA’s approval of a rarely used herpes test—right as the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou published the first of a two-year investigative series that ultimately brought down the company. But there was Holmes, shimmying across the stage to shift the narrative, which is exactly what she is doing now. 

Gone are the black Issey Miyake turtlenecks and the low, messy bun of Holmes’s Theranos days. Bizarrely, the only people who look like the former version of Elizabeth Holmes are the fangirls called  “Holmies,” who wear her signature all-black outfits and distressed blonde buns; one reporter spotted a gaggle of them who had queued up at 6 a.m. to snag a spot in the courtroom. Gone are the bodyguards who lent the onetime youngest self-made female billionaire on earth her wunderkind mystique. Now Holmes, 37, is an American everywoman, favoring sheath dresses, sensible pumps, smart suits and a loose hairstyle, with blonde waves framing her face in a style reminiscent of a Midwestern bank VP. Once she had intimidating security guards who carried her bags for her; now she holds a $175 leather diaper bag that is described as “the perfect mama-cessory” on the website of its label, Freshly Picked. 

Holmes hasn’t testified yet, though she’s widely expected to take the stand later in the trial. But her new look speaks volumes about her team’s defense strategy: she will be channeling a new identity, Working Mom, after choosing to have a baby weeks before she was to go on trial on charges that could result in a 20 year prison sentence. 

Holmes has always been an optimist: “I’m too pretty to go to jail,” she once told a Theranos employee, according to ABC’s The Dropout podcast. In many respects, “Can’t Touch This” has been the motto of her life. And, really, why wouldn’t Holmes believe herself to be untouchable? Historically, she’s only ascended higher and higher on the power of her own unblinking self-confidence. 

Even in Silicon Valley, Holmes’s story is legendary: She dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Theranos with the support of one of her professors, Channing Robertson, the dean of the School of Engineering. Her vision, inspired by a lifelong fear of needles, was to build a machine that could conduct hundreds of diagnostic tests on a drop of blood taken from a finger. The problem, as Stanford medical school professor Dr. Phyllis Gardner told her: this was scientifically impossible. Marker molecules are often present in far lower concentrations in our blood, requiring more than a single drop to get an accurate reading. 

One need not hold a PhD in microbiology to understand this scientific concept, but that didn’t stop Holmes from convincing pinwheel-eyed investors that she’d somehow make it work—and they handed her $700 million to do it. The powerful men—all of them men—who took seats on Theranos’s board included two former secretaries of state, two former secretaries of defense and two former senators. By 2014, Theranos had attained a valuation of $9 billion and the turtlenecked Holmes was being heralded as the second coming of Steve Jobs. 

Besides Holmes, the only board member who worked at Theranos—the only non-white person on the board—was Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, a former software executive who made millions before the first dot-com bubble burst. Holmes and Balwani met on a Stanford-sponsored trip to China when she was 18 and he was 37. Several years later, Balwani invested $13 million of his own money in Theranos, and in 2009 he became the company’s president and COO. What board members, investors and employees didn’t know was that he and Holmes were involved in a romantic relationship that they kept secret from everyone. 

The romance fell apart in 2016, as the company began unraveling; now Balwani is playing a new role in Holmes’s life: fall guy. The two were originally to be tried together, but Holmes’s lawyers successfully argued to separate their cases, stating that she “cannot be near him without suffering physical distress.” So, in addition to presenting Holmes as a sympathetic new mother, her defense team is planning to cast Balwani as an abuser, claiming that he psychologically manipulated their client to the extent that she didn’t have any agency.  

For his part, Balwani has vehemently denied all allegations of abuse. Like his ex-girlfriend, however, he is not exactly a reliable narrator. The real question for the jury is whether partner abuse could reasonably cause someone to lie to investors, retailers and the press about the efficacy of blood-testing technology. To me, it’s a bridge too far, although Holmes has certainly sold many bridges. This is a woman who managed to find a handsome, wealthy husband eight years her junior—San Diego hotel heir Billy Evans—after she was indicted for fraud. 

Holmes has lied about things both big and small, sublime and ridiculous. She claimed that Theranos’s devices were being used by the military on the battlefield, which was a blatant falsehood. She said that the devices could run hundreds of tests, when in reality they could never do more than a dozen. She said that the product was endorsed by pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, which was not the case. In 2014 she said revenue was projected to be $100 million when it was in fact $100,000. She lied about her relationship with Balwani, where she lived and whether or not she was in the office. She even lied about the pedigree of her dog, claiming that her Siberian husky was a wolf. 

But the most bizarre misrepresentation is Holmes’s own voice, which she deepened, seemingly in a bid to get (male) investors to take her more seriously. In the boardroom, Holmes wanted to be seen as a man. But now that she’s in the courtroom, backed into a corner, she wants to play the woman card. When she takes the stand, I won’t be surprised to hear her raise her voice a few octaves. 

Tech executive Ellen Pao asserted in a recent New York Times op-ed that the trial is a “wake up call for sexism in tech,” noting that as a rare woman in a world populated by men, Holmes is the first founder to face any real consequences for Silicon Valley hype. She argued that men like Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann should have to account for their exaggerations, too. And they should. But Holmes lied about medical technology. She endangered peoples’ lives with false test results, which is substantially worse. At least Kalanick and Neumann built products that worked. Patients who had their blood tests analyzed by Theranos were led to believe they had cancer and vitamin deficiencies, or that they were miscarrying a pregnancy. Imagine calling an Uber to go to JFK airport, getting picked up by a pedicab and winding up in Times Square. Imagine renting an office in a WeWork and arriving to find an illegal basement apartment in Queens that had been flooded by Hurricane Ida. That’s Theranos. 

Holmes may be a new mom wearing smart suits and carrying an accessible diaper bag. She may or may not have been abused by her former domestic partner. But none of that changes the fact that the core of her business—the core of her entire being—was, and continues to be, bullshit. 
    [post_title] => Elizabeth Holmes's legal strategy: part Svengali, part 'can't touch this'
    [post_excerpt] => Once listed by Forbes as the world's youngest self-made billionaire, Holmes claimed Theranos could produce accurate test results from a finger prick of blood. Now she is on trial for fraud and faces 20 years in prison.
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Elizabeth Holmes’s legal strategy: part Svengali, part ‘can’t touch this’

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    [post_content] => The disappearance of privacy in the digital age is irreversible. Now we have to figure out how to protect ourselves.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: Technology and social media are frequently manipulated by bad actors. As a digital investigator, I see the effects of this firsthand. Often, my  prospective clients want me to utilize my knowledge of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) to stalk and harass someone they don’t like. Recently, a man contacted me to ask how much I would charge to cyberstalk his adult daughter and “expose [her] as a slut.” Of course I declined the commission, but I know there are plenty of less-than-scrupulous OSINT experts who will do the job for him. 

OSINT is a methodology by which one collects and analyzes online data that is in the public domain. OSINT can and does include leaks, and it can also involve information that was never meant to be shared widely—which is why a good investigator should always seek to protect a potentially vulnerable source, even if that source shared something publicly. 

On the micro level, OSINT can be manipulated to stalk an individual—a good example of this is people poring over clues in the photos you post to your social media accounts in order to figure out where you live and/or hang out. On the macro level, governments can and do utilize OSINT— as well as more traditional spying methods—in order to spy on their citizens.

The combination of both OSINT and other new sophisticated technologies means that none of us are truly safe from those who want to pry into our personal lives. Sometimes, this can lead to truly terrifying outcomes. If you saw “The Dissident,” the documentary film about the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, you know how easy it is to hack a phone, for example. The film shows how the Saudi regime used Israeli spyware to read communications between Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz and Jamal Khashoggi, who was then a columnist for The Washington Post. There is convincing circumstantial evidence in the film to support the theory, shared by Turkish Intelligence and the University of Toronto’s City Lab, that Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful Saudi crown prince, ordered his henchmen to murder Khashoggi at his country’s consulate in Istanbul—based on information he obtained from using Pegasus spyware to take over both men’s phones.

Or, consider the case of model Ines Helene, whose stalker geolocated her apartment building using the reflections of the buildings in the selfies she posted online.



Ines Helene’s stalker didn’t need to employ sophisticated spyware to find her address. All he needed was to be obsessive and pay attention to detail. 

If all of this scares you—well, it should. We live in a world where anyone can find out vital information about you and use it for malevolent reasons. This genie is out of the bottle in many respects, but there are ways in which legislation can catch up to our worst privacy concerns: legislation against revenge porn, which 48 states and the District of Columbia have passed, is a good example here.

There are also ways in which an environment where nothing stays secret for long is a good thing. For example, investigators can use data breaches and leaks to expose crimes that individuals or governments are trying to hide. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its four-part series on the detention and long-term incarceration of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region; to prove the existence of concentration camps the Chinese government was trying to hide, BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan collaborated with architect Alison Killing, and Christo Buschek, a programmer and digital security trainer in using open source technology to locate and identify the mass prison camps in which over 1 million Uyghurs are being held and, according to first person accounts, tortured. The importance of this type of work is in its clarity and effectiveness: by identifying and documenting irrefutable facts on the ground, it cuts through a well-funded and cynical propaganda machine to expose the truth. 

That’s not all, of course. Many of you reading this have undoubtedly experienced what it’s like to be lied to or conned. In this digital age we can expose liars and con artists before it’s too late. Worried about that guy you’re going on a date with? You can find out if he has a criminal record, or if he’s married. Concerned that a scam artist may be targeting a loved one? You can investigate the person to see what is really going on. 

Stolen valor has traditionally been a popular way for grifters to scam people—faking military service has a long, ignoble, and sadly profitable tradition—but today, there are enough tools at our disposal to figure out if someone is lying or not. 

Our social mores will eventually catch up to our changing understanding of public versus private. In fact, our comparative lack of privacy is beginning to change our very culture — making certain aspects of our past and present irrelevant. 

Consider the #infosecbikini Twitter storm. It started when a female Twitter user who works in information security was shamed for posting a relatively tame bikini photo; this led to a backlash against random sexism and harassment in cybersecurity

The more frequently people are “shamed” and “exposed,” it would seem, the less weight such harassment will carry in our lives. 

Simply put, we might soon reach a critical mass of “embarrassing” content, revenge porn, and other content routinely used to harass or denigrate people. So much so that a lot of this content will  become just another form of internet white noise. 

Oh, your emails were leaked? Well, so were a bunch of other people’s emails. Not only will many people have some kind of “scandal” or another in their past, there will simply be too much data to sift through. 

Similarly, the enormous amount of data out there presents a challenge for prying governments too. Russia is one example of a mass surveillance state. The scope of Russia’s surveillance system, SORM, is so great, however, that it creates logistical challenges. Nobody has time to watch everyone all the time, and unless the government is actually zeroing in on you because you stand out to them, you can still manage to fly under the radar. 

I understand that none of this is particularly reassuring for dissidents. In fact, it becomes less reassuring when we consider how evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to tap into mass surveillance systems over time—gradually reducing the human component and watching us all with renewed vigor and precision. 

Again, we have a window of opportunity to enact better legislation on AI now. Instead of being defeatist, we can think about ways in which AI can be regulated so as to reduce the potentially harmful impact of this data mining on private citizens. 

Perhaps, eventually, a healthy balance between constant hypervigilance online and going completely off-the-grid to raise chickens in a remote part of Montana will even be possible for those of us—most of us—who are trying to stay safe while also living our lives and doing our work. 

Of course, this healthy balance will not be available to private citizens of authoritarian regimes for as long as they remain authoritarian. But for those of us who still have democratic institutions to fall back on, creating the legal blueprints for how our digital rights can work better for all of us is possible. With smart activism, it is also attainable.
    [post_title] => We wish to inform you that privacy is dead
    [post_excerpt] => We live in a world where anyone can find out vital information about you and use it for malevolent purposes. This genie is out of the bottle in many respects, but there are ways in which legislation can catch up to our worst privacy concerns.
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We wish to inform you that privacy is dead

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    [post_content] => Civil society organizations in Myanmar are pushing for international recognition of internet access as a human right.

Since the internet first emerged during the 2011 Arab Spring as an effective means of organizing grassroots protests and speaking directly to the rest of the world in an unprecedented way, human rights defenders have found that it can also be used as a weapon against them. Since 2011, nationalist politicians in both authoritarian and democratic states have learned how to manipulate their citizens through social media—and when to use internet shutdowns to cut their critics off from the rest of the world. The Myanmar military clearly understands this dichotomy well. Since seizing power on January 31, it has restricted internet access—starting with Facebook, which for most people in Myanmar is their primary gateway to the online world.

In the midst of massive peaceful protests and a violent response from the military, people inside Myanmar have attempted to get information out during first a partial and then nearly total internet shutdown. It has never been easy for human rights defenders in Myanmar, but without the internet it is exponentially harder.

This is not the first time the Myanmar government has limited or blocked internet access. Eight townships in Rakhine and Chin states have been living with shutdowns off and on since June 2019. The military reportedly lifted those shutdowns on February 3, even as they began to restrict access elsewhere. Without access to the internet during the pandemic, residents— many of them survivors of the military’s genocide against ethnic Rohingya—have been denied essential information and vital aid. Now there are signs that internet shutdowns will be the new normal in Myanmar.

#WhatIsHappeningInMyanmar?

Using this hashtag and others, people inside Myanmar have been doing their best to report events on the ground, although Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger have been blocked since February 3. Many people, including activists and journalists,  moved to Twitter, where they called for the world to pay attention and support them. The military responded by blocking access to Twitter and Instagram on February 5, and followed this with a broader internet shutdown.  For a few days, friends and family outside of Myanmar had no information; they were left to wonder whether their loved ones were safe. Only a few independent media outlets and individual activists, such as journalist Mratt Kyaw Thu, managed to circumvent the shutdown and post live updates to social media. Internet access now appears to be at least partially restored. Footage of protests, including a video of the military shooting 19-year old Myat Thet Thet Khaing, is making the rounds on social media; but military leaders refuse to back away from their anti-democratic coup, despite international condemnation and the imposition of sanctions by the United States. In fact, the military has proposed a draconian “cyber security bill.”  According to an open letter signed and posted online by 161 Myanmar civil society organizations—a brave move, given the ongoing arrests of members of the National League for Democracy party as well as Union Election Commission officials and high-profile activists— the bill:

…includes clauses which violate human rights including the rights to freedom of expression, data protection and privacy, and other democratic principles and human rights in the online space. As the “bill” is drafted by the current military regime to oppress those who are against its rule, and to restrict the mobilization and momentum of online resistance, we strongly condemn this action by the current military regime in accordance with our democratic principles.

Currently there are only unofficial English translations of the bill available on social media, but reviews by Reuters and BBC reporter Freya Cole confirm that the legislation would prohibit “speech, texts, image, video, audio file, sign, or other expressions disrupting unity, stabilization, and peace.” The text also appears to include provisions that would enshrine the government’s right to shut down the internet at will and require Internet Service Providers to retain massive amounts of user data. ISPs that do not comply could be subject to fines and see their employees imprisoned.

The internet as a weapon

The military knows from its own experience the power of the internet—and especially of social media. The consensus among international experts and the U.N. is that the genocide of the Rohingya was enabled by the military’s use of Facebook; this is something that even Facebook acknowledges. In a 2018 article on the role Facebook played in inciting against the Rohingya, The New York Times reported that the military created fake Facebook personas who “posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes” and “flooded” the social media platform with hatred, spreading misinformation and fear about Muslims generally and the Rohingya specifically, even as the military systematically massacred and raped Rohingya, burning their villages to the ground and forcing the survivors to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Facebook provided some shocking statistics about posts in Myanmar during the genocide of the Rohingya. In a 2018 blog post the company says it removed “425 Facebook Pages, 17 Facebook Groups, 135 Facebook accounts and 15 Instagram accounts in Myanmar” for engaging in “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” (CIB)—i.e., networks of fake accounts dedicated to inciting violence and hatred and spreading misinformation. According to the company “[a]pproximately 2.5 million people followed at least one of these Facebook Pages.” But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Facebook has continually reported on efforts remove CIB— yet some of this content is still active. In fact, the social media platform banned a military television network page that was operating after the coup had already taken place only because the Wall Street Journal asked why it was still active, given that it had been banned earlier.

#SaveMyanmar

We do not have any clarity on what will happen next to internet freedom in Myanmar. For social media users outside the country, this a good time to follow the Twitter accounts of people who have been reporting events from the ground as much as and whenever possible. Twitter should consider authenticating these accounts and fast-tracking a blue check of verification to those who request it. In a February 6 letter, civil society organizations in Myanmar called for Internet Service Providers to “prevent the military from accessing user data…take every action available to appeal the recent junta directives, [and] develop plans in the event the human rights situation in Myanmar deteriorates.” The situation in Myanmar is inarguably deteriorating, and ISPs must develop those plans now. Telenor, the Norwegian multinational communications services provider, has said repeatedly that it is doing everything it can to push back on these orders, but their best is clearly not enough. The UN Human Rights Council is holding an emergency session on Friday to discuss the “implications” of the situation in Myanmar. The UN has already taken steps towards declaring access to the internet a human right. As it considers how to support human rights in the country it should emphasize the need to maintain internet access. After all, the internet isn’t just a weapon; it is still, even now, and despite those who continue to abuse it for nefarious purposes, a tool for upholding human rights and maintaining democracy. [post_title] => In Myanmar, the internet is a tool and a weapon [post_excerpt] => The military has proposed a draconian "cyber security bill" that would allow it the right to shut down internet access at will. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => in-myanmar-the-internet-is-a-tool-and-a-weapon [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2317 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

In Myanmar, the internet is a tool and a weapon

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    [post_content] => The search for a room of one's own—on Instagram.

Pakistanis were late adopters of social media culture, but that is now changing rapidly; emerging Instagram influencers with tens of thousands of followers have become the subject of articles in online magazines and on television. One of the most notable aspects of Pakistani influencer culture is the rise of women, who are finding a space and a voice in the country’s deeply conservative, patriarchal culture. 

Tanzeela Khan is a publicist as well as a style and beauty influencer, with over 100,000 Instagram followers. In her carefully curated photos she models outfits that highlight the latest fashions from both East and West, with captions that offer observations about her social life and her emotions. A photo posted on January 20 shows Tanzeela in a plum colored chenille coat with a matching face mask, captioned #motd (message of the day). 

Pakistani society frowns upon women who work outside the home; social media platforms offer them an opportunity to both stay at home and become entrepreneurs. The pandemic lockdown didn’t spark the rise of Pakistani influencer culture, but it definitely caused it to grow exponentially.

Women comprise 49 percent of Pakistan’s population, but only 24 percent of the labour force. The unpaid labor of domestic duties is not classified as work, which is a consequence of the fact that women are deprived of a space in the discourse for their own narratives. A few newspaper headlines illustrate widely held views on women in the workforce. 
  • “No country for working women,”  (Pakistan Express, March 10, 2018)
  • Should Pakistani women get a job? Yes but.. Say Pakistani men,” (World Bank Blogs, April 5, 2019);  
  • Problems working women face”  (Dawn, May 9, 2019)
While these articles make it clear that Pakistani women face severe challenges in seeking work outside the home, they focus on data while ignoring the human stories that show how women are affected by the lack of opportunities to embark on a career. Nor do they offer solutions, or suggestions for a path forward. The voices of women are not heard, whether they stay at home or go out to work. Tooba Syed, a feminist activist, pointed out in an Opinion piece for Dawn newspaper that women who do enter the workforce generally work in “occupations that mimic care work; undervalued, underpaid and further reinforcing women’s primary gender role as a caregiver.” Influencer culture provides Pakistani women with a space completely their own, neither dominated by men nor governed by existing norms of what is and isn’t acceptable—at least not directly.  Saman Zahrai, who moved from her native Lahore to London after she married, started out as a mommy blogger in 2018. “There was so much about mommyhood that I just wanted to share,” she said. She had been online for months before she recognized the opportunity to monetize her Instagram posts. As her blog developed, she began to incorporate other interests and to learn what interested her followers. This helped her make the shift to becoming a fashion influencer who shares her style choices, which include both traditional Pakistani outfits and European trends. Zahrai still visits Lahore frequently; she said the contrast with her life in London has made her acutely aware of the extent to which her native country denies women a space of their own. Blogging and influencing, she confirmed, can feel very liberating for women who want to express themselves in an environment that is free of social opprobrium and not controlled by the male gaze. Some influencers mix it up, with glamorous posed style photos alongside social justice messages. Rimsha Waseem, an influencer from Karachi who has more than 52,000 followers, says that she feels a responsibility to include social responsibility messaging with her fashion and makeup content. In addition to launching a campaign for breast cancer awareness on her YouTube channel, she worked with a local manufacturer of feminine hygiene products to raise awareness of period poverty.  Rimsha, Saman and Tanzeela come from privileged backgrounds. Their families are well off, they are educated, speak English, and have unlimited access to the internet and social media. In taking advantage of the opportunity to amplify their own voices and carve out their own space, they are paving the way for other women. Pakistani feminists understand that the few need to champion the many. But critics of the new influencer culture claim the young women who model their glamorous clothes and lifestyle on Instagram and YouTube are wasting their time; that they are immodest; or that they are unrepresentative and out of touch. The fatal flaw in the claim that Pakistan’s female influencers are out of touch with their country’s social reality is the case of Qandeel Baloch, the first and most famous influencer of them all. Unlike Tanzeela, Saman, and Rishma, Qandeel was not from the educated upper class. She was born to a conservative family in a small rural town in the Punjab, grew up poor and was married off at age 18 to a cousin who, she said, was physically abusive. Baloch escaped the marriage and ran off to the big city, where she changed her name (her birth name was Fauzia Azeem), tried and failed to break into show business and then discovered that the surest path to fame was via social media. The videos Baloch posted on her Facebook wall, which had more than 500,000 followers, managed to be simultaneously sexually provocative, guileless, and socially critical. She monetized her fame with paid advertising, which allowed her to support her family. But in 2016 an ill-conceived stunt that exposed a prominent imam’s hypocrisy brought notoriety, threats, and unwelcome attention directed at her family. On a visit home shortly after the incident with the imam, her youngest brother smothered her to death while she slept—in a so-called “honor killing.” She was 26 years old.  The murder of Qandeel Baloch sent shockwaves across the country, and was widely covered by the media both in Pakistan and abroad. Baloch had spoken often about taking charge of her sexuality rather than letting the exploitative media industry do it for her. Now, her murder resonated even with women who had disliked Baloch’s provocative persona. She became an icon for resilience and for the principle that a woman had the right to her own voice. Pakistani influencers from more privileged backgrounds still face significant challenges. Arranged marriages are a cultural norm for most families, but those who might have been interested in asking Rimsha to be their daughter in law see her career as a barrier. “People see it as me “showing myself off,”” said Rimsha. She added: “According to them it is not right for a girl to do, but no one sees the effort that goes into content creation.” While most of the Pakistani influencers on Instagram are women, the trend of social media bloggers and personalities began on YouTube with Zaid Ali, a Canadian-Pakistani star vlogger. Ali led the way for male vloggers, most of whom create funny, relatable videos that are entertaining but not exactly substantive. What’s notable is that the men are applauded for their light and amusing videos, while female influencers are criticized for the same type of content. Male influencers are not accused of showing off or wasting their time.  Tanzeela says there’s still a long way to go before influencer culture becomes mainstream in Pakistan. So far it has provided a space and a voice for women with talents and business acumen that they had kept under wraps for too long. Rimsha said that the money she earns as an influencer has allowed her to move toward financial independence. “I’ve managed to fund my travels, and support myself in other means which I am very grateful for,” she said. Very few women ever live alone in Pakistan; the norm is to go from their family home to their husband’s family home. Nor is financial independence for women a widely understood concept, let alone a valued one. But influencer culture and blogging have opened new doors for women to earn money on their own terms. The financial independence is gratifying, and is a small step toward broader social acceptance of women who earn their own living.  These are strong, smart women who have figured out how to monetize their passions. Pakistan needed a space where women could own their brands; we must move past the point of looking down on fashion, style or beauty as lesser content, which boils down to pulling people down. Rimsha is a strong advocate for lifting up and supporting women. Global women’s movements have shown the power of solidarity over the years and the influencer culture is no different. There’s a new kind of working woman in Pakistan and she’s here to stay. [post_title] => Pakistan's female influencers are challenging the patriarchy [post_excerpt] => Pakistani society frowns upon women who work outside the home; social media platforms offer them an opportunity to both stay at home and become entrepreneurs. 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Pakistan’s female influencers are challenging the patriarchy

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    [post_content] => A scientist-turned-businessman believes he can make a profit by harvesting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into synthetic limestone.

In 2006 Brent Constanz, a marine biologist who had studied corals for over 20 years, founded a company called Calera to produce cement with carbon dioxide. Constanz believed he could make a profit from harvesting toxic emissions to make the world’s most in-demand product with a method that was not only environmentally sound – but which actually helped reduce carbon emissions. He later thought using carbon dioxide to create concrete was the way to go and in 2012 launched Blue Planet, with the aspiration to pull 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually out of the air’s foul breath and turn it into synthetic limestone. Blue Planet manufactures synthetic limestone out of carbon dioxide – the toxic gas that is an industrial byproduct.  Synthetic limestone, when broken down into small pebbles and added to water and cement, becomes concrete, the second largest commodity in the world after water.

Today, carbon in the atmosphere has hit 415 parts per million—the highest level in the 800,000 years for which we have reliable data. In the pre-industrial era, it was below 300 parts per million. The excess carbon in the atmosphere traps heat on Earth, turning up the global thermostat.

Sanjeev Khagram, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, said that Blue Planet’s method of turning carbon into synthetic limestone was an effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. While presenting a paper on the subject at the Davos World Economic Forum this year, Khagram said that “carbon farming” was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to “turn a profit of $1 to $10 trillion” per year.

“Blue Planet’s is indeed a market-based approach to tackling climate change,” said Rick Parnell, CEO of the Foundation for Climate Restoration,  an organization that aspires to restore atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels by 2050. Parnell also advocates private sector initiatives like that of Constantz’s. “You can't wait for the governments to act, we need to act now,” he said. His partner, MIT graduate Peter Fiekowsky, said that until now Bill Gates was the only person funding carbon removal. He added that recent government initiatives were “at one tenth the scale we need.”

Carbon farming on a large scale would indeed solve a major environmental issue while creating a whole new industry, said Casper Ohm, a data scientist in the field of environmental sustainability. Ohm is editor-in-chief of Water Pollution, an online resource about water and the environment. “The investment to pull 25 billion tons of C02 per year would require a huge amount of capital,” he said.  “It all depends on money.”

For other experts, carbon trading is controversial for ethical and environmental reasons.

“It is kind of like enabling other companies to release more carbon carbon dioxide [so that] another company can take it out of the atmosphere, [which allows] the first company to keep creating more carbon dioxide,” said Lisa Schaefer, a systems engineer who founded Thinq.tv, a video streaming platform developed at Arizona State University that hosts live grassroots conversations about current events.

The first company, explained Schaefer, could be investing in making its infrastructure and processes greener, but instead will now pay a contractor to clean up what they are putting out into the atmosphere.  Schaefer also believes the amount of carbon Blue Planet promises to pull out of the atmosphere might have the counter-productive effect of encouraging the production of more concrete.

“Only 10 billion tons of concrete are produced every year, not including the recycling of old concrete and other cheaper materials for making concrete,” she said. There appears to be no demand for 25 billion tons. She added: “We certainly don't want to encourage companies to manufacture more concrete even if it is a ‘green one.’”

Constantz was, until January 2020, in discussions with a wide range of industrial emitters, including cement and steel plants about initiatives to establish manufacturing plants around the world. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought those discussion to a temporary halt, but Constanz expects them to resume once the crisis has passed.

But even in these times of insecurity, global stasis, and introspection, Fiekowsky, who invested in Blue Planet years ago (Leonardo DiCaprio and  Don Kennedy, the former president of Stanford University, are also investors), says there are parallels to be drawn between how different countries are addressing climate change and Covid-19.

“Singapore and South Korea decided they wanted to control the virus. The US and the UK said, well, let's just minimize the impact of the virus,” Fiekowsky said. As of this writing, the US has reported 1,259,108 cases and 75,781 deaths and the UK 207,977 cases and 30,689 deaths, while South Korea reports 10,822 cases and 256 deaths and Singapore 21,707 cases and 20 deaths. “Obviously, it's horrible. To just minimize what you really want to get rid of,” said Fiekowsky.

Governments were giving short shrift to the urgent need for policy to deal with climate change before the pandemic, which has since drowned out the conversation about the issue.  Constanz pointed out that while the United States government has allocated $2 trillion to address the Covid-19 emergency, far more will die from climate change.

Ismail Serageldin, the former  Vice-President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development at the World Bank, famously said in 1995 that "if the wars of [the twentieth century] century were fought over oil, the wars of the [twenty-first] century will be fought over water — unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource."

Climate change will continue to ravage the Earth even after a vaccination for the Covid-19 virus becomes available. It is thus a crisis that we cannot afford to sideline, even during a global health crisis. To that point, climate expert Professor Robert Devoy of Ireland’s Coastal Marine Research Center issued a stark warning in a 2015 interview. “The last time the planet warmed this much,” he said, “88 percent of life disappeared.”

 
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Can private industry save the environment with for-profit green initiatives?

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    [post_content] => Working from home under lockdown has highlighted some unanticipated gender and class issues.

I have a vivid memory of a 1990s television commercial for a then-state-of-the-art cordless phone. It portrayed an industrious young businesswoman working her way through the weekend from home. Her three young daughters appear and beg her to drive them to the beach. The woman is torn; she loves her kids, but she’s also a dedicated Career Woman, and, weekend or no, she has work to do.

The last shot of the ad shows the woman taking her daughters to the beach—and joining a conference call from her new cordless phone as they frolic in the waves. Technology, the ad suggested, would set a new generation of women free by allowing them to work from anywhere: with the right phone, you could spend time with your kids without sacrificing that promotion!



Fast forward to 2020 and a world reeling from a global pandemic. The ad now seems both dated and antithetical to modern concepts of gender roles and work-life balance (why can’t the children’s other parent take them to the beach? why is the person struggling to balance work and family always a woman? why should anyone have to join a conference call on a Saturday?). Now facing a grim choice between economic pain and physical risk are the huge number of people whose jobs cannot be performed from home—grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, transit workers, and health care providers, to name a few—as well as those whose employers are refusing to let them work from home, even in cases where their jobs can be done remotely.

Those who can work from home are the lucky minority. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29 percent of wage and salary workers had the option of working from home in 2017-18, and 25 percent did so at least some of the time. Most of them are high-earning white collar workers. Of civilian workers, a category comprised of both private industry and state and local government workers, only 7 percent have access to “flexible” work, or telework.

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed a white-collar job perk into a necessary means of protecting the health of workers, businesses, and the overall economy. This is why, in the span of a few weeks, so many companies have gone from resisting to mandating it.

Organizations seeking to advance women in the workplace have been pushing for companies to allow flexible and/or at-home work since the 1970s. Women would benefit the most from these arrangements, the theory went, because they were expected to perform a greater share of domestic labor. Why should an ambitious, hardworking woman be held back in her career simply because she had to pick up the kids at 3pm or get dinner on the table by 7?

Today, women still do more child care and housework than men, but many fathers are playing a greater role in their children’s lives than did men of previous generations. Male and female, single and married, parents and child-free, many workers value the flexibility and freedom of working from home at least some of the time—being able to let in the plumber, sign for a package, go to the gym, walk the dog, or prepare a home-cooked meal reduces stress across the board.

Before the pandemic—and even now, in the midst of it—many organizations were and are reluctant to allow staff to work from home. Although more companies have been allowing at-home work in the last 20 years, the last decade saw a small backlash, led most notably by Marissa Mayer, who banned remote work when she took over Yahoo in 2013. Some employers worried that workers didn’t have the training or equipment necessary to work productively from home, or that being at home would be too distracting. Some managers feared a loss of control and didn’t trust employees to get work done. Mayer, Steve Jobs, and others believed that collaboration, connectedness, and innovation suffer when employees aren’t interacting with each other in person.

Now that working from home has, in some cases, gone from a reward reserved for upper management to a requirement of the job, more people are discovering its downsides. As a young entrepreneur named Adam Simmons told CBC News in 2019, "I think [working at home] is really damaging for your mental health…It definitely was for mine. I felt very, very lonely.”

When Simmons worked from home, he was alone. But due to pandemic-induced school and day care closures, many of today’s office workers are trying to meet the demands of full-time jobs while caring for children. An acquaintance recently described a meltdown her toddler son had while she was working from home. “He asked for a snack WHILE eating a snack,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “I said, ‘You’re already eating an apple,’ and he threw himself on the ground, moaning, ‘No, I need a snaaaaaaack!’” Never has the professor whose children famously interrupted a live BBC News interview in 2017 been more relatable.

Newer technologies like instant chat and video conferencing have made it easier than ever to work from home, if not necessarily more pleasant. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford and founding director of the university’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, wrote about why so many people find Zoom meetings more exhausting than in-person ones in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Bailenson’s research suggests that employees now attending hours of Zoom meetings per week are experiencing “nonverbal overload.” The grid format of ten-person Zoom meetings, in which each participant stares at you from the screen for the entire time in an eerie echo of “The Brady Bunch,” can be “draining,” he wrote. In real-life meetings, we can “control our personal space,” whereas “for every minute we are in Zoom, we have staring faces inches from our own.”

Employers resist allowing people to work from home in part because they fear a dip in productivity. But research and workers’ experiences during the pandemic indicate that allowing (or requiring) work from home is in fact a boon to management. As Bailenson wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “people are forced to pay attention” on Zoom to a greater degree than in person. Even Kevin Roose, author of a recent New York Times op-ed entitled, “Sorry, but Working From Home is Overrated,” acknowledged that studies show remote workers are more efficient and productive and “tend to take shorter breaks and fewer sick days” than their on-site peers.

Advocates have emphasized for years that allowing employees to work from home at least some of the time can save companies money—e.g., by reducing office size or eliminating the need to rent one and slashing the cost of utilities, janitorial services, supplies, equipment, and furniture. According to a 2014 NBC News story, a typical business would save, on average, $11,000 per year by allowing employees to work from home just half of the time.

As Roose pointed out, having trouble separating work life from home life is a downside for workers, but not for bosses looking to “squeeze extra efficiency out of [their] employees.” Indeed, employees who now have to work from home because of the pandemic are encountering what one described in a recent career advice column as, “expectations that because we’re at home all the time anyway, we should be online and available at almost all times” and “being asked to do extra work during the evenings…because everyone knows we’re all here anyway.”

Without “the normal excuse of having plans,” the advice seeker wrote, “I'm finding it hard to say no.” Overwhelmed and/or abusive managers are already taking advantage of this situation; more than one person has noticed that they are working more hours now than they were before the pandemic, often because they’re replacing their daily commute with another hour or three of work.

Extra hours aside, working from home is not for everyone. Some—extroverts, parents of young children, people who value a clear separation between work and home—will be delighted to return to their offices as soon as it is safe to do so. Others, having discovered that they can work just as well (or better) from home, will not easily give up their newfound freedom.

For many companies, allowing people to work remotely at least some of the time makes sense for employers and employees alike, with or without a global pandemic. And it will be difficult for management to continue insisting it’s not feasible when workers have been doing it for months. Forcing adults to spend eight or more hours a day on-site is as outdated and ludicrous as running an ad that equates weekend work with women’s liberation.
    [post_title] => What the pandemic is teaching us about working from home
    [post_excerpt] => Now that working from home has, in some cases, gone from a privilege reserved for upper management to a requirement of the job, more people are discovering its downsides.
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What the pandemic is teaching us about working from home

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    [post_content] => With security risks and data-leaks, why do some serving soldiers bring smartphones on deployment, and how do countries differ?

A few years ago, my husband deployed to Afghanistan where the British Army had categorically banned all soldiers from using their phones. He called once a week at most, and our conversations were stilted and short. It’s hard to share sweet nothings in front of a line of soldiers waiting their turn. All was well until one morning I had coffee with another army wife. Her husband was working in the US Marine Corps Camp Leatherneck, and she got to facetime him every. single. morning. What I’d thought was an iron law of deployment – no personal communications devices for anyone, anywhere, anytime – turned out to be more an evolving set of practices.

Cell phones are wildly insecure. They’re the most vulnerable node in a network designed to generate and exploit user-data and share it with a wide range of actors, from device manufacturers, operating system owners, content-creators, software and app-designers, phone companies and partner networks. And those are just the organizations officially permitted to pull down mobile device data. Many apps leak data continually, as a consequence of either poor design or the user’s failure to install updates. We also have a perennial problem of apps that access and share personal and device data they have collected unnecessarily.

Cell phones use several different families of communications protocol — SMS, MMS, WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM – each with its own security vulnerabilities and unpredictable interaction effects. Then there are the network exploits: network providers use signalling protocols that  have known and more or less unfixable weaknesses. This means that more than half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.

Attackers can exploit all of these weaknesses. Spyware such as NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus software can allegedly read text messages, track calls, collect passwords, track the location of the phone, access its microphone and camera and suck up information from apps. No wonder so many militaries ban personal cell phones for soldiers in action, while some ban their use altogether.

For soldiers, however, a cellphone can seem essential. These are young people who exercise a lot, often using apps, are typically far from home and often bored — and they really, really like to show off to their friends by posting videos and photographs. But the morale boost of a cellphone can undermine operational security:
  • Researchers for Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence website, used soldiers’ social media posts to forensically trace the entire journey of the Russian military unit that transported the Buk missile launcher, which likely shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat used painstaking geolocation work on selfies the soldiers uploaded to popular Russian social media platforms VK and Odnoklassniki to determine the whole route. Some soldiers made the job a lot easier by photographing themselves in front of place-name signs along the way.
  • In January this year, during a military exercise in the Mojave Desert, a US Marine Corps lance corporal ‘got his whole unit killed’ – hypothetically — by posting a picture of them on Facebook. Nowadays, every conflict zone is “an electronic warfare-type environment,” said the Marine Corps’ head of education, in a widely syndicated article clearly intended to get the message across the whole US military.
  • But it’s not all soldier selfies. The 2018 Strava case showed that a popular fitness tracker, used by many in the US military and diplomatic services to record their favourite running routes for other app users, had exposed the locations of military and intelligence installations around the world.
Different militaries have varied in their responses, often in ways that seem to track their broader culture and politics. Turkey banned smartphone use by soldiers on-base in 2015, and Russia followed suit in 2019 when its parliament unanimously voted to ban tablets and smartphone use by on-duty armed forces. The Russian law also forbids men and women in the military from sharing information and photos about their service, because this content had been used by others “to shape a biased assessment of the Russian Federation's state policies." A more liberal outlier is China, where the People’s Liberation Army decided in 2016 to limit where and when soldiers on domestic bases can use their smartphones, and only after they realized that the taxi-hailing apps soldiers used to get back at night were collecting personally identifiable location data around military installations. Some bans are specific to location; Indian soldiers along the “Line of Actual Control” between Indian and Chinese-controlled parts of the Himalayas are forbidden to use Chinese apps like Weibo and WeChat. Countries that are more likely to use internet shutdowns also seem more likely to implement blanket-bans on soldiers using smartphones. Turkey, for example, recently blocked access to Twitter during a bombardment in Syria. In India, Kashmir is now in its six-month of a government-imposed internet shutdown. Authoritarian countries tend to be more absolutist in their policies regarding communications. They also lack the institutional capacity to consistently police their draconian rules, so smartphone bans may be observed more in the breach. Already, Bellingcat has easily identified many Russian soldiers’ pseudonymous profiles, and the weakest link in the chain — as I can attest — is often the proud or just emotionally needy wives and girlfriends who share pictures or insist on frequent phone calls. The US seems more permissive on communications devices than the UK’s military, based on my experience of a friend’s husband buying and using an iPad on a US base in Afghanistan. One reason could be that US deployments tend to be longer and more frequent. But as our cell phones become increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives, they represent an increasing threat — which is why the rules are tightening. Since 2018, the US has forbidden GPS-enabled functioning of personal devices on deployment, although this unintentionally hilarious education video – “Don’t end up like this guy”– suggests the ban is more honoured in the breach. Decisions to ban devices altogether, and not just specific GPS functionality on the devices, seem to be determined on a case by case basis. A recent 82nd Airborne deployment to the Middle East that banned all smartphones and devices was sufficiently newsworthy to be reported on CNN. One factor quietly influencing phones and deployment is geography. Typically, a soldier is deploying to somewhere far away. Distance tends to lower the expectation of frequent contact, and it also complicates the matter of the cell phone service provider. Soldiers from the US or UK who deployed to Afghanistan could, in theory, buy a local prepaid SIM card and put it in their own smuggled phone. This would be a bad move. A unique identifier in the phone, verifiable via a global industry database, would immediately allow the local phone provider to determine the phone’s provenance. With Russian, Iranian and Chinese intelligence agencies widely believed to be perched on Afghan networks, they could build up a picture not just of troop movements but possibly of identified individuals to track when they went home. Following the soldier home electronically doesn’t seem to have happened Afghanistan, but it’s been reported to have happened to NATO personnel in the Baltics, whose families were apparently traced by Russian entities. Not being able to trust the local cell phone provider can have a big impact, and it can happen even if the conflict is in the military’s own territory. The Kenya Defence Force (KDF) operates in Al Shabab-contested parts of north-eastern Kenya, near Somalia, and seem to have an active feud with Hormuud, the main Somali telecoms provider. The KDF frequently targets Hormuud cellphone towers across the border in Somalia. Al Shabab, which has long been suspected of being close to the cellphone operator Hormuud, returns the favour, frequently blowing up Safaricom towers inside the Kenyan border. This knocks out some of the KDF’s communications, and often happens just before attacks. Researcher Rashid Abdi has suggested that the battles over these cellphone towers could be some combination of a proxy war between the governments of Kenya and Somalia, and the Somali telecoms provider Hormuud using Al Shabab to “gain commercial advantage or to avenge previous attacks” on Hormuud’s cellphone towers. Either way, KDF soldiers cannot reliably and securely communicate with cellphones while on Kenyan turf. The Israeli Defence Forces’ unusually liberal policy regarding cell phone use during active service may be partly because their soldiers stay relatively close to home and can use their own domestic service providers. A recent alleged catfishing attempt by Hamas tried to tempt Israeli soldiers to share information with fake profiles of attractive young women on social media sites. Like the US Marine whose unit selfie ‘got his whole unit killed’ and became a cautionary tale on the evening news, the thwarted Hamas attack on a known vulnerability – the infinite vanity and ever-hopefulness of horny young men far from home – seems to have been publicised as a lesson for the troops. A widespread ban on personal cell phones in the IDF seems unlikely, not least because in a small country with near-universal conscription, parents are eager to keep tabs on their children during military service. Military chiefs often focus on the operational security problems of cell phones, but downplay another reason for their disquiet — i.e., soldiers using them to highlight bad treatment or conditions. Soldiers in India and Turkey have reportedly uploaded pictures or videos of bad food or poor shelter. Even when conditions are fine, cell phones are an escape from military life, and not all countries welcome that. South Korea banned its conscripts from having mobile phones at all during their two years’ service, and rigorously enforced it. But in 2018 the ban was reviewed and partly relaxed as part of a wider effort to reduce the isolation and total control over conscripted soldiers. Now, soldiers are allowed to use cell phones for an hour or two per day in barracks, enforced not by the military itself, but by specialised subscriptions from telecoms providers. Both the conscripted soldiers and their families back home report being happier, and time will tell if lessening the total control over soldiers affects their morale or cohesion. Enemies will always exploit vulnerabilities – both technological and human. Official policies on soldiers and cell phones will go on evolving as the demands of operational security change, the places they’re deployed to vary, and our expectations about connectedness to serving loved ones develop. And as the rules evolve, the ways people break them will, too. [post_title] => Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy [post_excerpt] => Half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => soldiers-with-smartphones-can-be-a-gift-to-the-enemy [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1665 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy

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    [post_date] => 2020-03-05 20:16:47
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    [post_content] => The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there's something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,"(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

Just half an hour flipping through my contacts produced half a dozen friends and acquaintances who didn’t require a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion to see what was wrong with big tech or the ways governments abuse it. Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women's rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech.

Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”

Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.

One hundred thousand people work for Google/Alphabet; some of them have much more power than others. The point isn’t whether Lajeunesse is or isn’t culpable for the many acts of the enormous company he represented—as its chief lobbyist in Asia for several years—it’s that of all the people who spent the decade of 2010-20 working thanklessly to expose and reduce the firm’s monopolistic abuse and assault on global privacy, it’s the ex-lobbyist who gets our attention now.

We all need second chances. Even if we don’t need those fresh starts ourselves, we want to live in a world where people have a reason to do better. But the prodigal tech bro’s redemption arc is so quick and smooth it’s barely a road bump. That’s because we keep skipping the most important part of the prodigal son story—where he hits rock bottom. In the original parable, the prodigal son wakes up in a pig sty, starving, and realizes his father’s servants now live better than he does. He resolves to go home to the people and place he did not value or respect before. He will beg to be one of his father’s servants. He accepts his complete loss of status. But instead of chastising and punishing his prodigal son, the rejoicing father greets him joyfully and heads off the apology with a huge party. It’s a great metaphor for how to run a religion, but a lousy way to run everything else.

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny, and why so many of the comments on Lajeunesse’s train wreck post on Medium were critical. The journey feels fake. These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED talk’ accounts typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too.

So, if you’re a prodigal tech bro, do us all a favour and, as Rebecca Solnit says, help “turn down the volume a little on the people who always got heard”:
  • Do the reading and do the work. Familiarize yourself with the research and what we’ve already tried, on your own time. Go join the digital rights and inequality-focused organizations that have been working to limit the harms of your previous employers and – this is key – sit quietly at the back and listen.
  • Use your privilege and status and the 80 percent of your network that’s still talking to you to big up activists who have been in the trenches for years already—especially women and people of colour. Say ‘thanks but no thanks’ to that invitation and pass it along to someone who’s done the work and paid the price.
  • Understand that if you are doing this for the next phase of your career, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing this to explain away the increasingly toxic names on your resumé, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing it because you want to ‘give back,’ you are doing it wrong.
Do this only because you recognize and can say out loud that you are not ‘giving back’, you are making amends for having already taken far, far too much.   [post_title] => The Prodigal Techbro [post_excerpt] => Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.   [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-prodigal-techbro [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1646 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

The Prodigal Techbro