Music Publishers File (Somewhat Weak) Copyright Lawsuit Against Twitter

Copyright

from the it's-always-the-dmca dept

To be honest, I’m somewhat amazed that more copyright lawsuits haven’t been filed against Twitter yet. There have been multiple reports of how the company’s DMCA takedown response systems have been broken/ignored since Musk took over. Without looking for it, I’ve seen full length high def movies show up in my Twitter feed (including movies still in theaters).

Still, it’s a bit surprising that the first such lawsuit is not from a Hollywood studio, but rather a big giant list of music publishers. And I’m pretty sure that Twitter has a strong case, if Elon bothers to hire competent copyright attorneys.

The backstory here is that music publishers (who are different than the record labels, even if some are connected to labels) have been demanding that Twitter license content for years. And, for years, Twitter correctly pointed out that it abides by the DMCA, and takes down copyright-infringing works when it receives a proper takedown notice. This is exactly what the law allows them to do, and it’s not as if Twitter is where people go to listen to music (and what music does get posted is generally hosted elsewhere and posted in a promotional manner). So, really, the idea that Twitter had to get a license from the publishers was always a stretch.

Still, almost immediately after Elon announced his bid for Twitter, the music publishers started agitating for him to license compositions. But, this is Elon Musk we’re talking about. The man won’t even pay his rent, or his cloud computing bills. Did anyone actually think he would pay for publisher licenses he doesn’t even need? So, it was little surprise when there were reports earlier this year that the talks had “stalled.”

And now there’s a lawsuit. But it doesn’t seem like a particularly strong one:

This is a civil action seeking damages and injunctive relief for Twitter’s willful copyright infringement. Twitter fuels its business with countless infringing copies of musical compositions, violating Publishers’ and others’ exclusive rights under copyright law. While numerous Twitter competitors recognize the need for proper licenses and agreements for the use of musical compositions on their platforms, Twitter does not, and instead breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators.

I mean, first of all… what? I’ve been an avid Twitter users from 2008 through 2022 and I honestly can’t recall ever encountering music in any significant way, or if I did, it was links to licensed sources such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or whatever.

The only reason to do such a license is if you’re actually hosting music (and even then the DMCA should protect you, but most sites choose to get a license mainly to get the industry to stop constantly screaming at them and so that they don’t have to constantly play DMCA takedown whac-a-mole).

And, some of this is just nonsense:

Twitter knows perfectly well that neither it nor users of the Twitter platform have secured licenses for the rampant use of music being made on its platform as complained of herein. Nonetheless, in connection with its highly interactive platform, Twitter consistently and knowingly hosts and streams infringing copies of musical compositions, including ones uploaded by or streamed to Tennessee residents and including specific infringing material that Twitter knows is infringing. Twitter also routinely continues to provide specific known repeat infringers with use of the Twitter platform, which they use for more infringement.

The standard here has to be specific, actual knowledge of infringing works, not general knowledge that some people on the platform sometimes post infringing works. And while the paragraph above alleges “specific infringing material that Twitter knows is infringing,” it’s not actually that simple. That’s the same sort of argument that Viacom made against YouTube and failed with. In that case, Viacom also insisted that YouTube had to know these works were infringing and the court said that’s not how it works. And it’s even more limited in this case because the publishers say that Twitter “knows” that its “users” have not secured licenses, but does not suggest how they know this at all. It’s entirely possible that some of the users have, in fact, secured licenses. Or, as noted, that they’re just posting videos from elsewhere that is licensed. The publishers know this, so this is just misleading nonsense.

Twitter profits handsomely from its infringement of Publishers’ repertoires of musical compositions. The audio and audio-visual recordings embodying those compositions attract and retain users (both account holders and visitors) and drive engagement, thereby furthering Twitter’s lucrative advertising business and other revenue streams.

I doubt this very much. First, again, who goes to Twitter for the music? Second, (also, again) the vast majority of music is linked to on other sites, not hosted by Twitter. Yes, Twitter hosts some video, and yes, Elon expanded how much can be posted, but it’s still a stretch to argue that Twitter is “profiting” from music on its platform.

This is just typical National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) nonsense, in which they falsely insist that no one does anything for any reason except to seek out their music, and that they should be paid for every listen.

Still, there are some things in here that suggest that Musk, in ways that only an incompetent Musk would do, has made his own situation worse. The key bits:

Twitter has repeatedly failed to take the most basic step of expeditiously removing, or disabling access to, the infringing material identified by the infringement notices. Twitter has also continued to assist known repeat infringers with their infringement. Those repeat offenders do not face a realistic threat of Twitter terminating their accounts and thus the cycle of infringement continues across the Twitter platform.

If that’s actually what’s happening, then that would be problematic. The complaint does point to an example of “a known repeat infringer” which at least raises some questions:

The screenshot below illustrates Twitter’s monetization of infringing content. This infringing tweet is from a known repeat infringer who has been the subject of at least nine infringement notices to Twitter, identifying at least fourteen infringing tweets, which contained unauthorized copies of Publishers’ musical compositions. Directly below the infringing tweet is a paid “Promoted” tweet selected by Twitter. To the right of the infringing tweet is a paid “Promoted” account recommended by Twitter. Twitter’s account recommendations also include another known repeat infringer, Twitter Account A, identified in paragraph 166 below.

I’m at least a little confused by this. From what I see there, it’s not at all clear that the original tweet is hosted audio. It’s possible, but normally when there’s a video player it shows with the indicators of a video player. And, honestly, the fact that there are other promoted tweets or recommendations is mostly meaningless for the copyright issues at play.

As for the repeat infringer question, the DMCA requires that companies have a “reasonably implemented” repeat infringer policy, but does not specify exactly how it works, so just claiming that there are repeat infringers on the site, without more info, does not prove that Twitter would be liable for infringement (it could be, I’m just noting that the complaint is pretty weak on this point). The legal battles around this are always about whether or not a particular policy is reasonably implemented, and without more info it’s difficult to know if Twitter’s would be.

Later in the lawsuit there are lots of complaints about how long it takes Twitter to review DMCA takedowns, which might be indicative of a real problem… but might not be:

The precise extent of Twitter’s lengthy delays will be the subject of discovery and analysis, including through a review of Twitter’s records. In the meantime, by way of an example, the musical composition “What a Wonderful World,” written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss and performed by Louis Armstrong, is a timeless classic, chosen by Rolling Stone in September 2021 as one of the top 200 songs of all time. Unauthorized audio and audio-visual recordings that embody “What a Wonderful World” are rampant on the Twitter platform, and Twitter has failed repeatedly to take them down in an expeditious manner. Across all the NMPA Notices sent to Twitter that identified the musical composition for “What a Wonderful World” by name, along with precise URLs for the tweets containing the infringing uses of that composition, Twitter failed to take down at least 240 infringing tweets incorporating “What a Wonderful World” within 14 days after the NMPA Notice was sent. Even more troubling, over 120 of those tweets were still available at least a month after the associated NMPA notice was sent to Twitter, and more than two dozen tweets were still available on Twitter over two months after NMPA sent a notice identifying them as infringing.

Seems like an odd choice to use, as an example, a song that is literally 56 years old, which at the time it was published had a maximum copyright term of 56 years? Yes, the song is still under copyright thanks to endless copyright term extensions, but… still. You’d think they’d pick another song.

Also, the lawsuit misrepresents Twitter’s marketing claims about Twitter and music, which tend to be about communities of fans, not posting actual music (again, that’s not really a Twitter thing).

Twitter has been outspoken about how important music is to Twitter and users of its platform. In its marketing, blogs, or tweets, Twitter stated:

a. “[M]usic is the largest community” on Twitter’s platform, where “people are more likely to follow a music-related account than any other type of account on Twitter.”

b. The Twitter platform is “the ultimate connection to the music world for fans and brands.”

c. “Every day, more than 30 million tweets are published about music around the world . . . [which is] more than 20,000 every minute.”

Twitter even has its own “@TwitterMusic” account on its platform dedicated to top music trends, which has a massive following of 11.5 million users

I mean, literally none of that has anything to do with infringing content. It’s mostly about music fans and connecting with artists. Not listening to music on the platform. It’s just designed to sound bad, despite being wholly unrelated to the actual copyright question.

Now, there are some things that Elon has done that may cause him trouble in court. Recently departed trust & safety boss Ella Irwin (stupidly) announced that the company wouldn’t suspend users unless “it is clear the user knew the content was illegal.”

While that may seem commendable in some ways, it might conflict with the DMCA’s requirements regarding repeat infringer policies. At least, the NMPA sure claims it does:

Twitter has told users of its platform that “[w]e don’t suspend users for posting reported content unless it is clear that the user knew the content was illegal.” But Twitter’s practice is unreasonable and contrary to law. Infringement occurs as a matter of law. Direct infringement is a strict liability offense, without any requirement that the infringer know the content they post is illegal.

Except… that’s not entirely accurate by the NMPA either. While the courts have definitely moved in that direction, some still do recognize the concept of innocent infringement (and, frankly, copyright law would be a lot more reasonable if the courts went back to understanding this).

There are other Elon decisions that the complaint calls out, but some are silly and have nothing to do with the copyright questions:

Instead of grounding decisions on sound policy development and reasonable implementation, Twitter has outsourced trust and safety decisions to Twitter polls, i.e., votes among users of the Twitter platform, through a feature on the platform used for polling.

But… there is another thing the lawsuit calls out which MANY copyright lawyers freaked out about last month, when a Twitter user appeared to complain that they were being unfairly hit with copyright claims and Elon told the user to try “turning on subscriptions.”

I saw multiple copyright lawyers freak out about this and try to warn Musk that this tweet would show up in copyright lawsuits. At the time, I looked into the issue and… while it looks bad, it’s not as bad as it seems. The “Figen” account does not appear to actually be infringing on copyrights. It actually is linking to the original uploads by the original users (those might be infringing, but most did appear to be from the original creator of the work). This is a confusing bit of how Twitter works, when you can “repost” someone else’s video, but you’re really just linking to their upload.

Still, this incident shows up in the lawsuit (somewhat obliquely):

By way of another example, a user tweeted that Twitter should not suspend accounts for receiving multiple copyright notices but rather should only disable the copyrighted videos. That user asserted that the user does not earn money from the videos they share, or understand that they are copyrighted, and that copyright owners should ask Twitter users to remove the videos rather than submit notices to Twitter. Twitter replied publicly to this user, but without asking the user not to infringe, without referring the user to Twitter’s Copyright policy, and without telling the user that copyright infringement is unlawful regardless of whether the user makes money from it or realizes that a particular video is infringing. Instead, Twitter suggested that the user “consider turning on subscriptions”—a feature of Twitter Blue that garners revenue for Twitter, enables the user to receive payments from other users of the Twitter platform, and, because the infringing tweets are behind a paywall, makes it more difficult for copyright owners to find.

So, this one goes both ways. If you understand that Figen wasn’t actually infringing, then Elon’s statement isn’t so bad. But it’s not even clear that Elon realized this user wasn’t actually infringing. And if he did believe the account was infringing then… yeah… that’s bad. But, also, it’s not at all a surprise this showed up in a lawsuit.

And then there’s this:

I mean, this is another case where Elon is correct, but that plays badly if you’re in a lawsuit for ignoring DMCA takedowns, and of course the NMPA calls it out.

Twitter’s most senior executive has previously described the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”)—a statute that, among other things, provides for notice and takedown of infringing copyrighted material—as a “plague on humanity.”… This statement and others like it exert pressure on Twitter employees, including those in its trust and safety team, on issues relating to copyright and infringement.

So, anyway, this is not a particularly strong lawsuit, but it’s not a joke either. It’s got many aspects where Elon and his inability to shut the fuck up clearly made things worse. But it does seem like the kind of copyright lawsuit that Twitter could win if it had competent copyright litigators to handle it.

Which means, the question is: can Elon actually hire a competent copyright litigator these days?

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, dmca 512, ella irwin, elon musk, licensing, publishers, repeat infringer policy
Companies: concord music, nmpa, twitter

Important Things At Twitter Keep Breaking, And Making The Site More Dangerous

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the there's-no-autocompleting-safety dept

It turns out that if you fire basically all of the competent trust & safety people at your website, you end up with a site that is neither trustworthy, nor safe. We’ve spent months covering ways in which you cannot trust anything from Twitter or Elon Musk, and there have been some indications of real safety problems on the site, but it’s been getting worse lately, with two somewhat terrifying stories that show just how unsafe the site has become, and how risky it is to rely on Twitter for anything.

First, former head of trust & safety at Twitter, Yoel Roth, a few weeks after he quit, said that “if protected tweets stop working, run.” Basically, when core security features break down, it’s time to get the hell out of there.

Protected tweets do still seem to kinda be working, but a related feature, Twitter’s “circles,” which lets you tweet to just a smaller audience, broke. Back in February, some people noticed that it was “glitching,” in ways that were concerning, including a few reports that some things that were supposedly posted to a circle were viewable publicly, but there weren’t many details. However, in early April, such reports became widespread, with further reports of nude imagery that people thought was being shared privately among a smaller group being available publicly.

Twitter said nothing for a while, before finally admitting earlier this month that there was a “security incident” that may have exposed some of those supposed-to-be-private tweets, though it appears to have only sent that admission to some users via email, rather than publicly commenting on it.

The second incident is perhaps a lot more concerning. Last week, some users discovered that Twitter’s search autocomplete was recommending… um… absolutely horrific stuff, including potential child sexual abuse material and animal torture videos. As an NBC report by Ben Collins notes, Twitter used to have tools that stopped search from recommending such awful things, but it looks like someone at Twitter 2.0 just turned off that feature, enabling anyone to get recommended animal torture.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told NBC News that he believes the company likely dismantled a series of safeguards meant to stop these kinds of autocomplete problems.

Roth explained that autocompleted search results on Twitter were internally known as “type-ahead search” and that the company had built a system to prevent illegal, illicit and dangerous content from appearing as autocompleting suggestions.

“There is an extensive, well-built and maintained list of things that filtered type-ahead search, and a lot of it was constructed with wildcards and regular expressions,” Roth said.

Roth said there was a several-step process to prevent gore and death videos from appearing in autocompleted search suggestions. The process was a combination of automatic and human moderation, which flagged animal cruelty and violent videos before they began to appear automatically in search results.

“Type-ahead search was really not easy to break. These are longstanding systems with multiple layers of redundancy,” said Roth. “If it just stops working, it almost defies probability.”

In other words, this isn’t something that just “breaks.” It’s something that someone had to go in and actively go through multiple steps to turn off.

After news of this started to get attention, Twitter responded by… turning off autocomplete entirely. Which, I guess, is better than leaving up the other version.

But, still, this is why you have a trust & safety team who works through this stuff to keep your site safe. It’s not just content moderation, as there’s a lot more to it than that. But Twitter 2.0 seems to have burned to the ground a ton of institutional knowledge and is just winging it. If that means recommending CSAM and animal torture videos, well, I guess that’s just the kind of site Twitter wants to be.

Filed Under: animal torture, autocomplete, csam, ella irwin, elon musk, recommendations, torture, trust and safety
Companies: twitter

Twitter ‘Shadowbans’ Bellingcat After Musk Attacks Them, Then Tries To Retcon A Nonsense Explanation

Content Moderation

from the another-day-down-at-the-shadowban-factory dept

Remember, according to Elon Musk, one of the worst things that old Twitter did was “shadowban” people. There was a whole “Twitter Files” about the practice, which Musk insisted was a horrible practice that was censorship. Except… at the same time he had no problem using it to silence accounts he personally disliked. Hilariously, he announced this as part of his “new Twitter policy” back in November, even though it had been existing Twitter policy since 2018.

This is a weird thing to claim is a “new Twitter policy” when it was publicly announced and covered by the media in 2018.

The main difference, however, seemed to be that when the old Twitter did it, it was actually focused on accounts that were “detracting” from the user experience on Twitter, not ones that annoyed the thin-skinned guy who ran the site.

One of Elon’s early moves at Twitter was to order that the ElonJet account, which he’d promised to leave alone, was “max deboosted” (it was later banned, following the banning of journalists who merely mentioned the fact that the account was banned). Here’s a leaked screenshot of Musk’s handpicked trust & safety boss telling the team to “apply heavy VF” (visibility filtering) to the ElonJet account:

He’s also used the tool to apply such “max deboosting” to other accounts he personally disliked including when he got into an argument with formerly favored “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, only to have Taibbi’s tweets disappear from search.

So, it’s not particularly surprising that Musk’s Twitter applied “max deboosting” to Bellingcat, the investigative journalism operation that is famous for using open source intelligence to track down all sorts of nefarious activity.

Just days earlier, Musk had smeared Bellingcat for its investigation into Mauricio Garcia, the gunman who killed eight bystanders (and himself) at a mall in Allen, Texas. The investigation highlighted that Garcia appeared to have Nazi-associated tattoos and was active on a Russian social network. The investigation actually goes into great detail (in the usual Bellingcat fashion) explaining how they figured out this was Garcia’s account. But Musk (again, in typical fashion) had already bought into the far right nonsense peddlers insisting that there was no way that Garcia could be a far right extremist, and so he decided to smear Bellingcat, and claim (falsely) that it “specializes in psychological operations.”

This is a claim that has been spread for a few years by Russian officials, who get really, really angry every time Bellingcat exposes some nonsense by Russia.

Then, just days later, Bellingcat basically disappeared from Twitter search.

Twitter appears to have limited the reach of Bellingcat, an investigative news website, as its main account no longer appears in the app’s search tool.

It’s unclear when exactly the change was made but Eliot Higgins, the Bellingcat founder, first tweeted about it  Thursday. Bellingcat’s main handle did not appear in several searches made by Insider on Twitter Friday.

On Monday, after more tweeting by Higgins, saying that he had discovered that Bellingcat had been “marked as sensitive media,” Irwin finally responded, claiming that it was because they had posted a video of the Allen shooting.

To be clear, her wording is imprecise here. She notes that such a video “was posted recently,” but never says that such a video was posted by Bellingcat. Bellingcat says they never posted such a video, and Higgins asked Irwin to point out where they had posted such a video, and as of now, Irwin has not responded.

You could argue that if Bellingcat had actually posted such a video (which does not appear to be true), then it might make sense for Twitter to visibility filter that tweet. But, seeing as it has not done so, and merely reported on the shooter (combined with Elon Musk spewing utter nonsense about the Bellingcat account), it seems that a more plausible explanation is that Irwin is full of shit, and Musk is once again using his power as the owner of Twitter to do the very same things he (falsely) accused the old regime of doing.`

Filed Under: allen, eliot higgins, ella irwin, elon musk, mauricio garcia, shadow banning, shadowban, texas, visibility filters
Companies: bellingcat, twitter

Twitter Suspends Reporter For Reporting On Twitter Hack, Using Same Policy Old Twitter Used To Block NY Post Hunter Biden Story

Content Moderation

from the ah,-it's-only-good-when-we-use-it dept

The nonsense never ends. As you’ll recall, there was a big kerfuffle (that still hasn’t fully ended) over a decision by Twitter in October of 2020 to block the sharing of a NY Post article about the contents of what was then alleged to be (and since mostly confirmed) Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop hard drive. What has since come out is that there was thorough debate within Twitter about whether or not this was a good idea, but the decision was made in an abundance of caution, as the provenance of the information was still unclear, and there were some questionable aspects to the information being released.

The policy used was Twitter’s “Hacked Materials” policy, which had been in place in March of 2019 and which we had highlighted as problematic a month before the NY Post kerfuffle, noting how it had already been used against journalistic activity by DDoSecrets after it published leaked police chat information and had its account banned.

In the wake of the NY Post story, Twitter admitted that the policy was a problem and changed the policy to no longer target journalists.

Except that was Twitter 1.0.

Now that we have Twitter 2.0, led by Elon Musk and trust & safety boss Ella Irwin, who have told us that they believe the NY Post banning was a mortal sin that should never be repeated… except that Musk/Irwin did also ban the NY Post’s account for a period of time just recently. And while they corrected that mistake, it’s still difficult to see how that was any different than Twitter 1.0.

But now we have the “Hacked Materials” policy showing up again, this time under Musk/Irwin’s control… and this time used in a manner I would argue is way, way, way more sketchy and problematic than earlier uses.

Specifically, Wired reporter Dell Cameron has had his account permanently suspended from Twitter as he revealed on Mastodon.

At issue? He just published a story at Wired about a hacker who got into culture war nonsense peddler Matt Walsh’s Twitter account and also his email account.

So why did Cameron’s account get suspended? Twitter claims he violated its “hacked materials” policy. You know, the same one that was used to block links to the NY Post story… and which Twitter had adjusted so as (in theory) not to target actual journalism.

I mean, it’s almost like content moderation is highly subjective and can be used in all sorts of ways.

But really, I can’t wait for all the people who had shit fits and ordered Congressional hearings over the whole NY Post / laptop story to twist themselves in pretzels to defend this banning of Cameron, who was reporting on a hack, but whose reporting did not reveal anything particularly sensitive or embarrassing. Oh yeah, who could forget this:

Of course, this should also remind journalists in particular that it is not safe to rely on Twitter for spreading your reporting. Musk and Irwin have made it clear that their only principle in handling trust & safety is to silence speech they find makes them look bad.

Filed Under: content moderation, dell cameron, ella irwin, elon musk, hacked materials, journalism, matt walsh, reporting
Companies: twitter, wired

New Boss Same As The Old Boss: Elon’s Twitter Locks NY Post Account Over Tweet That Broke Twitter’s Rules

Content Moderation

from the paging-matt-taibbi dept

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the NY Post tweets a link to one of its own news stories, and Twitter decides that it violates the company’s rules (perhaps very questionably so), and in response, locks the NY Post’s Twitter account. Also, as part of the same “crackdown” on sharing certain media, Twitter also suspends Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account.

Except, we’re not talking about anything having to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. Because this happened just last week.

Can’t wait for the House subcommittee investigation into this one. Oh, and the Twitter Files on this are going to be lit.

The details here are… kind of a mess, and I almost hate to get into them for fear it will derail the conversation. Basically there were a bunch of tweets about a protest to highlight the importance of the rights of transgender people. The name of the protest was a “trans day of vengeance.” As with so many culture war topics, this one was then weaponized by anti-trans people who were tweeting about it as well (and misrepresenting it, but that’s a separate issue).

And, because content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and because Twitter trust & safety seems to be managed by people who haven’t completed their speed run of the learning curve yet, they decided to delete all tweets from everyone on all sides that were showing a poster promoting the event. Around the same time, the company also suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account over her own tweet regarding the event.

Twitter’s, um, explanation of this was confused and didn’t make much sense:

Twitter’s trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, also explained the reason for taking down all those tweets was that “vengeance does not imply peaceful protest,” though I’d argue the context of the event (1) suggests otherwise and (2) suggests that, contrary to Elon’s claims, this is yet more moderation that goes way beyond the 1st Amendment. And, of course, this is all allowed (and perhaps even understandable under the true content moderation guiding light of “please, for the love of anything, just stop being jerks on our platform”).

Anyway, the NY Post wrote about the account suspensions, and apparently, the tweet about that article then resulted in the NY Post account being suspended and the account locked:

Hours later, however, Twitter reversed course and reinstated the NY Post’s account.

Again, all this is perfectly within Twitter’s rights, but I have difficulty seeing how it’s even one iota different from what happened in October of 2020. At that time, Twitter also applied a policy badly in the heat of the moment as things were moving quickly, suspended the NY Post’s account, and then admitted they were wrong and reinstated the account.

Mistakes sometimes happen. But people are still talking about the October 2020 version. Even this guy had something to say about it, as part of his justification for his attempt (at the time) to purchase Twitter:

That’s Elon Musk directly saying: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate”

Note that there’s no caveat there. There are no conditions. No suggestion that maybe it was a mistake that was corrected a few hours later (as happened in both cases). Just a flat out that “suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate” even though the identical thing happened under Musk’s watch as well.

But, in this case, people seem willing to let it slide by and Musk seems to think that he should be judged on a totally different standard. I mean, it’s almost as if he and his fans use different standards to judge Musk’s actions vs. the actions of the old leadership.

An intellectually honest response might lead to a recognition that perhaps the October 2020 actions were a similar type of mistake and correction, and should be forgiven just as this latest mistake and correction are being forgiven. But that would require some intellectual honesty and not rooting for one team to win and another to lose. And, apparently, that’s too much to ask for.

Filed Under: content moderation, ella irwin, elon musk, journalism
Companies: ny post, twitter

Pretty Much Every Expert Agrees That Elon Has Made Twitter’s Child Sexual Abuse Problem Worse

Failures

from the not-great,-bob dept

About a month ago, we wrote an article pulling together a variety of sources, including an NBC News investigation, that suggested that Elon Musk’s Twitter was doing a terrible job dealing with child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. This was contrary to the claims of a few very vocal Elon supporters, including one who somehow got an evidence-free article published in a major news publication, insisting that he had magically “solved” the CSAM issue, despite firing most of the people who worked on it. As we noted last month, it actually appeared that Elon’s Twitter was not just failing to deal with CSAM (which is a massive challenge on any platform), but that he was actually going backwards and making the issue much, much worse.

Last week, Senator Dick Durbin released a letter he sent to the Attorney General, asking the DOJ to investigate Twitter’s failures at stopping CSAM.

I write to express my grave concern that Twitter is failing to prevent the selling and trading of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its platform and to urge the Department of Justice (DOJ) to take all appropriate actions to investigate, deter, and stop this activity, which has no protections under the First Amendment, and violates federal criminal law.

The last two points are important: CSAM is (obviously) not protected speech, and as it violates federal criminal law, Section 230 is not relevant (lots of 230 haters seem to forget this important point). Of course, there is still the issue of knowledge. You still can’t hold a platform liable for things it didn’t know about. But, deliberately turning a blind eye to CSAM (while stating publicly that it was the number one priority) is still really bad.

Now, a NY Times investigation has gone much, much further into this issue and found, as NBC News did, that Twitter isn’t just failing to deal with CSAM, it has made a ton of really, really questionable decisions regarding how it handles the problem. The NY Times report notes that it used some tools to investigate CSAM on Twitter without looking at the material itself. While it doesn’t go into detail, from what’s stated, it sounds like wrote some software to identify potential CSAM, without looking at it, and then forwarded the accounts to the Canadian Center for Child Protection and also to Microsoft, which created and runs PhotoDNA, the tool that many large companies use to identify CSAM on platforms and to report that content to NCMEC (the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) in the US and the CCCP in Canada (and other organizations elsewhere). And what they found is not great:

To assess the company’s claims of progress, The Times created an individual Twitter account and wrote an automated computer program that could scour the platform for the content without displaying the actual images, which are illegal to view. The material wasn’t difficult to find. In fact, Twitter helped promote it through its recommendation algorithm — a feature that suggests accounts to follow based on user activity.

Among the recommendations was an account that featured a profile picture of a shirtless boy. The child in the photo is a known victim of sexual abuse, according to the Canadian Center for Child Protection, which helped identify exploitative material on the platform for The Times by matching it against a database of previously identified imagery.

That same user followed other suspicious accounts, including one that had “liked” a video of boys sexually assaulting another boy. By Jan. 19, the video, which had been on Twitter for more than a month, had gotten more than 122,000 views, nearly 300 retweets and more than 2,600 likes. Twitter later removed the video after the Canadian center flagged it for the company.

Even Twitter’s responses to requests from the government agencies dealing with this stuff did not go well:

One account in late December offered a discounted “Christmas pack” of photos and videos. That user tweeted a partly obscured image of a child who had been abused from about age 8 through adolescence. Twitter took down the post five days later, but only after the Canadian center sent the company repeated notices.

As an aside, I’m curious how all the people insisting that no government agency should ever alert Twitter to content that might be illegal or violate its policies feel about the Canadian Center alerting Twitter to CSAM on its platform.

And the article notes that Twitter seems to be ignoring a lot of the more easily findable stuff for organizations that have access to these types of tools:

The center also did a broader scan against the most explicit videos in their database. There were more than 260 hits, with more than 174,000 likes and 63,000 retweets.

“The volume we’re able to find with a minimal amount of effort is quite significant,” said Lloyd Richardson, the technology director at the Canadian center. “It shouldn’t be the job of external people to find this sort of content sitting on their system.”

Even more worrisome: the NY Times report notes that Twitter uses a tool from Thorn, the well known anti-trafficking organization that tries to use technology to fight trafficking. Except the report notes that, for all of Musk’s claims about how fighting this stuff is job number one… he stopped paying Thorn. But, even more damning, Twitter has stopped working with Thorn to provide information back to the organization to improve its tool and to help it find and stop more CSAM:

To find the material, Twitter relies on software created by an anti-trafficking organization called Thorn. Twitter has not paid the organization since Mr. Musk took over, according to people familiar with the relationship, presumably part of his larger effort to cut costs. Twitter has also stopped working with Thorn to improve the technology. The collaboration had industrywide benefits because other companies use the software.

Also eye-opening in the article is that, while Twitter is claiming that it is removing more such content than ever, its reports to NCMEC do not match that and have dropped massively, raising serious concerns at NCMEC:

The company has not reported to the national center the hundreds of thousands of accounts it has suspended because the rules require that they “have high confidence that the person is knowingly transmitting” the illegal imagery and those accounts did not meet that threshold, Ms. Irwin said.

Mr. Shehan of the national center disputed that interpretation of the rules, noting that tech companies are also legally required to report users even if they only claim to sell or solicit the material. So far, the national center’s data show, Twitter has made about 8,000 reports monthly, a small fraction of the accounts it has suspended.

Also, NCMEC saw that Twitter’s responsiveness dwindled (though in January seemed to pick back up a bit):

After the transition to Mr. Musk’s ownership, Twitter initially reacted more slowly to the center’s notifications of sexual abuse content, according to data from the center, a delay of great importance to abuse survivors, who are revictimized with every new post. Twitter, like other social media sites, has a two-way relationship with the center. The site notifies the center (which can then notify law enforcement) when it is made aware of illegal content. And when the center learns of illegal content on Twitter, it alerts the site so the images and accounts can be removed.

Late last year, the company’s response time was more than double what it had been during the same period a year earlier under the prior ownership, even though the center sent it fewer alerts. In December 2021, Twitter took an average of 1.6 days to respond to 98 notices; last December, after Mr. Musk took over the company, it took 3.5 days to respond to 55. By January, it had greatly improved, taking 1.3 days to respond to 82.

The Canadian center, which serves the same function in that country, said it had seen delays as long as a week. In one instance, the Canadian center detected a video on Jan. 6 depicting the abuse of a naked girl, age 8 to 10. The organization said it sent out daily notices for about a week before Twitter removed the video.

None of this is particularly encouraging, especially on a topic so important.

It also appears that foreign regulators may be taking notice as well:

Ms. Inman Grant, the Australian regulator, said she had been unable to communicate with local representatives of the company because her agency’s contacts in Australia had quit or been fired since Mr. Musk took over. She feared that the staff reductions could lead to more trafficking in exploitative imagery.

“These local contacts play a vital role in addressing time-sensitive matters,” said Ms. Inman Grant, who was previously a safety executive at both Twitter and Microsoft.

Again, dealing with CSAM is one of the most critical, and challenging, parts of any trust & safety team for any website that allows user content. There is no “perfect” solution. And there will always be scenarios where some content is missed. So, in general, I’ve been hesitant to highlight articles (which come along with some frequency) insisting that because reporters or researchers are able to find some CSAM it means that the site “isn’t doing enough.” Because that’s rarely an accurate portrayal.

However, this NY Times piece goes way beyond that. It didn’t just find content, it found empirical evidence of Twitter being slower to react than in the past, not reporting the material it should be reporting to the agencies set up for that purpose, cutting off Thorn from both money and collaboration data, and many other things.

All of which adds up to pretty compelling evidence that for all of Musk’s lofty talk of fighting CSAM being job number one, the company has actually gone not just a little backwards on this issue, but dangerously so.

Filed Under: csam, dick durbin, ella irwin, elon musk
Companies: thorn, twitter

As Expected, Twitter’s New Trust & Safety Rules Are ‘Elon’s Whims’

Content Moderation

from the who-could-have-predicted-this? dept

Have you noticed that everything that Elon Musk insisted was “bad” about the old Twitter (often incorrectly) are things… he’s now doing himself, but in even more ridiculous ways? He insisted that Twitter was run by people who were promoting ideological political views. Yet… it was Elon Musk (not old Twitter management) who publicly insisted people should vote for one party in the midterm elections. He insisted that Twitter unfairly blocked accounts based on made up rationale. Yet it was Elon Musk who started making up nonsense rules to ban people who annoyed him. He insisted that “shadowbanning” was bad, but his stated solution to content moderation policies… is the same exact thing he claims (falsely) is “shadowbanning.”

He claimed that Twitter wasn’t transparent or open enough. But the decisions he’s making are done with zero transparency and close off Twitter. For example, the decision to cut off third party apps, some of whom really helped build Twitter into what it had become, was done with no notice, and no explanation. Instead, nearly a week later the company claimed it was “enforcing its long-standing API rules” but then quietly (days later) inserted a new rule to ban 3rd party apps.

But the biggest issue of all, was that Musk (and many others!) have long seemed to believe that moderation decisions on Twitter were driven by Jack Dorsey’s whims. This has always been wrong. The company had in place detailed policies about how to handle trust & safety issues. They weren’t always good policies, and they often needed to be adjusted, but there were policies.

However, now, the decisions are driven purely by Elon’s whims.

Bloomberg has a thorough and eye-opening look at what’s been happening with trust and safety at Twitter these days. And, basically, it’s whatever Elon says, or whatever his hand-picked trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, says in trying to make Elon happy:

But now, internal documentation shows a decision-making process amounting to little more than unilateral directives issued by Twitter’s new owner. In late November, an account belonging to the leftist activist Chad Loder was banned from the platform. In Twitter’s internal system, a note read, “Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk,” according to a screenshot viewed by Bloomberg. On Dec. 11, Jack Sweeney, the creator of a bot tracking Musk’s private plane, posted a screenshot showing Irwin had sent a Slack message directing employees to restrict visibility to Sweeney’s bot account, @elonjet. On Dec. 15, when Twitter suspended prominent journalists covering Twitter and Musk, the action was accompanied by an internal note: “direction of Ella.” 

Twitter used to have a group called the Global Escalations Team that could be a check on power at the top of the company, overruling executives based on existing policy. Employees say that group has folded, and Irwin and Musk can no longer be challenged through a formal process. In her emailed response, Irwin said that was “not accurate at all,” declining to elaborate.

In other words, rather than fix a system of arbitrary and capricious trust & safety content moderation decisions, Musk has created just such a system.

“It’s like Musk is taking all of the content moderation best practice norms the trust and safety community has built up over the past decade and is trying to set them on fire,” said Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School. “The entire trend has been towards giving users more transparency, predictability and due process. What Musk is doing is like the antithesis of this.”

There are also some crazy details in the article, including that even before Musk took over, Irwin tried to kill a program that sought to deal with troll spam pushing Chinese Communist Party propaganda:

Irwin and Roth also directly butted heads in the months before he left the company, according to people familiar with the matter. As part of the review of unnecessary projects, she ordered a pause of work Roth oversaw that scanned the social network for spammy actors or people who wished to inject disinformation into the platform, such as those who spread falsehoods favorable to the Chinese Communist Party, according to four former employees. Roth, who was a lateral peer of Irwin’s, bristled at what he saw as overreach by Irwin into crucial processes executed by his team, the people said. Roth overruled her, saying it was essential work, they said.

I also should note that I appreciate how the two excellent reporters on the story, Davey Alba and Kurt Wagner, handle the issue of the Twitter Files, by noting what Musk and the people working on the files purport them to be, followed by what they really show:

On Dec. 8, the writer Bari Weiss posted a Twitter thread that purported to show that company employees had covertly blacklisted accounts and tweets; in reality, the documents she shared showed workers earnestly debating the spirit of their content moderation policies.

The article also debunks the false claims that have made the rounds among Musk supporters that the company didn’t take the issue of child abuse material seriously. The reporters spoke to NCMEC, which would know, since they’re the organization that deals with such reports:

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a federally designated clearinghouse for online child sexual abuse imagery that works with law enforcement agencies, also refuted the idea that Twitter had not taken action on child exploitative content before Musk’s takeover. “It’s been disheartening to see that rhetoric because we had relationships with people that really, truly cared about the issues,” said Gavin Portnoy, a spokesman.

There’s a lot more in the article and it’s worth reading if you want to know what a mess Twitter’s trust & safety practices have become. But, again, the biggest thing that stands out to me is how much of what Elon is doing (badly) are worse versions of what he said was wrong with Twitter in the first place.

Filed Under: arbitrary, content moderation, csam, ella irwin, elon musk, trust & safety, whims
Companies: twitter

Before Musk Riled Everyone Up With Misleading Twitter Files About ‘Shadowbanning,’ Musk Used The Tool To Hide Account Tracking His Plane

Overhype

from the a-shadowban-by-any-other-name dept

So, yeah, I wrote a big long thing debunking the first round of the “Twitter Files” but there’s no way I’m going to make myself do more of that for every stupid thread of the “Twitter Files” being tweeted out. Just know that, having read all of the released “Twitter Files” threads so far, they are all just as ridiculous as the first one. They are all written by people who appear to have (1) no idea what they’re looking at (2) no interest in talking to anyone who does understand it and (3) no concern about presenting them in an extremely misleading light in an effort to push a narrative that is not even remotely supported by what they’re sharing.

So far, to anyone who actually has been following the trust & safety / content moderation space over the last five to ten years, what the actual files have shown is a supremely competent trust & safety team, that was put in an impossible position, and actually bent over backwards to try to be thoughtful and careful about their decision making, rather than ad hoc and emotionally driven. Over and over and over again, the files seem to show not (as a bunch of people insisted) a bunch of “woke” ideologues suppressing opposing ideologies, but (as we’ve highlighted) a careful, thoughtful team, trying only to figure out the best way to stop assholes from being assholes — and doing so by trying to follow the rules they had set for themselves, though (as ALWAYS is the case in trust & safety) realizing that assholes are always evolving and policies sometimes have to change to evolve with the latest variant of asshole.

I did want to call out, though, that one of the ridiculously laughable “big reveals,” this time from Bari Weiss, was the well known fact that Twitter would “deboost” some users from trending and algorithms, and have them appear lower in replies. That wasn’t new. The company announced it. It was covered in detail in the media.

Much of the controversy last week was over the term “shadowban.” A lot of people insist that it has always meant any effort to limit the visibility of a user. But… that’s wrong. Historically, the term was really only used to mean a very particular type of limited visibility: one where those hit with it (trolls, spammers) could post, and think they’re posting normally, but only they could see their own posts.

The problem is that, as with so many things, a bunch of Trumpist grifters took a word that meant something real, and turned it into any kind of de-amplification. That happened in 2018 when Trump flipped out about a Twitter bug that accidentally downranked a bunch of people, including but not limited to some prominent Republicans in search results. Back in 2018, I wrote about how that was the wrong use of the word. Soon after, Twitter came out with its own explainer, which also clearly defined the original meaning of shadowbanning and said “that’s not what we do,” but explained (again pretty clearly) that tweets do get ranked and can be minimized in the algorithm, search, and replies. But those who follow them will still see them (unlike in a shadowban).

So much of the “controversy” over this was focused on the fact that a bunch of people only learned about the term “shadowban” from the misrepresented story in 2018, and none of them bothered to educate themselves in the half-decade since then. Now, language changes over time, so you can argue that the new definition of shadowbanning is how it’s commonly used today (though, I’m not convinced that’s true). However, even then you can’t say that Twitter somehow “misled” people, because (again) it very clearly stated which definition it was using and at the same time explained that users could get downranked in the algorithm and search.

But Bari Weiss misleadingly presented these features, which internally Twitter referred to as “visibility filters,” as Twitter lying about not shadowbanning. But… that’s wrong. And it’s obviously wrong to anyone who bothered to read what has already been publicly stated quite clearly.

Elon himself seemed to make a big deal out of this, and even falsely claimed that Weiss showed that this tool was only used against conservatives (it wasn’t and she showed nothing at all to support that). But the really bizarre part in all of this is Elon himself has claimed that he wants to do the same thing as his grand solution to content moderation, saying the company’s “new” policy “is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” and that “negative” tweets “will be max deboosted.”

Except… as noted, that wasn’t a new policy at all. It was the old policy, which Twitter had been very public about. So it seems particularly disingenuous to claim that the old Twitter was doing something nefarious when it’s literally (1) the same thing they talked about publicly and (2) the same thing Elon says is his own brilliant solution.

But the story gets even dumber. You see, one of the Twitter accounts that Elon absolutely hates is the “@ElonJet” account that tracks where Elon’s private jet is flying based on public data. Elon has long hated this account, and once offered the guy behind it $5k to take it down. Last month, he also claimed that he would leave the account up to prove his “commitment to free speech.”

However, Jack Sweeney, the guy behind the account, has now revealed via leak from a Twitter employee that just a few days before Bari Weiss’s “big reveal” about the “evil old Twitter shadowbanning,” Twitter’s new trust & safety boss, Ella Irwin, demanded that the Elonjet account be, well, max deboosted (in Elon’s terminology). In internal Twitter terminology it was “apply heavy VF to @elonjet immediately.” “VF” standing for “visibility filter.”

Here’s the thread from Sweeney:

So, uh, yeah. Based on all that, as reported by the Daily Beast, it sure looks like Musk absolutely knew that this tool was already available to Twitter, and used it against an account he didn’t like.

And while it’s only a single line screenshot, and perhaps there is more context, I’ll just note how different that appears from the screenshots being revealed in the official “Twitter files,” in which there don’t seem to be random “suppress this account!” commands like what we see from Irwin above, but rather open discussions about “does this violate the rules?” and pushback from other employees to make sure that they’re being as fair and reasonable as possible.

We keep pointing out that Elon seems to be on the path of reinventing every innovation Twitter already had done, but doing it much, much worse, but this one seems particularly nefarious. Because just as he’s trying to whip everyone up into a frenzy by (misleadingly) claiming that this evil tool was secret and used to silence people not for rules violations, but personal whims… he was apparently using the very same tool based on his personal whims and feelings.

Filed Under: ella irwin, elon musk, elonjet, shadowban, shadowbanning, visibility filters
Companies: twitter