Category: New tech, old knowledge

A world of lawsuits

In the US this week the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases centered on Section 230, the US law that shields online platforms from liability for third-party content. In Paris, UNESCO convened Internet for Trust to bring together governments and civil society to contemplate global solutions to the persistent problems of Internet regulation. And in the business of cyberspace, in what looks like desperation to stay afloat Twitter began barring non-paying users (that is, the 99.8% of its user base that *doesn’t* subscribe to Twitter Blue) from using two-factor authentication via SMS and Meta announced plans for a Twitter Blue-like subscription service for its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms.

In other words, the above policy discussions are happening exactly at the moment when, for the first time in nearly two decades, two of the platforms whose influence everyone is most worried about may be beginning to implode. Twitter’s issues are well-known. Meta’s revenues are big enough that there’s a long way for them to fall…but the company is spending large fortunes on developing the Metaverse, which no one may want, and watching its ad sales shrink and data protection fines rise.

The SCOTUS hearings – Gonzalez v. Google, experts’ live blog, Twitter v. Taamneh – have been widely covered in detail. In most cases, writers note that trying to discern the court’s eventual ruling from the justices’ questions is about as accurate as reading tea leaves. Nonetheless, Columbia professor Tim Wu predicts that Gonzalez will lose but that Taamneh could be very close.

In Gonzalez, the parents of a 23-year-old student killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris argue that YouTube should be liable for radicalizing individuals via videos found and recommended on its platform. In Taamneh, the family of a Jordanian citizen who died in a 2017 ISIS attack in Istanbul sued Twitter, Google, and Facebook for failing to control terrorist content on their sites under anti-terrorism laws. A ruling assigning liability in either case could be consequential for S230. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick has an excellent summary of the Gonzalez hearing, as well as a preview of both cases.

Taamneh, on the other hand, asks whether social media sites are “aiding and abetting” terrorism via their recommendations engines under Section 2333 of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996). Under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (2016) any US national who is injured by an act of international terorrism can sue anyone who “aids and abets by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to anyone committing such an act. The case turns on how much Twitter knows about its individual users and what constitutes substantial assistance. There has been some concern, expressed in amicus briefs, that making online intermediaries liable for terrorist content will result in overzealous content moderation. Lawfare has a good summary of the cases and the amicus briefs they’ve attracted.

Contrary to what many people seem to think, while S230 allows content moderation, it’s not a law that disproportionately protects large platforms, which didn’t exist when it was enacted. As Kosseff tells Gizmodo: without liability protection a local newspaper or personal blog could not risk publishing reader comments, and Wikipedia could not function. Justice Elena Kagan has been mocked for saying the justices are “not the nine greatest experts on the Internet”, but she grasped perfectly that undermining S230 could create “a world of lawsuits”.

For the last few years, both Democrats and Republicans have called for S230 reform, but for different reasons. Democrats fret about the proliferation of misinformation; Republicans complain that they (“conservative voices”) are being censored. The global level seen at the UNESCO event took a broader view in trying to draft a framework for self-regulation. While it wouldn’t be binding, there’s some value in having an multi-stakeholder-agreed standard against which individual governmental proposals can be evaluated. One of the big gaps in the UK’s Online Safety bill;, for example, is the failure to tackle misinformation or disinformation campaigns. Neither reforming S230 nor a framework for self-regulation will solve that problem either: over the last few years too much of the most widely-disseminated disinformation has been posted from official accounts belonging to world leaders.

One interesting aspect is how many new types of “content” have been created since S230’s passage in 1996, when the dominant web analogy was print publishing. It’s not just recommendation algorithms; are “likes” third-party content? Are the thumbnails YouTube’s algorithm selects to show each visitor on its front page to entice viewers presentation or publishing?

In his biography of S230, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, Jeff Kosseff notes that although similar provisions exist in other legislation across the world, S230 is unique in that only America privileges freedom of speech to such an extreme extent. Most other countries aim for more of a balance between freedom of expression and privacy. In 1997, it was easy to believe that S230 enabled the Internet to export the US’s First Amendment around the world like a stowaway. Today, it seems more like the first answer to an eternally-recurring debate. Despite its problems, like democracy itself, it may continue to be the least-worst option.

Illustrations: US senator and S230 co-author Ron Wyden (D-OR) in 2011 (by JS Lasica via Wikimedia.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an archive of earlier columns backj to 2001. Follow on Twitter.

Esquivalience

The science fiction author Charles Stross had a moment of excitement on Mastodon this week: WRITER CHALLENGE!.

Stross challenged writers to use the word “esquivalience” in their work. The basic idea: turn this Pinocchio word into a “real” word.

Esquivalience is the linguistic equivalent of a man-made lake. The creator, editor Christine Lindberg, invented it for the 2001 edition of the New American Oxford Dictionary and defined it as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities; the shirking of duties”. It was a trap to catch anyone republishing the dictionary rather than developing their own (a job I have actually done). This is a common tactic for protecting large compilations where it’s hard to prove copying – fake streets are added to maps, for example, and the people who rent out mailing lists add ringers whose use will alert them if the list is used outside the bounds of the contractual agreement.

There is, however, something peculiarly distasteful about fake entries in supposedly authoritative dictionaries, even though I agree with Lindberg that “esquivalience” is a pretty useful addition to the language. It’s perfect – perhaps in the obvious adjectival form “esquivalient” – for numerous contemporary politicians, though here be dragons: “willful” risks libel actions.

Probably most writers have wanted to make up words, and many have, from playwright and drama critic George S. Kaufman, often credited for coining, among other things, “underwhelmed”, to Anthony Burgess, who invented an entire futurist street language for A Clockwork Orange. Some have gone so far as to create enough words to publish dictionaries – such as the humorist Gelett Burgess, whose Burgess Unabridged (free ebook!) compiles “words you’ve always needed”. From that collection, I have always been particularly fond of Burgess’s “wox”, defined as “a state of placid enjoyment; sluggish satisfaction”. It seems particularly apt in the hours immediately following Thanksgiving dinner.

In these cases, though, the context lets you know the language is made up. The dictionary is supposed to be authoritative, admitting words only after they are well-established. The presence of fake words feels damaging in a way that a fake place on a map doesn’t. It’s comparatively easy to check whether a place exists by going there, but at some point down the echoing corridors of time *every* word was used for the first time. Pinpointing exactly when is hard unless someone ‘fesses up. I don’t like the idea that my dictionary is lying to me. Better if NOAD had planted two fake words and had them recursively point at each other for their definitions.

I had been avoiding the ChatGPT hoopla, but it seemed plausible to ask it: Is “esquivalience” a real word?” Its response started well enough: “‘Esquivalience’ is not recognized as a standard word in the English language. It is a made-up word…” And then cuckoo land arrived: “…that was created by a writer named Adam Jacot de Boinod for his book “The Meaning of Tingo”.” Pause to research. The book in question was written in 2006. The word “esquivalience” does not, from a quick text search, appear in it. Huh? I went on to suggest Christine Lindberg’s name to ChatGPT, and after a digression attributing the word to the singer-songwriter Christine Lavin, it appeared to find references to Lindberg’s “claim” in its corpus of data. But, it continued to warn, in every response, “it is still not recognized as a standard word in the English language”. It’s a bot. It’s not being stern. It doesn’t know what it’s saying. Getting it to agree on Christine Lindberg as the original source isn’t winning the argument. It’s just giving it a different prompt.

I ask if it has ever encountered the word “wox”. “As an AI language model, I have certainly come across the word ‘wox’.” A human reads lightly insulted pride into that. Resist. It’s a bot. It has no pride. The bot went on to speculate on possible origins (“it may be a neologism…”). I ask if it’s heard of Gelett Burgess. Oh, yes, followed by a short biography. Then, when told Burgess invented “wox”: “Gelett Burgess did indeed invent the word…” and goes on to cite the correct book…but then continues that Burgess defined it as “to make fun of, to poke fun at” which is absolutely not what Burgess says, and I know this because I have the original 1914 book right here, and the definition I cited above is right there on p112. The bot does “apologize” every time you point out a mistake, though.

This isn’t much of a sample, but based on it, I find ChatGPT quite alarming as an extraordinarily efficient way of undermining factual knowledge. The responses sound authoritative, but every point must be fact-checked. It could not be worse-suited for today’s world, where everyone wants fast answers. Coupled with search, it turns the algorithms that give us answers into even more obscure and less trustworthy black boxes. Wikipedia has many flaws, but its single biggest strength is its sourcing and curation; how every page has been changed and shaped over the years is open for inspection.

So when ChatGPT went on to say that Gelett Burgess is widely credited with coining the term “blurb”, Wikipedia is where I turned. Wikipedia agrees (asked, ChatGPT cites the Oxford English Dictionary). Burgess FTW.

Illustrations: Gelett Burgess’s 1914 Burgess Unabridged, a dictionary of made-up words.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Twitter.