Silicon Valley's "Nazi Purge" Shows Who Really Controls Our Online Speech

Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters

The Daily Stormer’s unceremonious booting from large swathes of the internet has made plenty of headlines; tech companies, the story goes, are “joining the resistance.” Silicon Valley is conducting a “Nazi purge,” and Charlottesville is “reshaping the fight against online hate.”

But the demise of this hateful website has also raised a new debate about an old problem: Silicon Valley’s control of our online speech.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have been making hard decisions about hate speech for a long time. These platforms, as well as web-hosting companies and other intermediaries, are not governed by the First Amendment. Instead, they must obey 47 U.S.C. § 230, known colloquially as “CDA 230.” This gives them immunity from liability for most of the content they host, and says they are free to host (or not host) whatever they want.

Those rights are important, but they also come with great responsibility. And I believe these companies are failing to live up to that responsibility.

The truth is companies get these decisions wrong a lot of the time. And because they’re not transparent about how their rules are enforced or about how much content is taken down, we only hear about the bad decisions when they make headlines. That is happening increasingly often these days, as those in media circles take more interest in the issue.

Just this summer, Facebook used its hate speech policies to censor queer artists and activists for using words like “dyke” and “fag”; Twitter booted several leftist activists, apparently for engaging in uncivil counterspeech; and YouTube’s algorithms deleted masses of videos from the Syrian civil war that activists had archived for use in war crimes investigations.

This is nothing new. Over the years, I’ve watched as Silicon Valley companies have made globally important decisions that have stirred less debate than this week’s Daily Stormer episode. Last year, when Twitter boasted that it deleted 235,000 “terrorism-related” accounts from their service, hardly anyone blinked. But in that case, as in this one, we need to ensure that these companies are accountable to their users, and that people have a path of recourse when they are wronged.

I’m not so worried about companies censoring Nazis, but I am worried about the implications it has for everyone else. I’m worried about the unelected bros of Silicon Valley being the judge and jury, and thinking that mere censorship solves the problem. I’m worried that, just like Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince woke up one morning and decided he’d had enough of the Daily Stormer, some other CEO might wake up and do the same for Black Lives Matter or antifa. I’m worried that we’re not thinking about this problem holistically.

In the case of the Daily Stormer, companies were undoubtedly very aware of the site’s presence on their platforms and made not just a moral decision, but a business one as well. But that’s not how content moderation typically works: In most instances, companies rely on their users to report one another. The reports enter a queue that is then moderated either by humans — often low-wage workers abroad whose job requires them to look at horrible images so you don’t have to — or by algorithms. A decision is made and the content is either left up or removed.

Some platforms, like Facebook, mete out punishment to their users, temporarily suspending them for up to 30 days; others may boot users for their first or second infraction. Users are only able to appeal these corporate decisions in certain circumstances.

How comfortable you are with this kind of set up depends on your view of speech and who should police it. There are different kinds of free speech advocates — some believe that a pluralistic, democratic society is nothing without freedom of expression, and that we must protect the rights of all if we want to protect the most vulnerable. The “slippery slope” argument is popular, although it’s not always convincing.

There are others who will fight to the death for your right to be a hateful Nazi, although I’m not one of them.

Rather, my belief in the need for freedom of expression has strengthened over time as I’ve watched governments and corporations restrict the speech rights of vulnerable groups, and questioned their ability — and sometimes their intent — to get it right. I’m also deeply unconvinced that censorship, especially when decoupled from education, is an effective means of change. Finally, even if one platform bans a user, another might be there to welcome them with open arms.

Cloudflare’s CEO, fresh from making what he admits was a dangerously arbitrary decision to cut off a neo-Nazi site, says we need to have a conversation about this, with clear rules and clear frameworks. I agree. What we need is for companies to choose openness, transparency, and due process.

In practice, that means giving experts and the public greater input into speech policies and their implementation — something that, right now, companies only do behind the secrecy of a nondisclosure agreement, if at all.

It means offering users a way to consent to policies and policy changes, and being open about how rules are made and enforced. And it means ensuring that every user has the ability to appeal decisions made against them. Even assholes.

Quelle: <a href="Silicon Valley's "Nazi Purge" Shows Who Really Controls Our Online Speech“>BuzzFeed

17 Alexa Skills That Don't Need To Exist

How many fart noise generators does one smart home device have to have?

Because I'm an American patriot, I celebrated Amazon Prime Day and bought a discounted ($35 instead of $50!) Amazon Dot. The Dot is the smaller, cheaper version of the Echo. I have heard good things about the Echo, and I was excited to try it out the smart speaker life.

I start to set it up, eagerly looking for cool “skills” (Alexa lingo for apps, basically) to add to it. Obviously, add the BuzzFeed News flash briefing (start your morning with it!). But then…. I'm looking at this list and it's like last call at Club Penguin in here.

The “skills” interface seems to offer no differentiation between an official or essential skill versus some random gimmick a teenager probably made. It appears it's quite easy you make own, which means there's a lot of super amateur ones, or ones that seems tailored for one person.

I imagined my new sleek and efficient life where I was chatting happily to Alexa, telling her to fire up my Juicero, put Tide pods on my shopping list, and add dinner dates to my calendar.

That's not exactly how things went….

I Pooped. You tell it when you pooped most recently and it encourages you. I told it I pooped today and it said “good job!” I’ll admit: I loled.

A skill that just tells you how many chicken nuggets to order. I tried asking. It said….. “7.” Fair enough.

The official “Dunkirk” movie skill. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure game based on the movie. TBH it’s actually pretty cool? But also… unnecessary.

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View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="17 Alexa Skills That Don't Need To Exist“>BuzzFeed

The Next Version Of Android Is Called Android Oreo

Google has finally revealed the name for Android 8.0: Oreo.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The company is commemorating the announcement with an Android statue near Chelsea Market, the location of the original Nabisco factory where Oreo cookies were once made and, coincidentally, the site of Google’s New York offices.

The name of each release is the subject of much speculation and anticipation among Android superfans leading up to the unveil. Every major Android release is named after a dessert in alphabetical order (e.g., Lollipop, Marshmallow, and Nougat). “We have these microkitchens everywhere at Google, and they’ve always been full of Oreos,” Dave Burke, Android’s VP of engineering told BuzzFeed News. “I think we subliminally have been waiting to get to O.”

But, for most, what really matters is: Why should I update my phone and when can I do it?

The new software, first announced in May, is packed with small, but meaningful, updates.

Dave Burke / Google

Rather than a radical redesign, Android users should expect more incremental refinements in O—many of which affect performance under the hood, to things like battery life and speed.

App developers will be able to add picture-in-picture capability (like Netflix, shown here). That means users will be able to continue watching the video they’re streaming while using other parts of their device. At launch, only subscribers to YouTube Red ($10 for ad-free music and YouTube videos) will be able to use the feature with the YouTube app.

Two other user-friendly, time-saving features coming to Oreo are notification dots, which allow users to long press apps on the homescreen to view what’s new, and autofill, which will automatically populate logins/passwords saved to Chrome directly to apps.

The bigger improvements, though, are less visible. A new feature called “smart text selection” uses artificial intelligence to automatically select related groups of words. For example, if you tap to select one part of a home address, Android will automatically select the entire thing, as well as suggest pasting the text into the Maps app.

Google Play Protect is a new program designed to detect harmful apps, and will help make Android phones more secure. Meanwhile, Android Oreo will make app boot times and device restarting up to twice as fast.

Google

Your battery life will get better too, which is something the Android team has steadily been working to improve since the previous two releases, Marshmallow and Nougat. More battery management is in the pipeline for Android P, Q, and beyond, according to Burke.

“One of the things about Android from the very beginning is that it was very open — and so apps could do anything they wanted,” said Burke. “I think for us, we were a little too open; we weren’t managing the system enough. So we’re slowly trying to take more control and throttle things.”

Background check, for example, is a new feature that restricts how much any app can run in the background, which is a significant power suck.

In terms of release date, Google says that its Pixel and Nexus phones will see the update “soon,” while other devices will get the new software by the end of the year.

Google had initially aimed to release Android Oreo today. “The date we’re rolling out is close to what we originally planned. It’s probably a couple of days out. But we’re not way off,” said Burke. The Android O beta testing group will be updated first, and the final build is currently going out for carrier testing.

Android O will be released in stages, depending on carrier and country, and Google has been working with Essential, General Mobile, HMD Global Home of Nokia, Huawei, HTC, Kyocera, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp, and Sony to launch new devices with Android 8.0.

Google

The slight delay may be because of Project Treble, a re-engineering of Android’s architecture that aims to make it easier for carriers and hardware makers to update to the latest version of Android.

“It’s a huge change for us. We literally spent most of our engineering work on it. It’s one of these things where it’ll pay out in the future, we just have to make a big investment,” said Burke.

Treble, which will ship with Android O, essentially separates the code that’s specific to a specific phone model, and the code that’s specific to Android. That easily-updateable Android layer means that phone makers won’t have to spend as much time or resources making Android updates compatible with their devices, which is a big problem (there are now two billion monthly active devices on the platform) for many non-Google hardware manufacturers who are often slow to ship updates to their users, like Samsung.

Makers of low-cost Android phones, who aren’t typically incentivized to pour engineering energy into a device that can sell for as low as $40, would have the most to gain from Project Treble. Burke said, “What we’re trying to do is reduce that cost, so that if you’re a device maker that wants to do a security update or a full dessert update, we want to make it as effortless as possible.”

But consumers won’t see this impact in O. Treble is laying the foundation for the releases that come after it. In the future, Burke hopes expensive flagship phones, like Samsung’s Galaxy, will see updates closer to Google’s initial announcement (instead of months, or sometimes years, after) and budget phones will actually update to bigger dessert releases at all.

The main challenge in implementing Treble was maintaining performance which, according to Burke, was the reason the team fell “a little bit behind.”

Dave Burke, VP of Engineering at Android

Stephen Lam / Reuters

“We’re actually really proud of what we did because if you have a Pixel 2016 that device has had a huge surgery, and you just don’t notice. It works the same. But it’s profoundly different inside.”

While Android Oreo, in terms of major user-facing improvements, isn’t as spectacular as previous releases, Burke sees the update as a pivotal turning point for Android: “I think of O as pivotal changes for device makers and developers — in terms of what we’re doing with Treble for device makers, and also what we’re doing with Kotlin, which is a new programming language for developers — and sort of linear on user facing features.”

In May, Google announced it will support Kotlin on Android. The programming language has cleaner, less verbose syntax for coding and some enhancements over Java, which is the language most Android developers use to build apps.

Looking ahead, Burke is most excited about the potential for artificial intelligence in phones.

Android O features some hints at AI-powered elements, like smart text select, but Burke said that even more is coming this year and in future versions of Android.

“Going forward, you’re going to see a change in the phone getting smarter and just being more intelligent, and so when we look back it’ll be a turning point … if we doing everything right,” he said.

Quelle: <a href="The Next Version Of Android Is Called Android Oreo“>BuzzFeed