Jan 2021 The Internet and its Discontents

 

The Internet and its Discontents

I was browsing through some of the sources I have used for this column recently and one from the  past  (September 19, 2016) caught my interest again,  “I used to be a Human Being “ by Andrew Sullivan. It was a criticism of the social outcomes wrought by, you guessed it, the Internet, but it was the subtitle that really interested me: “An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It 

might break you, too.” He backs up his claims that range from spread of misinformation to the mechanisms it uses that will  lead to addiction. If your search engine can find the article, I highly recommend reading it if only for the line,  ”If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out.”

My initial reaction was --- if that was true over five years ago, is it better now or worse? Well, to cut to the chase, some things are better and some are worse. 

On the positive side, the Internet has a plethora of videos from showing you how to fix your washing machine to dealing with your computer (most of the time).  It’s  an easy way to keep in  touch with friends, make travel plans, arrange your photos, shop, and, well,  you fill in the rest.  One can subscribe to receive current news on the Washington Post, The New York Times, Wikipedia  and the Wall Street Journal to check or explore source materials for their column. Just sayin’.

On  the negative side there also exist sites that can cause harm to the user and thus harm society. For example, consider  the  truly evil websites like  the “how to commit suicide” website  directed at teens which can be easily spread via the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and  Tik Tok sites. Additionally,  the Tik Tok site has an app that recommends teens to take extreme measures to lose weight with diets ranging from 300 calories per day to taking laxatives after overeating and if they find that they just can’t adhere to the stupid and spartan diet, other teens resort to shaming them, “You realize giving up after a week. Isn’t going to get you anywhere, right? ... You’re disgusting, it’s really embarrassing.”

To be fair, Tik Tok said it would adjust its recommendation algorithms to avoid showing users too much of the same content, “as part of a broad reevaluation of social media platforms and the potential harm they pose to younger users.”

To test this out I tried typing “how to commit suicide” in google search and got 322,000,000 hits and the first page looked like this”

Help is available

Speak with someone today

---

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Hours: Available 24 hours. Languages: English, Spanish. Learn more

800-273-8255

Intercepting and rerouting queries like this are best handled by the operating system or browser instead of tick tock itself okay.. xxx

 

The Internet is exceptionally good at spreading most any unsubstantiated  rumour like the “Pizzagate” affair which included the outragious claims that Hilary Clinton was using a pizza shop to snare unsuspecting children that were to be sold to sex trafficers.

“ Pizzagate was so effective in convincing one man that pedophile Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that in 2016, he showed up with an AR-15 to “rescue” the nonexistent children.  He was sentenced to four years in prison for@ the three shots he fired into the restaurant. Pizzagate was a cautionary tale, showing how online conspiracy theories about sex-trafficked children could lead to real-life violence. But that did nothing to stop more made-up stories from spreading.” 

For a more comprehensive analysis, search on:

“Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C 2016” on Washingtonpost.com

For another horrific example of the Internet amplifying rumors and presenting them as facts, search on “Wayfair hoax Washington Post” where a weird combination of circumstance and a propensity to believe conspiracy theories turned a harmless two-day run-away by a teen into another sex-trafficing bundle of misinformation harming many folks along the way. The article is too long to describe all of the mayhem caused, not least that the police and social services personnel were reassigned from real jobs to work on this fake one.

A less deadly but important example is from the Dec 13, 2021  article in the New York Times,  

“Now in Your Inbox: Political Misinformation” 

“At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.”

Those claims were grounded in news that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant families whom the Trump administration had separated, some of whom have not been reunited. But the payments, which are not final and could end up being smaller, would be limited to that small fraction of migrants.”

This is a good example of fibbing by omission. What the Inbox article omitted was an explanation of why it might actually be a cheaper and a more efficient way to control the current flood of immigrants into this country. It could cost more money for continuing to enforce the “illegal immigrant” problem we already are confronted with. But, then again we are dealing with politicians, and as the old saying goes, “The best way to tell if a politician is lying is that his lips are moving.”

 The Mathematician and Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)  states in his book, “The Aims of Education” a viewpoint that I have always thought as a given, “Civilization advances in direct proportion to the number of operations humanity can perform without thinking about them”. And I still believe it applies to many things today such as elevators and air 

conditioners, and automobiles, but it seems to me that this viewpoint is not entirely true about the Internet. Along with its many conveniences come unforeseen problems that can only be solved by thinking about them.

 

Facebook Redux

  Kayleigh Rogers reporting from fivethirtyeight.com has written an interesting article entitled:

“Facebook’s Algorithm Is Broken. We Collected Some Suggestions On How To Fix It.”,

Rogers interviewed several computer media experts for their suggestions on how to combat problems with misinformation, fraud and privacy on all Internet websites but focussed on Facebook's growing issues

The suggestions ranged from “Facebook can completely revamp its astronomically successful and profitable business plan” to “Facebook is irredeemable, and should be forced to fail. “ 

So what exactly is the “Algorithm” mentioned in her title?  Most generally,   the term   “algorithm” is a fancy word for any step-by-step process for someone or (something) to follow to achieve a specified result.  More precisely, “it is a set of instructions for solving logical and mathematical problems, or for accomplishing some other task. A recipe is a good example of an algorithm because it says what must be done, step by step. It takes inputs (ingredients) and produces an output (the completed dish)”. [Google search]

 

Facebook also is keeping  track of every website you visit (while you are on Facebook) and how you navigate Facebook itself, gathering data and “decides” what you will see and when you will see it.  They claim that this enhances your  “Facebook  experience”, and while that may be true, what they don’t say is that its algorithms are not just for your convenience but used primarily to maximize Facebook profits as well as the time the user will stay on its site. The longer you stay, the more ads you will see --- it’s the same reason supermarkets move items around. So, as you probably already know, using  Facebook is not actually free --- it makes its money by selling information about you to companies which allow them to aim their advertising directly at you. 

 

 The  Facebook business model is sort of like  a souped-up version of the process of using billboards you will see as you travel to and from work on an actual highway (as opposed to the Information Highway).  The owners of those billboards make their  money from businesses which display their ads on said billboards so that these businesses can make money for themselves.  For example, if and when you respond to one of the billboards, the money that these businesses will make as a result of your responding to the message on the billboard is used to pay the owner of the billboards and Capitalism goes on its merry way.  If this highway happens to run by a posh neighborhood such as Tribeca, you can be reasonably certain that the ads you will see will be for high-end products and services as opposed to farm equipment or firearm purveyors. The  maxim “Follow the Money” explains a lot about many of our behaviors as well as why something is happening.

 

While billboard advertising cannot predict what you are likely to buy,  Facebook advertising is attempting to do just that by using the information that you input, be it typing, voice recognition or brain wave analysis.  As an interesting side effect, you will see different ads than I do because Facebook's algorithm  already has our likes and dislikes tucked safely away. We hope they are safe and private because that also is becoming  a problem. 

 

 Besides the privacy issue there are problems: Facebook could be deemed to be a monopoly similar to the railroad companies in the early 19th century.

“By the late 1800s, railroad companies dominated shipping and transportation in the US. Several states had tried to curb railroad companies’ growing power and address perceived abuses. But in 1886, the Supreme Court ruled that state efforts to regulate interstate commerce were unconstitutional. That decision pushed Congress to create the Interstate Commerce Act.”

 

Unless all social media are fairly and smoothly regulated by appropriate federal government agencies as is the US Food and Drug Administration and until some sane regulation of the Internet is instituted, the future of the “marketing game” looks bright.

Following is a potpourri of juicy chunks of Rogers’ article wherein she presents the experts reccommendations:

 

“Some of the internal research found shockingly simple tweaks [to improve the algorithm],” said Noah Giansiracusa, a mathematics professor at Bentley University and author of “How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News.” “For example, if you limit the number of reshares, that will actually reduce the amount of disinformation.” Sharing is an effective method to engage the user and also allows that content (which, not surprisingly, contains ads) to spread quickly.” 

“Multiple experts also pointed to more prominent user controls, to allow users to decide what content they’d like to see. While Facebook does offer quite a lot of user control options, studies have shown most users are unaware of how they work, and there’s not an intuitive way for users to signal dissatisfaction with content, said Karrie Karahalios, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied user experience with Facebook. “

“Roddy Lindsay, a former Facebook data scientist who went on to co-found a startup, wants the algorithm to prioritize content that users are likely to deem “good for the world.” It’s an admittedly subjective metric, but Facebook experimented with it by having users rate content on whether they felt it was “good” or “bad” for the world. It then used that feedback to train the algorithm to prioritize only the “good” stuff. Facebook researchers found this reduced the amount of negative content in users’ feeds, but it also reduced the number of times users logged onto Facebook, so a watered-down version of it was ultimately adopted instead. ...It’s not that these algorithms can’t be improved,” Lindsay said. “The problem is that the only decision makers for what these algorithms optimize for are the companies.” 

 

“Another more dramatic change would be eliminating the ranking algorithm for the newsfeed altogether, and returning to a reverse-chronological feed. In other words, just show everybody everything people posted, rather than trying to personalize the feed just for you (and whatever the algorithm thinks you’re most likely to click, or rage-click). This notion is controversial. Some of the experts I spoke to said it would never work because it incentivizes quantity over quality — a fast road to spam — while also making it less likely that you’ll see anything relevant, interesting or engaging (in every sense of the word) on your feed.”

At the furthest end of the spectrum are two ideas, one optimistic and the other pessimistic:

1. Facebook can completely revamp its astronomically successful and profitable business plan

2.  Facebook is irredeemable, and should be forced to fail 

I have strong doubts about the feasibility of the second option as Facebook is surely no different than any other large organization in that it can easily afford a platoon of lobbyists to guarantee its survival and enhance their profitability.

Government vs Private Enterprise Consumer Privacy Protection: Pros and Cons

 Government vs Private Enterprise Consumer  Privacy Protection: Pros and Cons

This title is quite a mouthful, so let me attempt to explain:.

The latest Amazon kerfuffle has raised a more generalized question.

Last month’s column mostly discussed the issue of Internet privacy and may have left the impression that privacy is inherently a good thing as well as a citizen’s right. However, it raises a thorny issue: how to provide and enforce that right?  Can it be done with a cooperative effort by the service providers as self-watchdogs or should the government be the watchdog and provide the protection?

Like most thorny problems there are pros and cons to alternative solutions. An advantage to government regulation is that it is set up to be fair and impartial and we are protected under current interpretations of the Constitution and including its amendments known as The Bill of rights.  This can be a pro or con for Internet providers as well as service providers as they would have conflicting goals: on the one hand, most may really wish to provide privacy protection for their users but at the same time and, as anyone who has been watching the TV series “Billions” knows, corporations must make profits for their stockholders (and consequently themselves) and offtimes attempt to avoid the law in order to do so. 

Unlike the government, corporations are not elected by the people, so the government handling the issue is another plus for the government. On the other-other hand one can argue that the government has a history of being sluggish, costly and is prone to overreach making private enterprise the wiser choice. Clearly some sort of balance between the two should be worked out. Unfortunately, it is not a trivial task to balance what people say they want from a democracy to deciding how to provide that service  --- which is either through the auspices of the government or private enterprise. It isn’t even an exclusively one versus the other situation as it could also blend the rights and responsibilities of both. 

What about AI or Artificial Intelligence as a solution? It seems to be becoming a panacea for many other seemingly intractable problems. But using AI to help ensure privacy and security is also not as easy as it might seem.  AI is getting better and better at detecting and censoring hate speech but can it detect and block viruses and malware from taking over the computer’s built-in Operating system or OS?  

Oversimplifying, the OS is the boss of everything; it decides which components of the hardware will do what and when to do it. Perhaps “decide” is too much an anthropomorphic analog but the OS such as Microsoft or Chrome  (which to many are the Internet) are just programs written by programmers at a very detailed level called Machine Language that gets assembled into a format the hardware can “understand” and execute. 

Now suppose the programmer who wrote the program to steal or destroy data is smarter than the programmer(s) who wrote the OS.  It’s not going to be a happy scenario for users of the OS --- it becomes a game of cops and robbers where sometimes the cops win and sometimes the robbers get away with it. In other words, get over it or at least get used to it --- the struggle between good and evil has been a wrestling match for a long, long time.

There are three choices here: The government regulates, private industry regulates itself, or some hybrid model whereby regulation responsibility is shared. 

“One key lesson is that regulators should not be afraid of looking dumb and asking 'stupid questions'.  If something is unclear, or doesn't feel right, then you might well be close to learning something that the regulated entity doesn't want you to know. The classic example was the FBI's failure to follow up on their agents' reports that some trainee pilots had asked to be shown how to fly a plane, but not how to land it.  The result was 9/11.” (https://www.regulation.org.uk/reg_effectiveness-homepage.html”)

Once the dilemma of choosing the government, private enterprise or hybrid regulatory framework ,we would of course, have to name this agency and choose a suitable acronym for it because that’s how it works. For the sake of simplicity let us assume that we have chosen the Government-only Regulation option.

So first, what would we call this suggested “Internet Protection of Privacy and Security Agency'' ? The thought comes to mind that the simplest abbreviation is best: IPPSA. It even looks like it might be a pronounceable word (ippsuh) like many abbreviations for government agencies.  But wait, before we commit to an acronym,we must search through all of  the existing ones to make sure that we do not unwittingly reuse  one. Does there exist a list of all the agencies somewhere in the dusty corners of the Internet?  Of course. 

All one has to do is fire up their favorite Search Engine app to look for it.  When I enter the phrase “US GOVT agency acronyms” I got back a list of brief results from Google and chose the first one: https://govinfo.gov mainly because I trust websites that have the “.gov” suffix.   I got 8 pages of hits in a nice two-column table. The results range  from  ABMC standing for the AMERICAN BATTLE MONUMENTS COMMISSION to WHD for the Wage and Hour Division, whatever that means. ( I’m sure your search engine can find out.)  After a semi-intense scrutiny, we find that our proposed IPPSA choice would fit right in with no conflict). We could shorten it even further by dropping the “A” at the end to make  IPPS easier to pronounce. If you do venture to the website, it’s hard not to to get sucked in to browse the list finding edifying acronyms; for example, OJJDP stands for the  JUVENILE JUSTICE AND DELINQUENCY PREVENTION OFFICE  even though the “O” for Office seems to be misplaced.