Moderation is the Commodity
August 18, 2018 12:49 PM   Subscribe

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed a discrimination complaint against Facebook today for letting landlords target protected attributes for ads on the Facebook platform. Should we let Facebook slide by on this one? Tarleton Gillespie wants us to take a closer look at what we're really expecting out of platforms. His thesis: by letting platforms turn moderation into a commodity, we've let that conversation shift away from duties and responsibilities.

Gillespie is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an adjunct professor at Cornell who recently published a book called Custodians of the Internet. A lot of interesting fights in the Internet culture wars (Logan Paul, Twitter and Alex Jones, and so on) come down to our ill-defined expectations of what the duties of an online platform should be. Do they have a public duty? Should they be neutral? And how can they fulfill our conflicting expectations?
posted by redct (15 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Radiolab’s latest podcast has a history of Facebook’s moderation policies.
posted by interogative mood at 1:08 PM on August 18, 2018


Hand wringing over the role that platforms should or should not play in the public discourse is all well and good, but I don't think many of the companies responsible for running these platforms are primarily interested in the public good. Because, perhaps (probably) perversely, their only real obligation is to increase shareholder value, the set of incentives and disincentives to their behavior is not being generated from the "let's increase the public good" model, it's being generated from the "let's increase ad revenue" model. Sometimes it serves the latter to make it seem like you care about the former (here's looking at you, Zuck) but sometimes you just do whatever the hell you want even when the other platforms are at least trying to look like they're moderating hate speech (Dorsey and Alex Jones). As if a week's suspension is going to make Jones reexamine his propensity for being an absolute shitheel. A week's suspension is almost worse than no action at all, inasmuch as it feels like Twitter took the time to figure out how they could do absolutely as little as possible and then try to spin it like this is the appropriate response.

A lot of people (myself included) have therefore opted to reduce our exposure to social media platforms as much as possible. I realize this probably hasn't had much effect on ad revenues (yet) but I wonder whether it's the thin end of the wedge. Maybe in 10 years people will talk about FB the way they talk about myspace now.
posted by axiom at 1:50 PM on August 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


I sure hope so axiom, because the current crop of tech megacorps are assholes. I too am among those who basically just doesn't use social media anymore, or anyway avoids it as much as possible. It just doesn't seem to have much value relative to how awful it is. I don't feel less connected than I did when I used that stuff, but I do feel more present in my environment and more in control of my own life. It's been a good decision, for me.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:59 PM on August 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


Hand wringing over the role that platforms should or should not play in the public discourse is all well and good, but I don't think many of the companies responsible for running these platforms are primarily interested in the public good.

So it becomes a question of regulation, then. Legislation is the ultimate way to state "what we expect" from businesses, after all.
posted by Dysk at 2:25 PM on August 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


So it becomes a question of regulation, then.

Welp, then I guess we're fucked.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:38 PM on August 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


Ok, wait. From the first link:

draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

You can literally draw a red line for Facebook housing ads? Did their entire compliance department miss that month of school??
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 3:59 PM on August 18, 2018 [28 favorites]


Facebook and Twitter have really morphed from places where you primarily see content created by your contacts to places where you largely see content created by people you don't know. Both now show posts that your contacts didn't create or even share, just liked or reacted to or commented on.

That's really made it difficult to moderate your own feed. I can mute people who post annoying things. I can even mute people who reshare annoying things. But it's not reasonable to have to unfollow people because they sometimes react to something I find annoying or to avoid interacting with posts because I'll inadvertently amplify them.
posted by smelendez at 6:31 PM on August 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'm not sure I see the link between the Facebook lawsuit and the moderation argument. The problem with Facebook's targetted housing advertising here isn't that it's failing to moderate out discriminatory language - it may well be doing this, but it doesn't seem to be part of the complaint. The complaint is that Facebook is engaging in illegal discrimination when it chooses who gets to see, and who doesn't get to see, housing advertisements (the fact that it does so at the direction of advertisers is probably irrelevant to its liability). That's quite a different problem to the problems of moderation.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 8:30 PM on August 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


I like the lessons we might learn from this.
posted by filtergik at 4:16 AM on August 19, 2018


The complaint is that Facebook is engaging in illegal discrimination when it chooses who gets to see, and who doesn't get to see, housing advertisements (the fact that it does so at the direction of advertisers is probably irrelevant to its liability).

In an ideal world, while it would be irrelevant to Facebook'liability, the companies making use of the tools allowing illegal targeting would also be held responsible. To analogise: Facebook is the hitman, and are absolutely legally liable for the killing, but the person that hired them is guilty of murder too.
posted by Dysk at 4:27 AM on August 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is much worse than Facebook's failure to moderate content to some people's satisfaction. In the US, Facebook has no legal obligation to moderate user content, and the government has, for the most part, no right to impose such an obligation.

By contrast, Facebook has an obvious legal obligation not to sell advertising which violates housing discrimination laws, such laws are neither recent nor obscure, Facebook has plenty of lawyers, and (perhaps most damning) Facebook's advertising business is simply loaded with complex rules that it enforces with great vigor.

I think there's a decent chance that this violation will be found to be knowing and intentional -- emails or witnesses saying that Facebook could give landlords and brokers tools to evade the law -- and even in the absence of a smoking gun the reckless indifference to the law will result in severe penalties. I'd also bet that the same targeting tools are being used to violate employment discrimination laws too, which have for the most part much greater penalties.

Overall this threatens to take Facebook into the position of Uber late in the reign of Travis Kalanick -- scofflaw as business strategy. It could quite literally cost Zuckerberg his job.
posted by MattD at 5:52 AM on August 19, 2018 [11 favorites]


It could quite literally cost Zuckerberg his job.

One can only hope.

The the ability to discriminate between and target separately distinct groups (defined demographically, politically, or geographically) is basically what Facebook is selling to advertisers. It's therefore not surprising that the system was set up in ways that facilitate illegal forms of discrimination, and that companies have opted to illegally discriminate given the tools to do so.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:34 AM on August 19, 2018 [8 favorites]


hmm. How is this different than, say, sending out a paper mailer advertising houses for sale? are there laws saying you can't discriminate on where you send those? Can someone share an analogy for how this advertising crosses the line?
posted by rebent at 6:52 PM on August 19, 2018


oooooookay never mind, I read TFA and it's not just targeting ads based on location, it's

For example, HUD's complaint alleges Facebook's platform violates the Fair Housing Act. It enables advertisers to, among other things:

display housing ads either only to men or women;
not show ads to Facebook users interested in an "assistance dog," "mobility scooter," "accessibility" or "deaf culture";
not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "child care" or "parenting," or show ads only to users with children above a specified age;
to display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the "Christian Church," "Sikhism," "Hinduism," or the "Bible."
not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "Latin America," "Canada," "Southeast Asia," "China," "Honduras," or "Somalia."
draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

posted by rebent at 6:54 PM on August 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


MattD: "scofflaw as business strategy. It could quite literally cost Zuckerberg his job."

Not exactly a new thing for the company or Zuckerberg considering their original dataset was ill-gotten.
posted by Mitheral at 11:33 PM on August 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


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