Category: Technology

IT’S TIME TO CONTROL THE RUNAWAY TRAIN OF SOCIAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Like something out of a bad science fiction movie, social media technology has evolved into a grotesque, out-of-control monster that threatens our way of life. The beast’s ferocity has expanded so quickly and mindlessly that nobody is able to tame it, including the now-billionaire geeks who created it. Think that’s a harsh overstatement? Then look at these facts:

• Facebook admitted that it unknowingly accepted payment in Rubles from Russia for disguised pro-Trump propaganda spread to at least 10 million U.S. users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

• Twitter is equipped to place anonymous racist ads, ordered online, targeting 14.5 million users identified by Internet usage as responding to the n-word; 26.3 million to the term “wetback” and 18.6 million to Nazi.

• Google offers an online advertising tool in which ads are sold and placed with targeted users on the basis of such concerns as: “black people ruin neighborhoods”, “evil Jew” and “Jewish control of banks”.

To make matters worse, the offending content, placed on these sites by unidentified customers, have none of the visual properties of an online advertisement. They looked like ordinary posts, all part of a user’s daily newsfeed. In the case of the Russian Facebook buy, news-like items linking Hillary Clinton to Black Likes Matter or American Muslims were placed, for a price, on the pages of users who had clicked “like” on similar racist content.

Now, if these vile, misleading blurbs had been handled the way media outlets used to do business, a salesperson would have executed a formal contract for the buy and the advertisers’ name would appear in the copy. But that’s so 1990s. These social media sites rake in their billions over the transom of their medium. It’s all done online. In fact, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, until recently, brushed off reports of clandestine Russian interference on his site as a “pretty crazy idea.” Then he hired 3,000 “content monitors”, and suddenly hundreds of Russian “ads” and fake accounts were found. Same thing happened at Twitter.

Executives from the big three platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Google – steadfastly insist that there was never an intention to allow this kind of nefarious, deceptive activity on their sites. Think about that for a minute. Their defense is that the technology is at fault, that a bad algorithm did it. If they are right, then shame on all of us for allowing artificial intelligence to run roughshod over our democracy, for letting the technology control us, rather than the other way around. It’s time to take that control back.

Based on population, Facebook is larger than any country in the world. Except for Asia, it’s bigger than any continent. And it continues to grow at 17% a year. Zuckerberg, as an idealistic young Harvard student in 2004, created it in his dorm room. He said it would bring the world together through a “free flow of information”. He got the information flow part right, but there is nothing free about it. Facebook is now the largest online advertising company in the world, worth almost half a trillion dollars. As British writer John Lanchester put it, “Facebook was built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers.”

And that was precisely the transaction that Russia was looking for. It gave the Kremlin access to Facebook accounts of racist and anti-Muslim Americans, a ripe audience for pro-Trump messages paid for in Rubbles, but without a hint that they came from a foreign power. CNN reported Thursday that Russia’s Facebook campaign buy on Trump’s behalf was orchestrated so surgically that it hit disproportionately on a large number of targets in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that helped push Trump over the top in electoral votes.

So there is now a legislative campaign for transparency in digital political ads. Sadly, even that embarrassingly modest proposal is facing strong resistance. And it doesn’t begin to fix the much broader problem. Facebook, Google and Twitter are not just multi-billion-dollar conglomerates. Together, they control the communication infrastructure for most of the free world. Yet, the people who run these companies are not publically held to a single standard of accountability. Barbers and horse trainers are more closely regulated than these gigantic informational monoliths.

This is a long-overdue transformational moment. Technology has enhanced and lengthened our lives in so many ways. But that is no excuse for humanity to abdicate control, to let technology run itself, free from controls that reflect the values that only humans can construct. Yet that is precisely what has happened with these social media companies. No sick, ruthless executive knowingly took Russia’s money to let them tamper with our elections. It just happened because the technology allowed it to. Unrelated to the election, there are tens of millions of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, routinely sending off links to equally fake news sites. Neither company planned for that result; it was just technology doing its thing, unrestricted by human thought.

Folks with a rudimentary knowledge of code writing can create Twitter and Facebook bots, fake accounts, complete with pictures and bio. For all sorts of nefarious purposes, “bot farms” have been created to fire off thousands of phony messages every day. It is estimated, for example, that 43% of President Trump’s 38.6 million Twitter followers are fake accounts. In a recent high point of absurdity, Trump retweeted a follower’s post that blasted “fake news”. Turns out it had been created by a fake account.

This can’t continue. These companies can’t be allowed to simply sit back and bank their billions while their algorithms wreak havoc on the things that really matter to us, like truth and our democratic process. Whether through legislation or regulatory control, these corporate executives have to be sent back to their laboratories. They need to be forced to retool their technological monstrosities so that they comport with our values, not destroy them.

WHITE RAGE IS NO FIX FOR DEEP PROBLEMS OF THE WORKING CLASS

The angry white power movement that helped propel Donald Trump’s ascendancy from provocateur to president rests on one truth and two lies. The truth is that the so-called forgotten and downtrodden middle class really has been seriously harmed and ignored. These are the lies: its travail was caused by non-whites, and Trump will make everything better.

Over the past decade, the “American Dream” that many of us grew up on has faded slowly into oblivion. Gone is the social compact by which hard work – with or without a college degree – delivered the good life, complete with home ownership, medical insurance, a retirement plan, and a spouse able to stay home to raise the kids and manage the household. There is a trove of economic data that paints a dismally bleak picture for middle America. Real wages keep falling. Good jobs are disappearing. Hope has morphed into anger.

Of course, this dream was always a white thing, at least in terms of attainability. Statistically, far more Caucasians got there than racial minorities, or women not married to a man. That explains the results of a recent poll that showed white men are far more angry about their economic plight than blacks, Hispanics, Latinos or women of any race. This, despite the fact that women and minorities are still at an economic disadvantage compared to white males. The idyllic middle-class life was built with decent paychecks issued mainly to guys who were white. When the jobs fueling this lifestyle started to disappear, the dream faded, leaving a thick residue of anger in its wake.

And along came Trump, the pied piper for angry white men. He wowed them with a simple two-note tune: America is overrun by people who don’t look like us; and, we need to bring back all the good jobs we lost. Here he is, waxing polemically with one-eighth of a run-on sentence during the campaign: “We’re going to bring back our jobs, and we’re going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again. . .” Unsurprisingly, he won the votes of white males without a college degree by a margin of 49 percentage points. And it’s been a love-and-anger fest ever since.

Those white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville may have been on the fringes of this movement, but they voiced the fears of many in their demographic by chanting, “You will not replace us.” In 1980, whites were 80% of the U.S. population. They are now at 63%, heading to under 50% by 2043. Of course, there is not a scintilla of economic evidence linking white economic malaise to an increase in diversity. But anger always breathes better with a bogeyman, particularly in authoritarian politics.

Still, Trump was on to something that most politicians ignored. The middle class’ economic pain was much more than aftershocks of the Great Recession. The lost jobs aren’t coming back. We are in the throes of a massive structural change, marked by an obscene income disparity, and a growing inability of ordinary folks to support themselves. The situation has gotten so bad that, for the first time in decades, the life expectancy of middle aged white Americans has started to drop. Earlier this year, Princeton University researchers attributed the trend to what they called “deaths of despair”. They identified four causes: stress of economic struggles, suicides, alcohol and drug overdoses.

Unfortunately for Trump’s base – and the rest of America – anger alone will not restore middle class vitality and viability, particularly misplaced anger. Nonwhites, whose economic woes are far worse than those of their Caucasian counterparts, are not to blame. Neither are trade agreements or globalization. Sure, NAFTA wreaked some havoc on our jobs, but that was more than 20 years ago. Most of that work is now performed by robots or other nonhuman technological processes.

Two Ball State professors examined manufacturing job losses between 2000 and 2010. They found that 13% were lost due to trade agreements and 87% through automation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the high-paying manufacturing sector accounted for 34.4% of the country’s jobs in 2000, but only 8.7% in 2015. Despite the dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs, productivity has remained relatively constant. That’s because more stuff gets made with fewer workers. The Brookings Institute says it now takes only six workers to generate $1 million in manufacturing output. The same level in 1980 would have taken 25 workers.

Simply put, the problem facing America’s working class is pervasive and systemic. The inertia of uncontrolled technology is redefining the world of work, and eliminating millions of good jobs. Tragically, nobody is doing anything about it. Plenty of people are thinking about it – economists, academicians, think tanks. Fixes like massive worker retraining, job creation, technology regulation and a guaranteed annual income are out there. But they haven’t gone beyond the pondering stage because most of our elected office holders have lacked the courage to seriously tackle this issue.

And that gave Trump an opening. Long fueled by anger himself, the Donald opportunistically saw what others wouldn’t: millions of outraged and forgotten people, fed up with negative balances and surrounded by folks who weren’t like them. Nobody seemed to give a damn about their plight. Then along came the star of “The Apprentice”, every bit as worked up, bitter and belligerent toward the ruling class as they were. Why wouldn’t they drink the Kool Aid?

Meanwhile, deaths of despair are now baked into the American Dream. Trump’s promise to bring all the great jobs back was nothing more than slick Willy Loman bravado. However, there is still time to rewrite the next act of this play. Are you listening, Democrats? It’s time to fill the Republican void with a smart, effective, Ted Kennedy-like program that will save the middle class. Mocking Trump’s failures is not sufficient. What we need is a sound legislative plan, an all-out campaign to replace despair with hope.

A MURDER ON FACEBOOK CASTS LIGHT ON TECHNOLOGY’S DARK SIDE

“Facebook Murder” blared from the headlines a few days back. I took it as an extreme approach to unfriending and was all set to delete my sarcastic political memes. Figured my life depended on it. Turns out this was far more serious than un-liking a post. A guy in Cleveland actually filmed himself murdering a man, a random victim, and quickly uploaded the video to Facebook. The murderer killed himself a few days later, apparently off camera.

Although we seem to be building an immunity to shock and dismay, the reaction to this murder broadcast was close to apoplectic. “No More Snuff Videos on Facebook,” demanded the Boston Globe. “Facebook Helps Violence Go Viral,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. “What Could be Worse than Murder on Facebook?” asked Inc.com. Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post media columnist, said this of the episode: “Facebook’s existential crisis arrived with a vengeance this week.”

Really? So this is where we draw the line? This is where Facebook turns evil, when a guy kills somebody in cold blood and turns it into social media content? Death and violence are no strangers to Facebook. Earlier this year, a two-year-old boy’s death was streamed live there. He’d been riding in a car with his aunt and her boyfriend when a driver cut them off, left his vehicle and started shooting. The aunt filmed it for Facebook Live. Four teenagers filmed themselves on the same platform while torturing a mentally disabled man. Just last month, several men live streamed their sexual assault of a teenage girl while dozens watched on Facebook.

None of those cases provoked the wrath that followed Steve Stephens’ Easter Sunday murder of Robert Goodwin Sr., his handpicked snuff film victim. Rape, torture and a dead child fly under the radar, but this first made-for-Facebook murder was apparently a step too far over the line of outrage. Facebook is sympathetic and insists it moves as quickly as it can to delete offending content when users complain, but that the process can take hours. Amazingly, however, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a plan. It is called Artificial Intelligence. He says it will take many years to fully develop, but he envisions software sophisticated enough to distinguish between acceptable and deplorable content. Imagine that: an AI program to tell the difference between right and wrong, between a cute kitty video and a murder in progress.

Remember the days when technology was cool because it gave us more control over our lives? Think of that first time you sat smugly on the couch and changed the channel with the push of a remote button. If you weren’t up for a long diatribe on the wonders of supply side economics from your Republican brother-in-law, you could let the answering machine deal with him. And if you didn’t have the slightest idea what supply side economics was all about, along came Google. The technology was there to serve us. It was, in a sense, an extension of ourselves. We retained control.

That’s no longer the case. We now have social media networks so large and complicated that the only way they can be stopped from publishing vile, offensive content is to create a whole new layer of technology through Artificial Intelligence. When was it, exactly, that we, as a people, ceded control to technology? More importantly, how do we get it back?

This is about a lot more than one deranged man staging a murder on Facebook. A huge fact of our new technological life is that people are being constantly hurt and traumatized over social media with seemingly no remedy in sight, save a promise of AI and not-yet-invented software. Hundreds of kids kill themselves every year after being bombarded with cyber messages telling them they are too fat, or ugly, or dumb, or worthless. Over and over.

A sidebar of the Facebook killer story, one that got very little attention because it represented business as usual, involved the killer’s former girlfriend. Before Stephens pulled the trigger, he demanded, at gunpoint, that his victim pronounce the woman’s name for the video production. It was Joy Lane. Although she had nothing to do with this murder, Lane was quickly persecuted by the tapping of angry fingers on thousands of keypads. The messages: “Moral: don’t date Joy Lane.” “Joy Lane deserves to feel horrible.” “He killed people because of a fat bitch.”

Twitter hashtags emerged quickly. One was #JoyLane Massacre. “No disrespect but if somebody had to die it should’ve been Joy Lane,” read one of the tweets. Over on YouTube, there was an “Original Song About Stephens Ex-Girlfriend”. Lyrics: “Hell yeah I’m sick, psychotic deranged/And it’s all over a bitch named Joy Lane.”

This kind of stuff happens all the time. It breaks people and destroys lives. It has become the new normal. Jonathan Weisman, deputy Washington editor of the New York Times, quit Twitter last year after a barrage of anti-Semitic messages. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti unplugged from all social media after receiving a rape threat against her five-year-old daughter. Until Reddit finally banned it, there was a discussion group with 150,000 subscribers called “Fat People Hate”. Users would find pictures of overweight people, mostly women, attach mean captions and post them on the target’s Facebook Page.

Other than a complete social media withdrawal, there is no quick and easy answer to this problem. For starters we need to think seriously about our relationship with technology. It has given us so much, but it is quickly evolving beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to shape it in ways that will enhance, rather than denigrate, the quality of our lives. How we and future generations respond to this dilemma will determine whether technology is an instrument that adds value to our civilization, or one that manages to suck all the humanity out of it. If we don’t find a way to control technology, it will end up controlling us. That’s one horror film that should never be made.