A. Phone and the last president ial debate. Facebook says it has a plan for fighting misinformation if the u. S. Election in their words descends into chaos but all facebook and other social media platforms doing enough to stop the spread of fake news and incitement of violence this is inside story. Hello and welcome to the program im wrong on social media shape the way people across the globe perceive everything from politics to pop culture and Tech Companies have long taken a hands off approach all giving that uses should be able to judge content for themselves but critics say the social media giants have a responsibility to make sure their platforms arent being misused to incite violence or spread misinformation facebook now says it will take aggressive measures to restrict use as if the u. S. Election in november descends into chaos this is what the companys head of Global Affairs nick clegg said in an interview to the Financial Times there are some break glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and worse still violent set of circumstances we have acted aggressively in other parts of the world where we think that there is a real civic instability and we obviously have the tools to do that. Facebook says it has previously limited content on its platform during periods of unrest in countries like me and in india but it has faced criticism for failing to prevent russian attempts to manipulate the 2016 u. S. Elections facebooks now under mounting pressure to address misinformation and Voter Suppression ahead of novembers vote there are growing concerns that media can be used to contest a result or even call for violent protests among facebooks new policies will be adding a warning to posts in which candidates might be prematurely claiming victory. Lets bring in our guests in washington d. C. Rebecca mackinnon director of ranking Digital Rights and author of consent of the networked in the dutch city of mushtaq to catalina go enter an assistant professor in private law a master at university and comanager the much stricter law and tech lab now i want to begin in washington d. C. With you Rebecca Mackinnon these are our extraordinary words from the facebook boss nick clegg he says if the u. S. Election descends into chaos they have a plan but all these words a little bit disingenuous given facebooks failures in the past when it comes to policing false information on the platform is this too little too late you think. Well it is it is too little too late my Program Actually weve released a report a few months ago where we talked about the entire problem is their fundamental Business Model that enables people not only advertisers but also people with pages who pay to boost their pages to target. Very specific people according to their traits their race their you know various traits where they are with specific messages and thats how the platform is organized so its organized sport for people to strategically work to manipulate information to manipulate Public Opinion so to say that after the election they have a plan to limit this information its going to be as difficult as it has been for them to stop her with misinformation and all the other misinformation that has continued to rage on the platform. For rebecca this facebook cell given as if that actually theyve been quite successful with combating coded misinformation there is a coded Information Center on facebook it pops up on youll see every day tries to give you the right information facebook say that theyre all they are trying but the platform is huge i mean what youll suggesting they dont doing enough but facebook say that they all. Well are trying it would certainly be the worst if they were not trying but this is fundamentally about the design of the plot and its about the design of a platform thats optimized to help advertisers reach as many eyeballs as possible not to serve as a platform for informed public discourse. And so therefore because its algorithms optimize content its going to get the most inducement which is often the most controversial because there their platform enables people to be targeted with messages. Effort that they have to curb this information is is a little bit like. A bandaid on. What would be catalytic for a very long time big social has always said look its up to you how you use the platform we just give you the platform its up to you who you react to who you engage with thats not our responsibility theres a very very american argument that it comes to you know freedom of speech but not right now what we have is a freedom of speech that is this going slightly crazy where anybody can post absolutely anything now whose responsibility is it then is it big social facebooks responsibility or is it education on part of the user should we be more knowledgeable about what were clicking on do we need social media policies in schools for example do we need to educate ourselves. And read that those are very very important questions and let me unpack this the points that youre making and the questions that youre raising by 1st of all building on what rebecca was mentioning about the main Business Model of facebook so rebecca was mentioning that its possible to buy advertising from facebook and that advertising goes into what is known as archives the ad archives of facebook and twitter has those as well and what we see is that recently specifically in october last year twitter announced that its not going to accept political ads anymore facebook also mentioned one week before the u. S. Elections were not going to allow people to buy advertising on the platform for political speech what that advertising does is as rebecca was also mentioning in a way discriminately in many different social situations increases the reach of a specific message and this has been the model that we know from facebook so far now new Business Models have emerged and those Business Models also. Challenge what you were mentioning earlier this dichotomy between we have a platform on the one hand and we have a user on the other hand the picture is not so simple anymore in 2020 we have a plethora of other users in between with different paths for instance social media implementers social media lancers do not necessarily have a of an official definition and any jurisdiction maybe there might be guidelines but we dont know how to define them because they can be anything and everything and increasingly because we see that there is this gray space of banning political ads which are labeled ads in the archive of twitter and facebook i see that theres going to be an increasing opportunity for influencers to become vehicles of advertising for political speech. But it happens constantly now if fail becoming the very cause of advertising political speech its not illegal is it facebook were allowed to do this. So thats a very good point and then were even in murkier waters because for better or worse the ads that you see sponsored ads which in 2016 there have been so many campaigns of this information that have been using the facebook ad system but at least they were labeled as such they were labeled they were labeled as add when you have influence or marketing and when you have an influence or being paid to engage in a political opinion and to disseminate it to the millions the followers they have on multiple platforms then that becomes even more dangerous because its very difficult given their characteristics of relatability genuine characters and also their proximity to their followers its going to be very difficult for followers to distinguish is this something that they really need or are they getting money to say that so thats why its very important to think about extending perhaps existing consumer law rules that apply to advertising also for the kind of political advertising that influencers engage in. Rebecca mackinnon facebook has set up this war room theyre calling it a war room for the election as guys have a lot of people in it who are going to be policing whats going on on the night of the election if they suggest if somebody suggests that they have won the election and theres i prefer it theyre going to crack down on that special one example that theyve given but this war is owned by facebook this is the Police Policing themselves as i could not see. What is a problem and facebook has all already said you know in the past we dont know what theyre going to do immediately after the election they havent made clear but if if the president himself or if many members of of his party. Post content that is clearly false in the past the government has said that their normal rules dont apply to politicians necessarily and so how will facebook apply its rules to these political figures and so its going its going to get very contentious and this is just a problem with the nature of the entire platform it has not been sufficiently clear and transparent about how its rules are enforced about how its advertising system works people dont know or understand where a lot of the information theyre getting is coming from necessarily d theyre inclined to believe people d or their friends who may be sharing this information. So the system is not set up in a way that that favors factual information and as you say the trick is how how do you how do you oversee this at this point when it is all so far down the road already. And as you mention free speach. Yes. Facebook has a right actually under under us 1st amendment to organize its platform how it sees fit to police or not police content as it sees fit but the question is what is its responsibility to society and democracy. Mark Zuckerberg Talks a lot about free speech but in fact facebook privileges paid speech and it continues to do so it continues to privilege the speech of more powerful public figures over ordinary people in a way that violates peoples human rights to information and the ability to participate in in free and fair democratic. Processes and to formulate opinion without interference which is part of. The basic fundamental human rights freedom of expression so we have a big problem here and its pretty late in the day to unwind it my organization has actually called for facebook to stop targeted advertising to shut down his targeted advertising system in a prior early several months before the election so so that content could be more organic and that any advertising that happens would be no more targeted then you get on Cable Television but of course that is not good for business to do that and that is not something they consider. Through but do you make the points you make one point i think is very interesting you talk about the oversight that there was an attempt there was a congressional hearings months like about did to pick out a few years back in front of congress and he almost bamboozled them he almost confused congress itself because they simply didnt understand what they were dealing with that was the way people asking such basic questions about facebook itself it didnt really understand the idea of targeted paid advertising that anybody could buy in anybody could put forward so this is not just a commercial failure of people who like me who just arent on the side wow face what this is a political. The highest level it is of although there was another congressional hearing this summer where you saw that congress has learned a lot there were very specific question Christopher Bergen and other Corporate Executives about their Business Model about how targeted advertising works and citing internal emails that have since been leaked that that shows that. The company had actually done internal studies around misinformation conspiracy theories hate speech and so on and had elected not to take action to address them fully and there are now plans or proposals both in terms of antitrust so in order to increase comp petition. And to potentially break up part of facebook or it or at least to subject it to a much greater constraint in terms of its control across the market. But also proposals for privacy law there are proposals that my organization and others have made for transparency requirements that there needs to be a lot more transparency by these companies about how content is being managed on the platform there needs to be Impact Assessment Companies Need to be doing civil rights and human rights Impact Assessment to really identify the social impact of their platform and their Business Model how its affecting society how its affecting political process sees and. And social dynamics and potential discrimination and to show how they are taking concrete steps to mitigate that and up and really this year facebook did not even acknowledge that it its platform might have negative civil rights implications. Times he regrets talk about but i would like to bring in in the u. K. Chris valis an associate professor of philosophy at the university of oxford and author of privacy is power why and how you should take back control of your data crystal weve been discussing how facebook and big social should police itself and whether it actually should police itself theres a question i want to ask you is it time for United Nations charter of Digital Rights is it time for global oversight over big social and i think thats an excellent question and an accident idea but there has to be global oversight but also National Press that its not ok for private companies who have private interests to over have oversight of themselves. And as long as we dont have better audit 100 and we just have to trust and that they want for example interfere with their elections and the rule of law can not only be based on trust thats not rigorous enough. Thats a live and maastricht we talked about this earlier but i just want to bring it up again how do you police they say if if its not the u. N. If its not the National Governments because facebooks almost too powerful to take on mugs like a book and pretty much do what everyones. Yeah so this is a core question right so not if we should police this or if its too too late but how we should police it right now what were dealing with is a legacy regulatory failure that has led to this regulatory subsidy that a lot of digital platforms have had and have been having since the ninetys because regulators simply didnt know how to what to expect from their Business Models so what happens at the European Union level is that later in the year were expecting a new draft of the Digital Services act which aims to commend the drawbacks of the ecommerce directive which has led to this burden this Regulatory Burden that we have to deal with right now and i think yesterday that i use of off with the european commissioner for justice and consumers actually met with jack dorsey the c. E. O. Of of twitter sorry and they decided that or they agreed on the fact that there shouldnt be a narrative they should follow a narrative of taking down content but actually trying to focus on the recommender systems and trying to see how content is disseminated on the platform so if the oversight is going to entail regulators and Companies Working together and and trying to create more transparency maybe this could be an option the question is if this is going to be enough and what we have seen so far is that when when were dealing with a recommender system basically the bread and butter of any kind of social media platform those are the systems that determine what you see as a user a lot of questions arise when youre trying to really to to limit the reach of the content this has led to concerns for instance relating to shadow banning so this in the end if not done properly might lead to even more interest errancy questions than actually to solutions chris is a loser. Here we are talking about things that we can do one solution that has been mooted is breaking up big social breaking up facebook in particular facebook control instagram they control whats happened they have billions of users on the on their platform this idea of it being a monopoly and therefore it should be broken up would that help. Im entirely supportive of that anyone would help but it wouldnt be enough as long as we have the data economy as long as we get personalized content then democracy will be at risk because there will be a risk of personalized propaganda and somebody will make use of that somebody will use you say to that way so i think we should and that they take on a me personally they do i should be the kind of thing that you can buy or sell or take advantage of people it puts us in not too vulnerable acquisition both as individuals but also as. But you cant ban data you cant ban the data economy thats half the worlds economy gone right there its worth billions and weve now given facebook and other social media platforms so much information anyway that theres this information is relevant for the next 20 years you cant simply get rid of it overnight surely not overnight but surely we can there have been times in the economy in the past in which very big portions of the economy have been banned because we have realized that its to talk sic so we can use data and we can share data but we can fail if we cant make business and that profit off of that so of course if you go to the doctor you have to give up your data in order to get care and of course we got can use data to make Public Services better and so on but it shouldnt be something that people profit off because that is going to be misused it creates an incentive for misuse Rebecca Mackinnon in d. C. Is there any political will to do or caruso is suggesting and get rid of the data or quantum. Here in the United States it all depends on was half what happens on november 3rd to be elections i think that if. If if the democrats take the senate if we if we end up having a democrat in the white house i think a lot of regulatory are going to move but even even if things go another way theres actually quite a lot of bipartisan interest in strong privacy law so we will see something in the United States i think in europe with with the. Theres a court ruling on something called the Privacy Shield that enables us companies to transfer data that has basically been struck down the u. S. Needs to prove that its able to protect data. Across borders or its going to be very bad economically for u. S. Companies in general so theres a lot of reasons why i think more regulation may move forward in the United States regardless of the political outlook outcome but look i want to put something in the in a broader Historical Perspective here because we are in a moment where a lot of regulation and sort of how power is organized through information needs to be rethought you know a long time ago there was a point in history when our labor suddenly became a commodity that was there was a time when when labor was did not have a price and then suddenly it had a price and our entire world changed in terms of how societies organize you know how communities are organized how the power is relation how power works in society how companies are formed what they can do the economy the world entirely was transformed now were at a similar historical moment where information about everything we do and know our data is commodified thats new. And similarly we dont have the political social economic structures norms institutions to protect people right now in this new situation and so government that has been everyone is scrambling to catch up after a number of companies have already made billions trillions of dollars off off of our data and now everyones rebecca sadly rebecca we already have to time and i do want to come to our other guest person just very quickly what rebecca is suggesting is that this is now a commodity and as a commodity like others that has a value but does need to be looked like quite seriously however we are looking at companies that are policing themselves that companies are using this data to have targeted advertising the problem isnt the data isnt the problem is how its policed right thats part of it but the times it is very hard to police and once you have it its very easy to. Have a leak or some kind of accident even if you have good intentions so its very important to minimize the collection of data so one way to go about this is also to have a fiduciary duty so if you do should you do your duty for that are implemented when there is any symmetry of power in a professional relationship such as doctor and patient lawyer client Financial Adviser and clients and there can be conflicts of interest so we can have data but when we share it with they need to make decisions that are in our interest our data should never. I want to thank all our guests Rebecca Mackinnon catalina go and encourage certain elise and thank you to you for watching you can see the program again any time by visiting our website aljazeera thoughts come in for further discussion go to our Facebook Page thats facebook dot com forward slash a. J. Inside story and you can also join the conversation on twitter handle is at a. J. 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