YouTube has reconsidered their deletion of the RightWingWatch account that chronicled years of far-right extremism often hidden in the shadows.
The group, run by the People for the American Way (PFAW), appealed all of YouTube's rulings but the site ignored them, deciding to shut down the page regardless. Ironically, what RWW found was that many of the videos that they cut and uploaded for their own purposes came from larger clips that were still allowed from YouTube.
YouTube has a platform that bans extremism, but when reporting is done about the extremism, it's different than posting the clips to spread the conspiracies or the lies. YouTube didn't make room for that nuance.
"Right Wing Watch's YouTube channel was mistakenly suspended, but upon further review, has now been reinstated," a YouTube spokesperson told the Daily Beast, according to Justin Baragona.
After huge backlash, trending on Twitter most Monday, and multiple news stories about YouTube's decision, the account was brought back.
"We are glad that by reinstating our account, YouTube recognizes our position that there is a world of difference between reporting on offensive activities and committing them," said PFAW in a statement on their website. "Without the ability to accurately portray dangerous behavior, meaningful journalism and public education about that behavior would cease to exist. We hope this is the end of a years-long struggle with YouTube to understand the nature of our work. We also hope the platform will become more transparent about the process it uses to determine whether a user has violated its rules, which has always been opaque and has led to frustrating and inexplicable decisions and reversals such as the one we experienced today. We remain dedicated to exposing threatening and harmful activities on the Far Right and we are glad to have YouTube again available to us to continue our work."
The Google-run site YouTube has destroyed the one of the greatest repositories of right-wing extremism online by eliminating the channel for Right Wing Watch.
The group announced on Twitter Monday that after years of work exposing "bigoted views and dangerous conspiracy theories," their collection has been deleted.
While YouTube professes to support journalism and protects copyright laws that allow videos of that reporting, it conflicts with their ban of right-wing personalities who spread lies. Ultimately, that means that reporting on the words from extremists conflicts with YouTube's rules against promoting extremism.
"Right Wing Watch senior fellow Kyle Mantyla told The Daily Beast that this had been an ongoing problem with YouTube for years, despite their efforts to make clear to the platform that their videos worked to expose extremism and contained disclaimers to that effect," the report explained.
They had two "strikes" against the account from exposing right-wing ideologues. So, they weren't able to post on YouTube for 90 days. Then YouTube went after a video that had been up for 8 years on the site. That was their third strike and the account was deleted. Right Wing Watch appealed the decision but they were denied.
The videos exposed Alex Jones, Pat Robertson, and dozens of other right-wing pastors across the United States. The purpose of the site and its videos was to ensure the extremism was being seen.
"Notably, many of the right-wing outlets and personalities that Right Wing Watch chronicles are not currently suspended or banned from posting content to YouTube, while RWW has been booted for merely exposing their comments and content—something Mantyla noted as being particularly ironic," said the Beast.
"The number of times our video has gotten flagged and removed and the video from which we took it is still up on YouTube, you're just like, well, something is wrong with your system here," he declared.
As the Washington Post would say, "democracy dies in darkness."
Raw Story reached out to Google/YouTube for comment but havent' heard back.
On Wednesday, writing for Coda, Isobel Cockerell reported that a new study suggests social media platforms make as much as $1.1 billion per year off the disinformation spread by anti-vaccine groups.
"Anti-vaccine content creates a vast amount of engagement for leading technology platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, with an estimated total social media audience of 62 million people. The arrangement works both ways, with the anti-vax industry earning up to $36 million a year," said the report. "The Center for Digital Hate, based in Washington D.C., has called on social media companies to deplatform leading anti-vaxxers, who are responsible for the majority of vaccine misinformation generated online. The Center's CEO, Imran Ahmed, said that the $36 million estimate was conservative and that their real profits could be much higher."
Earlier this year, another analysis by the Center for Digital Hate found that just 12 anti-vaccine activists are responsible for 73 percent of all vaccine misinformation shared on Facebook, referred to as the "Disinformation Dozen." Most of those activists are still producing content "despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram and Twitter's terms of service agreements."
"The Center for Digital Hate's investigation also found that influencers' attempts to push their followers onto 'lifeboat' accounts on smaller platforms such as Telegram has had limited success, while deplatforming is successful in preventing them gaining wider audiences," continued the report. "Leading anti-vaccine organizations led by big names in the industry, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree and Larry Cook, have admitted in legal filings that they need mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, in order to make money and spread their ideas."
President Donald Trump's blog appears to have been shifted away from The Desk of Donald Trump back to news releases. RawStory contacted the Trump office asking if it was an error or if the website was changing things around but hasn't heard back.
The blog crashed on Saturday after he posted an unverified conspiracy theory about the false Arizona "audit." The piece claimed there were "broken seals on boxes, ballots missing, and worse." The site went down, leaving only a message saying, "something has gone wrong and this URL cannot be processed at this time."
It ultimately returned, but now that site has disappeared entirely with no information. All of the messages from Trump continue to be available on the "News" page, but they lack the excerpt of the text and all have the same headlines with different dates:
Clicking on links to Trump's Memorial Day message leads to a page that no longer exists. His commentary about a new Reuters poll also goes nowhere.
The Desk of Donald Trump was part of the social media site that the former president said he was crafting where people could speak freely. There are no comments on the blog, but it has allowed Trump to speak directly to his supporters after he was suspended from most social media sites. The social media share buttons allowed Trump's fans an easy way to share his comments.
The desk appears to have been rerouted to a signup form where people can be alerted to Trump's updates.
After about an hour, the "desk" section, listed at the top of the Trump site in the image above disappeared, leaving no link for the "Desk" at all.
Over the course of the past weeks that the blog has operated, it has slowly decreased in attention and traffic.
"Trump's biggest attempt yet to recapture America's attention has severely underwhelmed the Internet — and even his own advisers. His 'From the Desk of Donald Trump' blog, which he and his team have promoted heavily in TV interviews and social media posts, has in the last week been shared to Facebook on average fewer than 2,000 times a day," the report said, noting that it was a significant drop-off from last year.
See their traffic graph showing the downturn below:
This week, an independent Facebook oversight board is set to rule whether President Donald Trump will be allowed back onto the social network, after having been banned from it months previously for his role in promoting the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
According to POLITICO, if the board moves to reverse the ban, it could have far-reaching implications for politics in the coming years — not least of which is Trump's viability as a candidate in the 2024 election, and the viability of anyone else who might want to run.
"Should the suspension be dropped, Trump and his campaign committee could begin posting again to more than 32 million followers. He can also begin running ads," reported Meredith McGraw and Sam Stein. "And while GOP operatives are gaming out just what it would mean to give back the former president a powerful media bullhorn, the real impact, they say, will be seen in dollar signs. A return to Facebook would open major fundraising spigots that further cement Trump's hold on the Republican Party, protecting his massive grassroots donor network from potential rivals."
A top GOP strategist put it bluntly in conversation with POLITICO: "It really f*cks the other '24 wannabes."
Trump has not waited for the oversight board to make its decision, and launched a blog of his own ahead of the ruling that could be used to communicate with followers if he is not let back on.
In a hilarious moment on MSNBC Tuesday evening, host Ari Melber ridiculed President Donald Trump's new "social media platform," that he said is nothing more than a blog from the 1990s.
"Donald Trump, after talking about creating a social media platform, instead of doing that or starting an app or a tech company, instead he's launched a blog," said Melber with a smirk. "It is a section of his website that operates like a WordPress blog. And so, I'm not here to make Donald Trump look ridiculous. Today he's done that all by himself. They didn't need to pretend or lie that they were going to create an app or a tech platform. If they put millions into it, that would have been an interesting thing. What does it tell you that he is going straight BlogSpot, straight LiveJournal, straight back to '95, baby."
Political strategist Chai Komanduri speculated that Trump may have had problems accessing the right technology talent or venture capital to create such a social media platform. Despite campaign support from former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, Komanduri wondered if Thiel wasn't willing to help out on the social media site.
"But he couldn't put it together. Really what this shows you is how much Donald Trump needed the platform of Twitter, how much of a conservative movement needs access to Facebook to really push their message," said Komanduri, noting that Trump likely became the president because of his power on Twitter.
"That is something he learned when he did the birther conspiracy," Komanduri continued. "He was able to use Twitter to move that conspiracy and get the media to cover it. Now nobody covering anything he has to say. It's just going to be another blog on the internet, uncovered by everybody except for a few people on the right-wing media. It is really very sad and pathetic, but that's kind of where Trump has ended up. He's ended up as just another blogger on the internet, not the most powerful man in what was once the most powerful part of the United States."
See the discussion below:
Trump's social media platform is a livejournal
www.youtube.com
It was revealed this week that President Donald Trump and his allies are moving forward with a social media site where he has the freedom to say what he wants. While the open site Parler would gladly accept his participation, Trump appears to want to invest in his own option.
Large GOP donors see it as a way to own "big tech" after so many on the right have been banned from their sites, said a CNBC report.
According to former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the Trump platform is "going to give [Trump] the opportunity to control not only the distribution of it, but also who participates in it." It makes it sound as if the forum won't be a place for free expression like Parler. Instead, it sounds more like a marketing app where Trump can raise more money, said the Inquisitr.
The main question, however, is whether Trump will use the infamous law that he tried to change while in office that allows people to sue social media companies for what is on their platforms.
Trump was so furious about Section 230 in the Communications Decency Act that he threatened to veto the entire Defense Department spending bill if Congress didn't eliminate it. His efforts failed.
"…..Therefore, if the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk. Take back America NOW. Thank you!" Trump tweeted on Dec. 2, 2020.
He even went on to falsely call it a "serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity." Unsurprisingly, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) joined Trump in the crusade.
So, the question becomes, will Trump's new social media site have a terms of service that eliminates Section 230 for their site in particular? Or will the site continue to utilize Section 230 as a preemptive strike against litigation as Trump complained Twitter and Facebook do?
"The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccination despite its availability, on social media — a primary source of health information for millions of people," the report explained.
Facebook has removed false and misleading information about the coronavirus for the last few months, but the groups were allowed to grow and spread lies for a year until the social media site did anything to stop it. Some information, like someone saying the side effects were worse than expected, are opinions that can create a dialogue, but at the same time, it might stop someone from getting the shot.
The data discovered thus far revealed that out of U.S. users, groups and pages, they segmented people into 638 segments. They found that just 10 out of the 638 contained 50 percent vaccine hesitancy.
"And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content," said the Post.
NPR revealed that in their survey, more than 60 percent of Republican men, who haven't been vaccinated, already say that they'll refuse to get it. It's unclear how much of that belief is driven by social media, however.
President Joe Biden is bringing together government agencies to come up with a different approach to foreign hacking after former President Donald Trump's government was hacked by Russia and China hacked Microsoft.
According to the New York Times, the hacks "exploited the same gaping vulnerability in the existing system: They were launched from inside the United States — on servers run by Amazon, GoDaddy and smaller domestic providers — putting them out of reach of the early warning system run by the National Security Agency."
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were caught off-guard about the Russian hacks that happened over a year ago but weren't discovered until after the election.
After the Microsoft hacks, the company has tried to push out security updates, but it seems that every update "that code is being reverse-engineered by criminal groups and exploited to launch rapid ransomware attacks on corporations," The Times said, citing industry executives. "So a race is on — between Microsoft's efforts to seal up systems, and criminal efforts to get inside those networks before the patches are applied."
"When not one but two cyberhacks have gone undetected by the federal government in such a short period of time, it's hard to say that we don't have a problem," said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI). "The system is blinking red."
A senior adviser to Biden said that the team is looking for a whole new structure for cybersecurity and are seeking input from the private sector.
In the wake of the massive hack on U.S. government agencies and private companies allegedly carried out by Russia, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a statement saying it "has determined that this threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations."
According to Wired, all the attacks appear to stem from one initial break-in of the IT infrastructure and network-management firm SolarWinds.
"Hackers had breached the company as far back as October 2019, then planted malicious code in software updates to its network-monitoring tool, Orion. Any customer that installed an Orion patch released between March and June inadvertently planted a Russian backdoor on their own network," writes Wired's Lily Hay Newman.
According to Wired, the hack will only affect the roughly 33,000 SolarWinds customers who use Orion. But according to the CEO of the threat-tracking firm Binary Defense Systems, David Kennedy, "The fear on this one is real."
"This type of attack could allow the adversary access to essentially anyone they wanted that had SolarWinds Orion and the bad patch," Kennedy said. "There is a large scramble right now to see which systems were compromised, and if there is a probability this could have happened, organizations need to investigate."
Apparently not all the Orion customers affected by the hack are at serious risk, meaning that there are three subgroups within the potential victims: "Orion users who installed the backdoor but were never otherwise exploited; victims who had some malicious activity on their networks, but who ultimately weren't appealing targets for attackers; and victims who were actually deeply compromised because they held valuable data," Wired reports.
Newman says that when it comes to this latest hack, eliminating the backdoor is crucial. "...now that the technical details about their infrastructure are public, there's also a risk that other hackers could piggyback on the malicious access as well if it's not locked down."
President-elect Joe Biden will start his official Twitter accounts from scratch after taking office next month.
President Donald Trump absorbed all of his predecessor's followers on the official @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts, at Barack Obama's suggestion, but Biden's digital director confirmed that Twitter will not transfer those social media followers to the president-elect.
"In 2016, the Trump admin absorbed all of President Obama's Twitter followers on @POTUS and @WhiteHouse -- at Team 44's urging," Flaherty tweeted. "In 2020, Twitter has informed us that as of right now the Biden administration will have to start from zero."
Freelance journalist Hugo Lowell reported that the Trump administration was refusing to turn over the keys to those two official accounts to the Biden transition team.
The @POTUS account has 33.2 million followers and @WhiteHouse account has 26 million followers.
Trump's personal account has 88.5 million followers, compared to 21.6 million for Biden's personal account.
Lawmakers in Congress are under fire from digital rights campaigners for embedding three controversial changes to online copyright and trademark laws into the must-pass $2.3 trillion legislative package—which includes a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill and a $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill—that could receive floor votes in the House and Senate as early as Monday evening.
The punitive provisions crammed into the enormous bill (pdf), warned Evan Greer of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, "threaten ordinary Internet users with up to $30,000 in fines for engaging in everyday activity such as downloading an image and re-uploading it... [or] sharing memes."
While the citizenry had almost no time to process the actual contents of the 5,593 page legislative text, Greer said Monday afternoon that the CASE Act, Felony Streaming Act, and Trademark Modernization Act "are in fact included in the must-pass omnibus spending bill."
As Mike Masnick explained in a piece at TechDirt on Monday:
The CASE Act will supercharge copyright trolling exactly at a time when we need to fix the law to have less trolling. And the felony streaming bill (which was only just revealed last week with no debate or discussion) includes provisions that are so confusing and vague no one is sure if it makes sites like Twitch into felons.
"The fact that these are getting added to the must-pass government funding bill is just bad government," Masnick added. "And congressional leadership should hear about this."
Um. Admitting that you're using a must pass government funding bill to sneak through legislation that you couldn't pass normally is... a choice I guess. https://t.co/atkS2Ny8nr
According to Fight for the Future, "More than 20,000 people had called on House and Senate leadership to remove these dangerous and unnecessary provisions from the must-pass bill," yet Congress chose to include them anyway.
"This is atrocious," Greer said in her statement. "We're facing a massive eviction crisis and millions are unemployed due to the pandemic, but congressional leaders could only muster $600 stimulus checks for Covid relief."
And yet, lawmakers "managed to cram in handouts for content companies like Disney?" Greer continued. "The CASE Act is a terribly written law that will threaten ordinary Internet users with huge fines for everyday online activity. It's absurd that lawmakers included these provisions in a must-pass spending bill."
They're voting soon. Keep making noise! Even if this bill passes we are going to have a massive fight in 2021 to fix the DMCA and defend the rights of Internet users and online creators. Keep retweeting, keep signing petitions, keep sounding the alarm.https://t.co/AuXeBYNEOm
— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) December 21, 2020
Explaining why the inclusion of these provisions is dangerous, Masnick said "there's a reason [why] copyright is generally controversial." Even "small changes" threaten a "massive impact on... the public's ability to express themselves," he wrote.
Greer echoed Masnick, saying that "we've seen time and time again that changes to copyright law have profound implications for online freedom of expression and human rights."
"Frivolous copyright takedowns are already a huge problem for the next generation of artists and creators, streamers, gamers, and activists," Greer noted, advocating instead for what she called "a fair system that protects human rights and ensures artists are fairly compensated."
Considering how artists and musicians "are suffering immensely during the pandemic," Greer added, "Congress should be working quickly to provide immediate relief, not cramming controversial, poison-pill legislation into budget bills to appease special interests."
The way Congress jammed through these changes "is a total and complete travesty," said Masnick. "People should be mad about this and should hold the congressional leadership of both parties responsible."
Calling on "House and Senate leadership to remove the copyright provisions from the continuing resolution and move them through regular order so we can have transparent and open debate about the right balance," Greer said that "these types of decisions should never be made in closed-door negotiations between politicians and industry or rushed through as part of some must-pass spending package."
“It is better to buy than compete,” he allegedly wrote in an email in 2008, according to the lawsuit. Four years later, after Facebook purchased what he had called a “very disruptive” photo-sharing app, he celebrated by explaining to a colleague in another email: “Instagram was our threat. … One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”
As an antitrust professor preparing a new spring course called “Antitrust for Big Tech,” I read the FTC’s Dec. 9 complaint with great interest. I have taught my students for years that internal documents can come back to haunt antitrust defendants. But I have never seen a plaintiff’s case rely so heavily on a CEO’s own words.
As I read the FTC’s summary of the arguments it plans to make at trial, I began to highlight every direct quote from an internal Facebook communication. My highlighter ran out of ink.
Basing a monopolization case on a CEO’s own explanations of his conduct may seem like a straightforward strategy to most people. But among judges and antitrust scholars, it’s actually controversial, as it is sure to be in this case.
Despite that controversy, the FTC’s choice to hoist Facebook by its own petard makes sense. Zuckerberg’s emails are voluminous and specific in describing how the mergers will insulate his company from competition. They avoid most of the problems critics have with using what lawyers call “hot documents” to make an antitrust case.
It worked against Microsoft
And anyway, it’s worked before.
The case against Facebook bears similarities to U.S. v. Microsoft, the landmark 2001 case that found the software company liable for monopolization. Here, the FTC will have to prove that Facebook, like Microsoft, acquired its market power in the social media market by excluding rivals, not merely by making a great product. And in both cases, internal statements by executives play a big role.
In the case, the government produced a 1995 memo in which Microsoft founder Bill Gates identified Netscape as “a new competitor ‘born’ on the internet.” A few years later, another executive allegedly said, “We are going to cut off [Netscape’s] air supply.”
When Microsoft proceeded to do so by impeding Netscape’s access to Windows users, statements like these made it hard for the company to argue that its conduct wasn’t predatory, and Microsoft lost the case.
As successful and intuitive as the strategy is, courts are surprisingly reluctant to hang their antitrust rulings on internal documents revealing an executive’s intent.
The problem with relying too much on internal emails
Judges often say that antitrust law is interested only in the economic effects of a business’s conduct – such as whether it suppressed competition – not the motives of its executives. Critics have argued that CEOs are not economists and are sometimes prone to chest-thumping braggadocio, making their emails and other communications better for wowing juries than making an economic argument.
Judges and scholars worry that juries will see all aggressive comments as evidence of exclusionary intent. But you can “destroy” a competitor by outdoing him; economists call that competition.
For example, Facebook’s employee manual reads: “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, something else will.” That sounds ominous, but creating things to keep rival startups at bay is exactly what the antitrust laws want Facebook to do – innovate.
More fundamentally, relying on statements like these – where a defendant seems to reveal subjective intent – is controversial because the law is unclear about why or whether a defendant’s intent to suppress competition matters at all. The clearest statement we get on the issue – from U.S. v. Alcoa – is enigmatic: “To read the [law] as demanding any ‘specific’ intent, makes nonsense of it, for no monopolist monopolizes unconscious of what he is doing.”
Even lawyers haven’t been able to figure out exactly what that means.
Lawmakers have been increasingly grilling tech companies like Facebook in recent years.
On the other hand, other types of evidence may not be enough to make an antitrust case.
The inquiry in a monopolization case is often framed as whether the monopolist enjoys its market position because it excluded rivals or because it made a better or cheaper product. The difficulty with using only objective market evidence to answer that question is that the evidence usually points in both directions.
Defendants can almost always identify some product improvement that came from their conduct, muddying the waters of the plaintiff’s story of exclusion. In the Facebook case, the company has pointed to Instagram’s growing user base and improved interface during its time under Facebook’s control.
So in most monopolization cases, courts get stuck if they try to use only market facts to answer the ultimate question: Did the monopolist flourish because of the improvements or because of diminished competition?
That’s where “intent evidence” – information about what a defendant was thinking – can help. If a CEO intended a merger to insulate her company from competition, it likely did in fact insulate the company from competition. Judges will attribute some of the company’s dominance to exclusion, and that violates the antitrust laws.
That’s why judges will turn to evidence of intent, especially if it is more than just economically ambiguous declarations of war against rivals.
Neutralizing competitors
Unfortunately for Facebook, Zuckerberg’s emails are explicit and detailed in describing his desire to avoid competing with Instagram and WhatsApp. The court will find that relevant – and possibly damning.
For example, in the months leading up to the acquisition, Facebook’s chief financial officer outlined three reasons for buying Instagram:
“1) neutralize a potential competitor?… 2) acquire talent?… 3) integrate their products with ours in order to improve our service?” Zuckerberg responded, “It’s a combination of (1) and (3).”
Zuckerberg goes on to explain Instagram’s competitive threat at length. By the time he gets to the product improvement explanation, he’s changed his mind. “(3) is also a factor, but in reality we already know [Instagram’s] social dynamics and we will integrate them in the next 12-24 months anyway.”
After the Microsoft case, many companies adopted communications policies that discourage the creation of documents just like these. Google, for one, circulates a five-point antitrust “communications safety” policy to employees.
What I find truly remarkable about this case is not the volume of internal quotes in the complaint, but the paper trail a sophisticated CEO like Zuckerberg created of Facebook’s transgressions – which is now why a federal antitrust lawsuit poses an existential threat to his company.
