I’ve been known to criticize Microsoft for having a lot of bark and not much bite when it comes to protecting Internet users’ rights. But this LinkedIn China pullout is a serious move and they are to be congratulated. bbc.com/news/technolog…
Of course, as the article notes, “LinkedIn had been the only major Western social-media platform operating in China” and blocked journalists critical of China. Still. They tried something, they wound up yielding ground in ways they surely didn’t like, and they decided to stop.
Let’s congratulate Microsoft on waking away from the Chinese market (for this at least) and go back to scrutinizing the major, human rights-damaging compromises that platforms are being pressured to make in Russia and Turkey right now.
Attention from the world — press, civil society, governments — can help determine whether platforms give in to Russian and Turkish govts’ pressure to compromise Internet users’ rights and safety.
That attention is grievously lacking right now.
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It's odd to me that the bill targets *personalized* ranking but not general engagement-based ranking. If the problem is that ranking is personalized, you would think the legislative fix lies in privacy rights rather than changing a content law like CDA 230. 1/
As usual, the kind of prohibited ranking sweeps very broadly, and would seem to discourage platforms from making beneficial ranking changes in response to e.g. coordinated inauthentic behavior. (Maybe the idea is to address that by covering only personalized ranking?) 2/
This AG Opinion in a pending CJEU case about the tensions between GDPR and journalists' rights to access court records is pretty amazing. curia.europa.eu/juris/document…
It's full of things like "[in] an administrative law dispute between Z (‘Citizen Z’) and the Mayor of Utrecht (‘Mayor M’)... X (‘Lawyer X’) acted as Citizen Z’s representative."
Reading it, I wondered if the AG was deliberately making things sound as Kafkaesque as possible.
And it turns out the AG -- a respected legal expert working for one of the most important EU institutions -- really WAS trying to sound like Kafka. Check out this footnote!
Some of my favorite responses to the "Facebook Files" coverage, in no particular order. 1/
Hands down winner is @persily with not only a concrete proposal for better research transparency, but actual draft legislation to get it done. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/1…
2/
@Klonick brings calm and sanity, and rightly emphasizes the very serious issues the FB Files reveal for users outside major markets, who are getting a much less safe version of the product. nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opi…
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There is always a cat-and-mouse game between (1) makers of ranking algorithms and (2) content providers who profit from high rankings.
That background fact should inform every analysis of algorithms and amplification.
Sometimes we call that "spam." Sometimes it's "content farms" or "inauthentic behavior." Sometimes it overlaps with clear societal harms, other times it just degrades service quality. But it is always there, and it always shapes the available choices for platforms and regulators.
Will someone *please* write about this for a policy/news reporter audience? There is literally an entire industry of experts who could easily explain it. SEO conferences and publications like searchengineland.com talk about it all the time.
I finally read Øe’s Opinion in the CJEU’s pending case about Article 17 filtering/fundamental rights, and it is amazing. Here comes a long thread about what stood out to me. curia.europa.eu/juris/document…
Of course, I don’t like the upshot: Article 17 stands. Øe reconciles that with users' rights by, as @bjjuette and @giuliapriora put it, confining the law in a “tight corset of conditions to safeguard compliance with EU fundamental rights.” copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/07/20/on-…
@bjjuette@giuliapriora (That blog post is a great overall explainer of the issue and the Opinion, BTW, with lots of useful links.)
Something terrible is happening in Canadian Internet law, and the people who care in the rest of the world are mostly stretched too thin to pay attention. We’re counting on people like @mgeist, @EmilyLaidlaw, @tamir_i, and @vivekdotca to somehow fix it. 1/
@mgeist@EmilyLaidlaw@tamir_i@vivekdotca This is a thread listing some of the law’s problems as identified by @mgeist, and flagging a few resources showing the law’s major human rights problems. Others who know of more that might be useful for those working on this in Canada, please add on. 2/
Many of @mgeist's recent posts are about the rushed and secretive lawmaking process. This latest one lays out the current proposals. michaelgeist.ca/2021/07/online…
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