Warner Bros. Discovery Gives In And Transfers Games Back To Developers’ Steam Accounts

Culture

from the phew dept

A couple of months back, we talked about an odd decision Warner Bros. Discovery made to simply “retire” a bunch of games it published, mostly from small indie studios, from the various online stores where they were sold, such as Steam. This resulted in anger from those who bought these games and confusion from those who developed them. Buyers were pissed because retired games would either disappear from the accounts of those who bought them, or else would force them to get re-published versions of the games from indie developers that would be without all of the data and achievements players had gotten playing them. The confusion from the developers was over the fact that WBD could simply transfer these games to those developers’ storefront accounts rather than losing anything at all for the customers. On Steam, for instance, comments from some of those same developers demonstrate that this process is trivially easy.

In a comment on that Ars post, Matt Kain, developer of Adult Swim Games’ Fist Puncher, noted that they had received the same “retired” notice from WBD. “When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators,” Kain wrote.

This led to all kinds of speculation as to why WBD was going down this road. It was an obvious PR nightmare, telling those who bought published products from WBD that some or all of their stuff was just gone. Some speculated that this was being done as some kind of tax write-off strategy. Others suggested it was just that the company didn’t want the headache of figuring out the sales taxes on these titles anymore and just wanted it all to go away.

Either way, thanks to the public pressure and the reporting done on the subject, it appears that WBD has relented and will, in fact, transfer the games to the developer accounts on these storefronts.

Late last week, one of the Adult Swim Games creators impacted by Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) seeming shutdown posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he received an email from Warner Bros. indicating that his Duck Game was “safe.” “[T]he game is being returned to corptron along with [its] store pages on all platforms,” Landon wrote. The same went for Owen Deery, whose notice from WBD about his game Small Radios Big Televisions brought attention to the media conglomerate’s actions and who posted that his game, too, will have its ownership and store listings returned to him.

As noted by PC Gamer, the 60-day timeline originally provided to developers for their games to be delisted has passed, and yet most of the Adult Swim Games titles are still up.

And so, for now, it seems that WBD is going through the transfer process for these games. We don’t have confirmation it is doing so for all the games in question, but it would be sort of insane if the company were picking and choosing which games to transfer and which not to.

But it’s hard for this to make anyone feel like their purchased content is safe, no? If that content lived at the pleasure of WBD’s whims, which, as we just saw, can change on a dime, what prevents the company from making anti-customer decisions with other content in the future?

Filed Under: adult swim games, duck game, indie studios, retired video games, video games
Companies: warner bros. discovery

Taxing The Internet To Bail Out Media Won’t Solve The Fundamental Problems Of The Media Business

Journalism

from the not-the-way-to-do-this dept

Hey Google, can you spare a few hundred million to keep Rupert Murdoch’s yacht afloat? That’s essentially what some legislators are demanding with their harebrained schemes to force tech companies to fund journalism.

It is no secret that the journalism business is in trouble these days. News organizations are failing and journalists are being laid off in record numbers. There have been precious few attempts at carefully thinking through this situation and exploring alternative business models. The current state of the art thinking seems to be either (1) a secretive hedge fund buying up newspapers, selling off the pieces and sucking out any remaining cash, (2) replacing competent journalists with terrible AI-written content or (3) putting all the good reporting behind a paywall so that disinformation peddlers get to spread nonsense to the vast majority of the public for free.

Then, there’s the legislative side. Some legislators have (rightly!) determined that the death of journalism isn’t great for the future of democracy. But, so far, their solutions have been incredibly problematic and dangerous. Pushed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, whose loud and proud support for “free market capitalism” crumbled to dust the second his own news business started failing, leading him to demand government handouts for his own failures in the market. The private equity folks buying up newspapers (mainly Alden Capital) jumped into the game as well, demanding that the government force Google and Meta to subsidize their strip-mining of the journalism field.

The end result has mostly been disastrous link taxes, which were pioneered in Europe a decade ago. They failed massively before being revived more recently in Australia and Canada, where they have also failed (despite people pretending they have succeeded).

For no good reason, the US Congress and California’s legislature are still considering their own versions of this disastrous policy that has proven (1) terrible for journalism and (2) even worse for the open web.

Recently, California Senator Steve Glazer offered up an alternative approach, SB 1327 that is getting a fair bit of attention. Instead of taxing links like all those other proposals, it would directly tax the digital advertising business model and use that tax to create a fund for journalism. Specifically, it would apply a tax on what it refers to (in a dystopian Orwellian way) as a “data extraction transaction.” It refers to the tax as a “data extraction mitigation fee” and that tax would be used to provide credits for “qualified” media entities.

I’ve seen very mixed opinions on this. It’s not surprising that some folks are embracing this as a potential path to funding journalism. Casey Newton described it as a “better way for platforms to fund journalism.”

Unlike the bargaining codes, this bill starts with the right question, which is how to fund more jobs in journalism. Its answer is to use tax credits, a time-tested form of public-private partnership. It structures those credits to incentivize small publishers and even freelance journalism just as much as it helps to support large, existing media companies.

And it does all of that without breaking the principles of the open internet.

And, I mean, when compared to link taxes, it is potentially marginally better (but also, with some very scary potential side effects). The always thoughtful Brandon Silverman (who created CrowdTangle and has worked to increase transparency from tech companies) also endorses the bill as “a potential path forward.”

It’s a simple bill designed to help revive local journalism. Instead of complicated usage-based mechanisms, this approach is very straightforward. It’s an online advertising tax that funds tax credits to support education and journalism. In this case, it’s a 7.25% ad tax (matching the state’s sales and use tax rate) on companies with more than $2.5 billion in revenue.

And here’s the rub: it would raise more than $500 million.

That’s every year.

To put it in context, the single largest philanthropic commitment to local news in the U.S. was the MacArthur announcement I mentioned in the first of this post. That funding represents $100 million a year and is spread across the entire country. This would be 5x that number, would grow over time, has no end date, and is just for California. Of course, as I understand it, some of this money would have to go to the general fund and be directed towards education in the state…that’s also a great use of the funds and there would still an enormous amount left for news (we’ll know more on these exact numbers as more official analysis is completed).

But that is a staggering amount of money and a game-changing amount of potential funding for news in the state. And it’s something that could easily replicated across the country.

But I tend to agree much more with journalism professor Jeff Jarvis who highlights the fundamental problems of the bill and the framework it creates. As I’ve pointed out with link taxes, the oft-ignored point of a tax on something is to get less of it. You tax something bad because that tax decreases how much of it is out there. And, as Jarvis points out here, this is basically a tax on information:

Data are information and information is knowledge. To demonize and tax the collection of information should be abhorrent in an enlightened society. His rhetoric at moral-panic pitch sets a perilous precedent.

Furthermore, Jarvis rightly points out that Glazer’s bill is positioned as something unique when users give their attention to internet companies, but explicitly carves out when users give their attention to other types of media companies. This sets up a problematically tiered system for when attention gets taxed and when it doesn’t:

He argues that he is taxing a barter exchange users make when they give data to internet platforms and receive free content in return. Well then, shouldn’t that tax apply to the exchange we all make when we give our valuable attention to TV and radio and much of the web in exchange for free content? But the bill exempts news media.

Indeed, the entire framing of the bill seems to suggest that data and advertising is a sort of “pollution,” that needs to be taxed in order to minimize it. And that seems particularly troublesome.

As Jarvis also notes, the true beneficiaries of a law like this would still be those rapacious hedge funds that have bought up a bunch of news orgs:

The hedge funds that now own 18 of the state’s top 25 newspapers — the hedge funds that are ruining journalism in California and across America — will benefit. They should not receive a penny. If anyone’s cash flow should be taxed, if anyone should be punished for the state of news today, it is them. Though the money is intended to go to supporting reporters, money is fungible and it will doubtless support hedge funds’ bottom lines more than journalists.

Indeed, the structure of the bill is one that will continue to benefit the failed news organizations, rather than incentivizing newer, better news organizations. That is the problem with all of these approaches, which assume that the answer must be to prop up the businesses that failed to innovate, rather than creating better incentives for more innovative approaches.

Google has warned that, if the bill passed, it would likely stop funding a bunch of other news initiatives that it has funded for years. This shouldn’t be surprising. If Google has already been funneling a ton of money into news initiatives, and then the California government is forcing them to direct hundreds of millions of dollars to its preferred news initiative, it would make sense that the company would drop its other programs and redirect the money to this one.

And, again, that highlights the problematic nature of this whole setup. It’s based on having the government decide who should be taxed and who gets funded. And when it comes to journalism, we should be pretty worried about the government picking and choosing winners and losers. Because that raises serious First Amendment issues and is very prone to just supporting news organizations that treat the deciding politicians nicely, rather than those that do deep investigative reporting and expose corruption and malfeasance.

Not surprisingly, Glazer did not take Google’s announcement well. He obnoxiously declared, “When people asks [sic] who is in charge of protecting our democracy and independent news— now you know.”

But, if the alternative is that the California legislature gets to pick and choose who “protects independent news,” I’m not sure that’s any better.

Honestly, if Glazer didn’t think that his plan would lead Google (and Meta) to pull the money they already put into funding journalists as duplicative, what was he even thinking?

And I say this as someone who could conceivably benefit from this bill. But I don’t trust the California legislature not to play favorites.

A few years back, I visited some elected California legislators to talk about a bunch of policy-related issues. My first meeting with a California state senator set the tone. He asked me if I had heard about a new committee he had set up, and I told him I had. He then said he noticed that I had not reported on that committee. I pointed out that the mere creation of a committee didn’t seem all that newsworthy, but when the committee did something that I thought was worth covering, I would then write about it.

His response was kind of chilling and has stuck with me for years: “well, if you’re not willing to write about what I’m doing, why should I even listen to you?”

It was a demand for political quid pro quo, which is not something we do here at Techdirt.

But I fear that a bill like Glazer’s effectively makes this mandatory. Journalism orgs will need to scratch the California government’s back to get access to these funds.

There are all sorts of reasons why tech companies should consider funding journalism. I think their desire for high-quality data for training AI is a good one, for example. But having the state step in and set the rules seems prone to all sorts of corruption.

Journalism needs new business models. We’re all experimenting all the time with different ideas (and if you’d like to help, there are lots of ways to support us). But we should be pretty wary of governments stepping in with half-baked solutions that could distort the overall world of journalism and the open internet.

Filed Under: business models, california, data extraction tax, data tax, innovation, journalism, sb 1327, steve glazer
Companies: google, meta, news corp

Federal Judge Says It’s Time To End The ‘Mistake’ Of Qualified Immunity While Handling A Bogus Murder Charge

Legal Issues

from the QI-hasn't-done-much-but-encourage-bad-behavior dept

Qualified immunity is a mess. It’s a mess the Supreme Court created and, to date, seems largely unwilling to fix (despite the occasional remand).

The theory of QI is this: law enforcement officers (and other government employees) should be granted forgiveness for blowing constitutional calls during rapidly evolving situations potentially involving life and death.

And it would be great if that’s how qualified immunity was applied. But instead it’s summoned as a “get out of litigation free” card every time a cop (or other government employee) gets sued. While it may have limited usefulness in cases where officers are under fire or facing other life-threatening situations, it should not be applied at all when time isn’t a factor.

The problem is that the Supreme Court has made the rules of QI very clear: assume QI at all times and only deny it when there’s no possible way to avoid doing so.

Years of cops hollering QI at the drop of a lawsuit has pushed some courts and judges to the limits of their patience. Most notably, new appointee to the Fifth Circuit, Don Willett, called bullshit on qualified immunity shortly after taking his seat at this appellate court:

Section 1983 meets Catch-22. Plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent. Important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude there’s no equivalent case on the books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads defendants win, tails plaintiffs lose.

What Willett points out is the hamstringing of lower courts by the top court in the land. The discussion is no longer about the perceived rights violation, but rather whether or not even the stupidest cops in the nation would be able to comprehend precedential court rulings that might have an effect on their police work.

The problem with this blistering dissent is that it’s a dissent. The majority still rules. The other problem is that Willett does his work in the federal circuit that’s most likely to grant qualified immunity to police officers.

In the case Willett handled, officers violated rights by performing a warrantless search of a health care provider’s office. There were no “split second” decisions to be made and at no time did officers “fear for their safety” because of threats or violence emanating from the target of their (illegal) search.

That’s not how QI should be used. It should only apply in the way the Supreme Court originally worded its precedent: in rapidly evolving situations where officers needed to react quickly, rather than consult their “Precedent For Dummies” handbooks.

The same sort of thing has happened here. In this case, handled by a Mississippi federal court, there were no split-second decisions to be made. Instead, during the course of murder investigation (something that can take weeks, months, or years), a law enforcement officer decided the best course of action would be to frame an innocent person.

From the decision [PDF]:

For nearly two years, the State of Mississippi falsely accused Desmond Green of capital murder. A detective used a lying, drug-impaired jailhouse informant to lock Green up. The detective also steered the informant to select Green’s face from a photo lineup. It was a horrifying wrong.

[…]

The informant eventually recanted. The State then dropped the charges. But the ordeal cost Green almost two years of his life.

The exonerated man sued a number of government entities with the primary target being the detective (Jacquelyn Thomas) who ensured he was locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.

But he went one step further. He asked the federal court to rule on the constitutionality of qualified immunity itself. As the court notes during the opening of its decision, Green makes a good point. As the law stands now, the court can find Green’s rights were violated while also finding Green cannot pursue a lawsuit against the person who coerced a lying informant to give her all the “evidence” she needed to lock up an innocent man.

Green has found a receptive audience, at least at the lowest level of the federal judiciary:

The Court agrees with these calls for change. Congress’s intent to protect citizens from government abuse cannot be overridden by judges who think they know better. As a doctrine that defies this basic principle, qualified immunity is an unconstitutional error. It is past time for the judiciary to correct this mistake.

Obviously, the court denies the lying detective’s request for immunity. But it goes on to attack the Supreme Court-created escape hatch favored by lawbreakers who work in law enforcement.

First, it reminds other courts about what Section 1983 (the law giving citizens the power to sue government employees over rights violations) actually is: it’s the response from Congress to the sad fact that law enforcement was still filled with white supremacists following the end of the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan waged war on freed slaves and other black citizens, fully supported by law enforcement officers who were either KKK members or fully supported these acts of violence.

Section 1983 is actually the “Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.” Few plaintiffs cite the act’s full name. Police officers never do. But from Section 1983 lawsuits, the Supreme Court erected “qualified immunity.” It was not created by an act of law. It belongs solely to the nation’s top court. And until legislators pass a law abolishing it, it will remain the overriding “law” in lawsuits like these — lawsuits only allowed to exist because law enforcement in the United States was indistinguishable from the Ku Klux Klan following the end of the Civil War.

The law itself imposed liability. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law does the opposite: it gives cops a way to escape liability long before all issues (including differences in testimony, evidence, etc.) have been resolved. It means cops don’t even have to answer the allegations of plaintiffs. All they have to do is press the QI eject button and hope courts won’t ask them to contribute to the resolution of open evidentiary issues.

The court continues its history lesson, suggesting the qualified immunity concept is just as questionable as the post-Civil War behavior of law enforcement officers.

That all changed in Pierson v. Ray, a case arising out of Jim Crow Mississippi.

In Pierson, police officers in Jackson arrested and jailed peaceful ministers who entered a “White Only” waiting room in a bus terminal. The ministers eventually beat the bogus criminal charges in Mississippi state court, then sued the police officers in federal court for violating their constitutional rights, as guaranteed by the Ku Klux Klan Act.

On appeal, the Supreme Court decided that the police officers could assert a form of immunity—a “[]qualified immunity”— by claiming that they acted in good faith when they arrested the ministers to prevent violence. The Justices derived this immunity from good-faith and probable cause defenses available to officers facing common law claims.

Reasonable (as in “reasonable officer”)? Not really.

The officers had no proof that the ministers were a threat to public safety. The true threat came from the menacing crowd of 25 to 30 bystanders “in a very dissatisfied and ugly mood,” “mumbling and making unspecified threatening gestures,” and “threatening violence.” Pierson, 386 U.S. at 553. The officers never even claimed a good faith belief that the ministers had violated the law. It was as if the officers had arrived at a hostage situation, protected the kidnappers, and arrested the hostages.

Qualified immunity can be directly liked to the Supreme Court deciding to give officers a free pass on allowing a potentially violent heckler’s veto decide what black people could or could not do in the United States more than 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

The court sums up its history lesson this way:

It is difficult to see qualified immunity’s creation as anything other than a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.

The court continues through the rest of Green’s claims against the government and this detective. It says Green brings a bunch of evidence that supports his claims. It then says the detective brings little more than repeated invocations of immunity and counterclaims that are mostly of the “well, it’s not the worst thing a cop can do” variety.

From then on, the court advances Green’s other case: that federal courts declare qualified immunity itself to be unconstitutional. Here’s part of the Mississippi court’s opening salvo in support of Green’s “kill QI dead” assertions:

[Qualified immunity] adjudicate cases—it ends them—rather than channel them into a better forum brought by parties with a more concrete stake in the outcome. It is so removed from the democratic process that it merits the most stringent scrutiny.

I think “democratic” is a poor choice of words. The rest is bang-on. QI short-circuits the judicial process. And, in doing so, it prevents plaintiffs from presenting their cases fully, which would appear to violate the guarantee that citizens can seek redress from their government for harming them. Sure, allowing people to file Section 1983/Ku Klux Klan Act suits handles the redress part (technically), but allowing the government entities they sue to escape the lawsuit before having to fully address the allegations gives the government options citizens have no access to.

Without explicitly saying so, the court says it’s pretty fucking odd that it’s almost always the same sort of government employees invoking qualified immunity to get out of lawsuits before all the facts are in. And as for the Supreme Court’s rationale that immunity is necessary to prevent the government from being expected to shoulder the burden of (supposedly) frivolous litigation, the same court has provided no similar protections for private entities just as likely to be sued as law enforcement officers.

Pause for a moment to observe how aberrant these justifications are. Emergency room physicians are critical in a real life-or-death sense. But when they are sued for negligence, we take for granted that they will have to respond and, perhaps, be subjected to discovery about their actions. The economy relies on banks to preserve, grow, and allocate resources. In the event a bank engages in fraud or facilitates a Ponzi scheme, though, its victims can come to court and ask to be made whole.

The same is true for just about every realm of life. The judicial process is how our democracy provides “tribunals for the peaceful resolution of all manner of disputes.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., 2015 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary at 2 (emphasis added). So it is odd for the judicial process to privilege government over every other industry. It’s important to keep the public sector functioning, to be sure, but we also need functional hospitals, utilities, financial institutions, and supply chains. And in all of those systems, we accept the costs and distractions of litigation as necessary consequences of a fair dispute resolution system.

The Supreme Court nevertheless assumes that qualified immunity is necessary to privilege government operations over non-government operations. Yet little to no evidence supports the assumption.

Then it compares the loss of life and liberty in criminal prosecutions to the possible loss of government funds in cases where qualified immunity is raised. Cops get to escape lawsuits if they’ve managed to violate rights with actions that do not specifically align with previous rights violations actually held to be rights violations by the courts handling those cases.

That standard doesn’t apply to citizens accused of crimes, however. Nor does it apply to civil defendants, who aren’t able to argue their actions were so novel they couldn’t possibly be expected to realize they were fraudulent, murderous, or whatever.

In a criminal case, the government can convict and send you to prison even if no one had ever committed that crime in quite the same way before. The prosecutor doesn’t have to prove that the unlawfulness of your conduct was “beyond debate.” You can lose your liberty for new and creative kinds of criming…

But citizens are expected to hold themselves to a higher standard than courts are willing to hold police officers to. Remember, a violation of constitutional rights is a federal crime. Just because it’s most often handled in civil litigation doesn’t mean it’s not a criminal act. Cops get an easy out. Anyone else accused of a crime has to go through the entire legal process, with their only hope being (perhaps) the tossing of some evidence if it was obtained unlawfully.

And what has America gained from qualified immunity? Not a goddamn thing.

The result is a world where courts let prison officials get away with putting someone in a feces covered cell for six days, rather than hold them accountable for violating the general principle: don’t make people sleep in other people’s feces.

The conclusion presented by this court is as short as it is self-evident. A cop railroaded an innocent man on murder charges. He lost two years of his life — possibly the two most miserable years of his existence. The allegations should be met with evidence, not a rote invocation of a privilege all law enforcement officers feel they deserve. The federal judiciary needs to dismantle qualified immunity and allow the judicial process to take its true course.

Desmond Green has suffered two injustices. The judiciary should not impose a third. If qualified immunity would do that, closing the courthouse doors to his claims, then the doctrine should come to its overdue end.

Exactly. But if the Supreme Court is unwilling to walk back one of its own doctrines, it should at least have the intellectual honesty to insist it only be applied as intended: during split-second decisions in objectively dangerous situations. Everything else just encourages cops to violate rights in perpetuity.

Filed Under: carlton reeves, don willett, qualified immunity, supreme court

Daily Deal: The Award-Winning Luminar Neo Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at its core. Meanwhile, the recognizable Luminar design is retained, making Neo simple to use and fun to explore. In the bundle, you’ll also get an introductory course to show you how to use Neo and access to 6 additional overlays and LUTs to play with. The bundle is on sale for $150.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Congress Wants A Magic Pony: Get Rid Of Section 230, Perfect Moderation, And Only Nice People Allowed Online

Policy

from the the-land-of-magical-thinking dept

The internet is the wild west! Kids are dying! AI is scary and bad! Algorithms! Addiction! If only there was more liability and we could sue more often, internet companies would easily fix everything. Once, an AI read my mind, and it’s scary. No one would ever bring a vexatious lawsuit ever. Wild west! The “like” button is addictive and we should be able to sue over it.

Okay, you’re basically now caught up with the key points raised in yesterday’s House Energy & Commerce hearing on sunsetting Section 230. If you want to watch the nearly three hours of testimony, you can do so here, though I wouldn’t recommend it:

It went like most hearings about the internet, where members of Congress spend all their time publicly displaying their ignorance and confusion about how basically everything works.

But the basic summary is that people are mad about “bad stuff” on the internet, and lots of people seem to falsely think that if there were more lawsuits, internet companies would magically make bad stuff disappear. That, of course, elides all sorts of important details, nuances, tradeoffs, and more.

First of all, bad stuff did not begin with the internet. Blaming internet companies for not magically making bad stuff disappear is an easy out for moralizing politicians.

The two witnesses pushing for sunsetting Section 230 talked about how some people were ending up in harmful scenarios over and over again. They talked about the fact that this meant that companies were negligent and clearly “not doing enough.” They falsely insisted that there were no other incentives for companies to invest in tools and people to improve safety on platforms, ignoring the simple reality that if your platform is synonymous with bad stuff happening, it’s bad for business.

User growth slows, advertisers go away. If you’re an app, Apple or Google may ban you. The media trashes you. There are tons of incentives out there for companies to deal with dangerous things on their platforms, which neither the “pro-sunset” witnesses nor the congressional reps seemed willing to acknowledge.

But the simple reality is that no matter how many resources and tools are put towards protecting people, some people are going to do bad things or be put in unsafe positions. That’s humanity. That’s society. Thinking that if we magically threaten to sue companies that it will fix things is not just silly, it’s wrong.

The witnesses in favor of sunsetting 230 also tried to play this game. They insisted that frivolous lawsuits would never be filed because that would be against legal ethics rules (Ha!), while also insisting that they need to get discovery from companies to be able to prove that their cases aren’t frivolous. This, of course, ignores the fact that merely the threat of litigation can lead companies to fold. If the threat includes the extraordinarily expensive and time consuming (and soul-destroying) process of discovery, it can be absolutely ruinous for companies.

Thankfully, this time, there was one witness who was there who could speak up about that: Kate Tummarello from Engine (disclosure: we’ve worked with Kate and Engine in the past to create our Startup Trail startup policy simulation game and Moderator Mayhem, detailing the challenges of content moderation, both of which demonstrate why the arguments from those pushing for sunsetting 230 are disconnected from reality).

Kate’s written testimony is incredibly thorough. Her spoken testimony (not found in her written testimony, but can be seen in the video at around 34:45) was incredibly moving. She spoke from the heart about a very personal situation she faced in losing a pregnancy at 22 weeks and relying on online forums and groups to survive the “emotional trauma” of such a situation. And, especially at a time when there is a very strong effort to criminalize aspects of women’s health care, the very existence of such communities online can be a real risk and liability.

The other witnesses and the reps asking questions just kept prattling on about “harms” that had to be stopped online, without really acknowledging that for about half of the panel, they would consider the groups that Kate relied on through one of the most difficult moments in her life as a “harm” where liability should be there, allowing people to sue whoever hosts or runs such groups.

It’s clear that the general narrative of the “techlash” has taken all of the oxygen out of the room, disallowing thoughtful or nuanced conversations on the matter.

But what became clear at this hearing, yet again, is that Democrats think (falsely) that removing Section 230 will lead to some magic wonderland where internet companies remove “bad” information, like election denials, disinformation, and eating disorder content, but leave up “good” information, like information about abortions, voting info, and news. While Republicans think (falsely) that removing Section 230 will let their supporters post racial slurs without consequence, but encourage social media companies to remove “pro-terrorist” content and sex trafficking.

Oh, and also, AI is bad and scary and will kill us all. Also, big tech is evil.

The reality is a lot more complicated. AI tools are actually incredibly important in enabling good trust & safety practices that help limit access to truly damaging content and raise up more useful and important content. Removing Section 230 won’t make companies any better at stopping bad people from being bad or things like “cyberbullying”. This came up a lot in the discussion, even as at least one rep got the kid safety witness on the panel to finally admit that most cyberbullying doesn’t violate any law and is protected under the First Amendment.

Removing Section 230 would give people a kind of litigator’s veto. If you threaten a lawsuit over a feature, some content, or an algorithm recommendation you don’t like, smaller companies will feel pressured to remove it to avoid the risk of costly endless litigation.

It wouldn’t do much to harm “big tech,” though, since they have their buildings full of lawyers, snf large trust & safety teams empowered by tools they spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing. They can handle the litigation. It’s everyone else who suffers. The smaller sites. The decentralized social media sites. The small forums. The communities that are so necessary to folks like Kate when she faced her own tragic situation.

But none of that seemed to matter much to Congress, who just wants to enable ambulance chasing lawyers to sue Google and Meta. They heard a story about a kid who had an eating disorder, and they’re sure it’s because Instagram told them to. It’s not realistic.

The real victims of this rush to sunset Section 230 will be all the people, like Kate, and also like tons of kids looking for their community, or using the internet to deal with various challenges online.

Congress wants a magic pony. And, in the process, they’re going to do a ton of harm. Magic ponies don’t exist. Congress should deal in the land of reality.

Filed Under: algorithms, congress, content moderation, house energy & commerce committee, Kate Tummarello, liability, section 230

Big Telecom Is Once Again Using Fake Consumer Groups To Attack Community Owned Broadband Networks

Politics

from the socialist-antifa-woke-takeover-of-the-internet-dot-com dept

Annoyed by the kind of expensive, shitty, slow, and spotty broadband access caused by limited competition and monopoly power, hundreds of U.S. communities have been building their own broadband networks. These networks come in a variety of forms, including direct municipal ownership, cooperatives, extensions of city-owned electrical utilities, or public private partnerships.

While there’s certainly the occasional misfire, data consistently indicates the networks they build tend to result in more broadband competition, lower prices, better customer service, and more uniform access. They also see fairly widespread, bipartisan support. Our collective disdain of shitty companies like AT&T and Comcast is one of very few subjects that can burn through all partisan barriers.

Big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast don’t much like that. But because these networks are hugely popular, they can’t just come out and say they don’t like that. They could prevent this from being a problem by providing faster, cheaper, evenly deployed broadband, but it’s much easier and cheaper to bribe politicians into banning community broadband (see: House Republicans).

It’s also fairly inexpensive to throw money at a dodgy fake consumer interest group whose entire function is to seed lies in local communities. Charter, for example, was caught using a fake consumer group to spread distrust about community broadband in Maine. AT&T has, for years, either funded fake consumer groups or “co-opted” existing groups with malleable ethics to do the same thing.

There was a bit of a lull in this kind of activity during COVID, as undermining popular, affordable broadband access during peak plague wasn’t a great look. But big telecom has, in the last year, begun ramping back up such efforts, increasingly using, as this great Ars Technica article explores, dark money 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups who couldn’t care less about actual social welfare:

“Nonprofits registered as 501(c)(4) “social welfare organizations” are allowed to engage in some political activity. Public broadband advocates suspect that 501(c)(4) groups fighting municipal networks are funded by private ISPs. There’s evidence to support this belief: Even though 501(c)(4) groups don’t have to reveal donors, they sometimes list ISPs as “partners” or as sponsors of a conference.”

You know you have a really sound argument when you’re too afraid to make the argument as yourself (say, Verizon, AT&T, or Comcast), but instead have to create a fake consumer interest group to make your (usually false) points for you.

These campaigns were highly successful for a few years, but the annoyance many people had with substandard broadband via COVID really drove the point home that broadband monopolies are bad, and affordable broadband access should probably be viewed more like an essential utility in actual service to the public interest:

“Public broadband advocate Christopher Mitchell told Ars that when the COVID-19 pandemic made home broadband access even more important to Americans than it already was, “the cable and telephone companies lost a fair amount of their power and sway in state legislatures. Now, I kind of think they’re trying to figure out how to operate in the new environment.”

Most of the sleazy groups funded by the telecom industry have names like the “Taxpayer Protection Alliance,” and generally try to play to the inherent right wing or libertarian mistrust of government. This usually involves misrepresenting community broadband as some kind of socialist, dystopian, government takeover of the internet that always inherently results in a massive taxpayer boondoggle.

But that narrative generally falls apart once locals actually experience community broadband access, which, again, comes in a variety of forms with varying degrees of government involvement. In many areas, locals are getting symmetrical, uncapped, gigabit fiber for as little as $60 dollars a month. Owned and operated by people more directly accountable because they live down the street from you.

That’s not to say community broadband is some magical Utopian silver bullet. It requires intelligent planning, smart leaders, and savvy financing. But it’s still an organic, popular, grass roots alternative to the consolidated monopoly telecom power every American has decades of experience with. It not only delivers affordable access, it spurs local monopolies to actually try harder.

And it’s getting harder for giant telecoms to distort and twist the narrative in their favor.

Filed Under: 501(c)(4), astroturf, broadband, community broadband, competition, gigabit fiber, high speed internet, lobbying, municipal broadband, telecom

Court To Cops: Sucking At Your Job And Slow-Walking A Stop Means You Lose All Your Evidence

Legal Issues

from the pls-tell-me-about-yr-training-and-expertise dept

Pretextual stops. Let’s talk about it.

Cops who perform traffic stops are rarely performing traffic stops because they care about traffic safety. They’re looking for something — anything — else. Driving a car on public roads puts you on the outside of the Fourth Amendment. Warrants aren’t required. Reasonable suspicion is the low bar that has to be reached to search a car.

Then there’s a bunch of other stuff. Asset forfeiture encourages pretextual stops because rolling the dice on a traffic stop may mean walking away with a whole lot of cash. If the violation is severe enough, officers may claim the vehicle must be towed, which means they’ll get a freebie search as they “inventory” the contents of the car before handing it over to the impound lot.

The requirements are so low for warrantless searches of cars that courts have had to do a bit of double-duty to ensure the Fourth Amendment didn’t become completely irrelevant. Exploitation of this loophole finally resulted in the Supreme Court setting down a few limits with its Rodriguez decision. Cops can keep their pretense, but they must make an effort to honor it. Artificially extending the stop to engage in a fishing expedition got a little more difficult. Most importantly, it meant cops couldn’t just screw around in hopes of bringing in a drug dog to give them the reasonable suspicion they needed to perform a search.

In reality, this just means cops with K-9 s are constantly on the road, hoping to be within minutes of any pretextual stop. It also means cops have expanded their theories about suspicious behavior. Courts, to their credit, are pushing back more frequently on both tactics following the Rodriguez decision. But the fact remains that, like nearly everything else involving law enforcement, you can’t push back against the government until after it’s already locked you up.

The nice thing is that courts are far more critical of pretextual stops, especially when the officers can’t be bothered to maintain the pretense. In this case, via FourthAmendment.com, the pretense couldn’t be maintained because the officers were so incompetent they weren’t even capable of exploiting the many constitutional loopholes still available to them.

In this case, defendant Said Alan Angulo-Gaxiola got stopped and, following a lot of fortuitous bungling by officers, managed to get hit with multiple drug possession charges. The officers’ luck ran out once Said moved to suppress the evidence, but oh man, that is a trip worth taking, even if we all know what the destination is.

This is from the opening of the Utah federal court decision [PDF]:

On Saturday, March 18, 2023, near six o’clock on a sunny spring night, Sevier County Sheriff’s Deputy Bodee Wells stopped a truck Said was driving because Wells suspected its dark window tint violated Utah law. Said did not have a driver’s license but produced valid border crossing cards issued by the United States to him and his passenger, his brother Saul Angulo-Gaxiola. Said also offered that Saul had a Mexican driver’s license. But Wells did not ask for Saul’s license, or the truck’s vehicle registration, or proof of insurance.

There’s the pretext. Window tint, like the odor of marijuana, is always in the optical/olfactory senses of the beholder. All you need is a reason, and things like window tint or marijuana odor produce no evidence that can be thoroughly challenged in court. They produce nothing in terms of documents, inventories, lab results, or anything else. They are things officers claim to perceive, which limits the discussion to “your word against ours,” which is an equation that almost always favors cops.

It didn’t work here. First, there’s the immediate abandonment of the pretense by failing to ask for registration or insurance info. Then there’s Deputy Bodee Wells, who was incapable of recognizing legal documents beyond (apparently) Utah-issued drivers licenses.

The border crossing cards and the names on them confused Wells, who had only been working as a patrol officer for a few weeks. So he requested help from Sevier County Sgt. Aaron Richards.

While it’s fine to ask for help, that doesn’t keep the Rodriguez clock from ticking. Extending a stop for anything other than the reason for the stop isn’t permitted, even if it’s just to seek clarification from another law enforcement officer.

This initiated a 30-minute traffic stop that ultimately resulted in a search of the car. As the court notes, neither officer ever bothered to write up, much less issue, a citation. The window tint level was never checked. And the compound ignorance of the officers led them to conclude innocent things were “suspicious.”

The search was initiated after a third deputy showed up with a drug dog, which “quickly alerted,” according to the officers’ testimony and the court’s own depiction of the events.

Fortunately, most of this stop was documented by body camera recordings. So, if the deputies wanted to raise factual disputes, they were limited by the far more forthright depiction of the events captured by their recording devices.

Not that it mattered. The testimony immediately distanced itself from the recordings.

Trooper Wells testified he remembers it was “pretty cold” that evening, but on the body camera footage, neither Said nor any of the (what becomes four) officers on the scene is ever wearing a coat or jacket and there is no visible breath vapor. Indeed, at one point while in his patrol car, the footage depicts Deputy Wells roll down his window during a stretch he is in his car for a few minutes.

This seems minimal, but it’s actually important. One might assume (logically) that the trooper might be mistaken about the weather during a traffic stop performed weeks prior to his testimony. But that’s not the case. It’s just one of many misrepresentations by the testifying officers — you know, the sort of thing regular people call “lies.”

Wells exited his car and approached the truck on the passenger side so he would not be in the path of passing traffic. By that time, the truck’s four side windows were all rolled down. Wells testified he thought this was “kind of odd because it was cold outside,” and “people only roll down one window to speak to us,” so that raised some suspicion that the occupants were airing out the truck. Wells did not further investigate any odors, ask the occupants to roll up any windows, or ask why all the windows were down.

That’s why the officer mentioned the temperature. (I have no idea why the court switches to “trooper” when referring to Wells. The first mention of Wells in the opinion states that he is a sheriff’s deputy. I’ll just use “officer” to refer to any of the officers and the court can do whatever it wants.)

Wells asked about the window tint. Said responded that he had just had it done and was told by the installer that he could take it back if it was too dark. Said also noted he resided in Las Vegas, something Wells acknowledged by stating he didn’t know the details about window tint legality in Nevada.

However, he was pretty sure that Said offering to have the tint fixed was “out of the normal.” Then he tripped up when testifying, claiming he had not heard whether or not the passenger had a valid drivers license — something that only would have made sense if he hadn’t said “OK, so neither of you have a drivers license here?”

After being confused by the identification cards he had received from the two people in the truck, Officer Wells finally moved forward with the stop. Or, at least, sideways. He called in another officer. And then he fucked up again.

Richards asked Wells if the men spoke English, and Wells responded that one does, explaining “[o]ne says he’s from Nevada and he just picked up his friend in Mexico.” Of course, that description is inaccurate in multiple ways. Said did not state that he had “picked up” Saul in Mexico. And Said told Wells Saul was his brother, not just a friend— which would explain their identical surnames on the border crossing cards.

It wasn’t until 13 minutes into the stop that Wells bothered to run the vehicle registration past dispatch. That call confirmed the truck belonged to the man driving it: Said Alan Angulo-Gaxiola. It had been registered in Nevada, confirming Said’s earlier assertions about having the window tint installed in Las Vegas.

Once all of this happened, Wells just sat in his car, waiting for the K-9 unit he had requested. He did nothing to move forward with his stated reason for the stop: the window tint. He also did nothing to answer any unanswered questions he might have had about the men in the truck.

A whole lot more screwing around went on. The other officer on the scene asked a bunch of questions unrelated to the stop. Said again stated he would try to take care of the tint problem when he returned to Las Vegas. Some other exploratory “small talk” was initiated by Officer Richards. None of this led to anything resembling reasonable suspicion. The only problem was the supposed lack of a valid Utah drivers license. Said’s brother, Saul, gave his Mexico drivers license to the cops to run in hopes of preventing the truck from being impounded.

Even though they had nothing to work with 20 minutes into an alleged window tint violation stop, the officers dragged it out even longer. Not only that, but Richards joined Wells in lying to the court about the details of the traffic stop:

Rather than do anything related to the license, Richards then recounted to Wells his suspicions based what he thinks Said told him during his questioning:

“He told me they are going to Denver for vacation . . . first it was to work . . . then it was to vacation, visit a friend. And then it was . . . be there a week, then when you coming home? Monday.“

Of course, Said did not tell Richards he was going to Denver for vacation, or for regular work. He told Richards he was going to Denver to help a friend patch a house so the friend could paint it and prepare it to sell. And he didn’t tell Richards he would be in Denver for a week. He told him he would be there the weekend and had to be at work (at an unidentified time) on Monday in Las Vegas.

The recordings show Wells had pretty much completely abandoned the stop 23 minutes into it, ignoring everything about it while chatting to yet another officer who had arrived on the scene. No citation or warning had been issued, but it was pretty clear the brothers in the truck weren’t free to go.

And that’s where even more slow-walking of the stop occurs, solely to buy time to allow the K-9 unit to arrive.

During this time, Richards can be seen on his body camera video slowly entering the truck’s license plate information into his computer. He does this despite having obtained and reviewed the paper registration document from Said, comparing it to the truck’s VIN, and knowing dispatch already provided the return on the ‘28’ on the same license plate, and Wells told him it had come back registered to Said.

That’s just one of many ways officers try to work around the Rodriguez decision. If it looks like it’s a crucial part of a stop, hopefully it won’t be seen as unlawfully extending a stop. So, cops just do the normal traffic stop stuff slower and repeat steps as needed to drag out stops until their “probable cause on four legs” arrives on scene.

Because these officers combined ignorance (Wells and his stated inexperience) and a whole bunch of bullshit (the slow-walking and senseless redundant verification of information that had already been verified by other officers) to arrive at the conclusion they wanted (a warrantless search of the truck), the court is unwilling to allow the government to hold onto its ill-gotten evidence:

Based on the foregoing, the stop was prolonged due to unreasonable delinquency. The resulting delays caused the stop—over twenty-nine minutes from initiation to when the K-9 sniffed and alerted—to last much longer than needed to complete the traffic-based mission of issuing a citation for window tint and/or unlicensed driver and complete any needed safety checks. This violated the Fourth Amendment, and now warrants suppression of evidence and statements resulting from the stop.

The court says this whole thing could have been resolved in under 15 minutes, even if it gives credence to Officer Wells’ claims he had no idea what to do with the IDs he had received from Said and his brother. The second officer was able to verify the documents “within seconds” — something he did moments after the drug dog arrived and more than 15 minutes after his own arrival at the scene.

As for the suspicion multiple testifying officers called “reasonable,” the court says what’s captured on camera does not match the assertions of the officers. Instead, the officers (deliberately or otherwise) misrepresented statements made by Said and used these misrepresentations to justify their extension of the stop and the eventual search of the vehicle.

It’s good to see a court call out cops for attempting to route around Rodriguez with a whole bunch of bullshit. But this is just the time the cops got caught. This sort of thing happens all the time. The only reason we don’t see this handled in court more often is because most people who get fucked with by cops before being allowed to go generally don’t head right out and hire a lawyer. It’s people facing criminal charges that have the most to lose. But they’re still entitled to the same rights as the hundreds (or thousands) of drivers who have their rights violated daily by opportunistic cops.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, asset forfeiture, bodee wells, civil asset forfeiture, evidence, pretextual stops, said alan angulo-gaxiola, utah

Emory University Suspends Students Over AI Study Tool The School Gave Them $10k To Build And Promoted

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the um-guys? dept

I’ll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it’s so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this means a great deal of consternation over concerns about students using these tools to cheat. While these concerns sure seem wildly overblown, the flipside of this issue has been the use of all kinds of software tools billed as “anti-cheating” programs for schools to use to make sure students are student-ing legitimately.

But, man, whatever the hell is going on with the folks at Emory University is simply bizarre. A group of students are suing the school after being suspended for a year over an AI program they built called “Eightball,” which is designed to automagically review course study material within the school’s software where professors place those study materials and develop flashcards, study materials for review, and the like. The only problem is that the school not only knew all about Eightball, it paid these same students $10,000 to make it.

Last spring, the students presented Eightball at the university’s “Entrepreneurship Summit” and were given a $10,000 grand prize to build and launch their software, which allowed students to upload PDFs of course readings, syllabuses, and other material and turn those into practice tests and flash cards. They also explained that they were eventually going to allow users to connect to Canvas, which is a software platform used by the university where professors upload course readings, documentation, assignments, etc, the lawsuit alleges. “By connecting Eightball to Canvas, students would be able to import their course materials to Eightball all at once rather than uploading the same documents individually.”

“Eightball is a platform kind of like ChatGPT but trained directly on your Canvas courses. The way Eightball works is it connects to your Canvas and goes through each of your courses. And for each course it studies the modules, the lectures, the slides, the readings, everything. From there, it becomes a ChatGPT-like experience, but the AI is customized for your course,” one of the creators explains in a demo video. The student then shows that Eightball surfaces directly relevant passages and serves as, more or less, a search-engine for class material.

The school actually did much more than just fund Eightball’s creation. It promoted the tool on its website. It announced how awesome the tool is on LinkedIn. Emails from faculty at Emory showered the creators of Eightball with all kinds of praise, including from the Associate Dean of the school. Everything was great, all of this was above-board, and it seemed that these Emory students were well on their way to doing something special, with the backing of the university.

Then the school’s IT and Honor Council got involved.

It is not clear, exactly, what changed at Emory that made the university take action against a startup that it went out of its way to promote, but both the lawsuit and the Honor Council writeup asserts that the university’s IT department was angry that the company allowed students to connect their own Canvas API tokens to the app. In the lawsuit, the students’ lawyers write that the university changed the settings within Canvas and “hid the button that generates Canvas [API] tokens, but it did not inform [the students] that the change was in response to Eightball’s newly available method for uploading course materials.” Soon after this, “Emory informed [one of the students] that he may have violated Emory’s Undergraduate Code of Conduct by Connecting Eightball to Canvas.” The students shut Eightball down at this point.

After all of this promotion, the university’s Honor Council launched an investigation into the students and Eightball. This investigation, which can be read here, found that Eightball had not been used for cheating, and that the students had not lied about the capabilities of the software. It also did not dispute that the school both funded and championed the software. The council recommended that the students be suspended for a year, anyway. Jason Ciejka, the director of the school’s honor council, wrote “this case is unprecedented in terms of its scale and potential to harm the Emory community.” 

Read that second paragraph again. The school funded the creation of this tool made by its own students, praised those students and promoted the use of the tool, validated that it had not been used for any cheating (because it can’t be used to cheat, more on that later), and then suspended the students for a year anyway. That’s insane.

And all of this consternation over using an API token by students is equally silly. The school suggested this was some kind of IT security risk for students to use them to connect Canvas to Eightball. What the school appears to be missing is that, you know, that’s precisely what APIs are for.

The school “figured out that the Eightball program accesses the Canvas data through the Canvas user generated token, which is essentially users’ Emory credentials that give full access to everything users can access on Canvas. This user generated token is considered a highly restricted user credential tool and sharing it to any outside party is a violation of Canvas terms and IT policies.” API tokens are sensitive, but API tokens exist exclusively for users to connect accounts to outside services—what the Honor Council is describing is essentially the only use for an API token, and is a feature of Canvas which the Honor Council wrote “is not something that they can turn off.” Canvas’s own documentation explains to students how they can use use API tokens to connect their accounts to other apps: “Access tokens provide access to canvas resources through the Canvas API. Access tokens can be generated automatically for third-party applications or created manually.”

The Honor Council, however, seemed to be hyper-focused on cheating, still. While it confirmed no cheating had taken place, it still recommended suspension due to how Eightball could be used for cheating. Except no, no it cannot. That isn’t what the platform does at all. The only information Eightball can supply the student with is the information that is in the course material supplied by the professors themselves.

According to Eightball’s marketing, the lawsuit, and Emory University’s own writeups, Eightball was not actually a cheating tool. As far as AI-tools go, it seems innocuous, and the university did not provide any examples of the tool ever being used for cheating. “Unless answers are directly in the course materials, Eightball cannot make up anything for non-existing answers.”

You can read the lawsuit from the students embedded below, but I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario in which the court doesn’t laugh Emory University out of the courtroom and order it to return these students to their classes.

Filed Under: ai, cheating, eightball, students
Companies: emory university

Why Jonathan Haidt’s ‘Protect The Kids’ Proposals Could Make Things Worse For Kids

Studies

from the first-do-no-harm dept

How much harm is done to children in the name of “protecting” them? Entirely too much. What if we drive them further into dangerous corners of the internet by cutting them off from their support networks?

Since the release of Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” a few months back, there has been plenty of discussion and debate about his claims and his proposed solutions. In my own review of the book, I discussed how the data supporting Haidt’s claims were extraordinarily weak, but spent more time talking about how flimsy the support for his “solutions” were.

Haidt has, at other times, suggested that even if there is no evidence to actually support his policy solutions, we should support them anyway, because they couldn’t do any harm, and the mere chance that they might benefit kids is worth it. As I wrote:

While it doesn’t make it directly into his latest book, while he was working on it, Haidt responded to critics of his thesis by citing Pascal’s Wager—that it makes more sense to believe in God than not, because the cost of believing and being wrong is nothing. But the cost of not believing and being wrong could be eternal damnation.

Similarly, Haidt argues that we should keep kids away from social media for the same reason: even if he’s wrong, the “cost” is minimal.

The scariest part is that the cost of being wrong is not minimal. Indeed, it appears to be extremely high.

If he’s wrong, it means parents, politicians, teachers, and more do not tackle the real root causes of teenage mental health issues.

The research has shown repeatedly that social media is valuable for many young people, especially those struggling in their local communities and families (multiple studies highlight how LGBTQ youth rely heavily on social media in very helpful ways). Taking that lifeline away can be damaging. There are numerous stories of kids who relied on social media to help them out of tricky situations, such as diagnosing a disease where doctors failed to help.

I then went on and detailed how little Haidt seemed to understand about his own policy proposals. At least he provided some studies to support his position about the problem. But when it came to his policy proposals, they were totally based on “feels” rather than facts (or data).

Similarly, Haidt is no policy expert, and it shows. In the book, he supports policies like the “Kids Online Safety Act,” which has been condemned by LGBTQ groups, given that the co-sponsor of the bill has admitted she supports it to remove LGBTQ content from the internet. That’s real harm.

Now, Candice Odgers, a researcher who has done the actual research work Haidt has never done, and who published a fantastic takedown in Nature of the misleading claims Haidt made about the research, has a new piece in the Atlantic. The piece details the very real harms that might occur if everyone focuses on smartphones as some sort of horrible depression-making boxes.

Again, Odgers reminds everyone about the lack of any real evidence on these claims of initial harm:

I am a developmental psychologist, and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

Many other researchers have found the same. In fact, a recent study and a review of research on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

In the piece, she notes that these claims from Haidt and others have “an intuitive appeal” because social media and mobile phones make for “an easy scapegoat.” But we should be concerned that the data doesn’t support these claims because it will mean we’ll make very wrong decisions in trying to figure out how to deal with these challenges.

Indeed, if the cause and effect is the opposite direction, as Odgers and others have found, then these “solutions” could do more harm:

The reality is that correlational studies to date have generated a mix of small, conflicting, and often confounded associations between social-media use and adolescents’ mental health. The overwhelming majority of them offer no way to sort out cause and effect. When associations are found, things seem to work in the opposite direction from what we’ve been told: Recent research among adolescents—including among young-adolescent girls, along with a large review of 24 studies that followed people over time—suggests that early mental-health symptoms may predict later social-media use, but not the other way around.

Odgers then highlights how experimental studies that might tease out actual cause and effect tend to have real problems, studying the wrong age group, or platforms that kids don’t really use these days (hello Facebook!).

But, as I noted in my review of Haidt’s book, and as Odgers also highlights here, the risk of falsely jumping to the conclusion that removing social media and phones from kids will somehow solve these problems risks making the problems worse:

But the problem with the extreme position presented in Haidt’s book and in recent headlines—that digital technology use is directly causing a large-scale mental-health crisis in teenagers—is that it can stoke panic and leave us without the tools we need to actually navigate these complex issues. Two things can be true: first, that the online spaces where young people spend so much time require massive reform, and second, that social media is not rewiring our children’s brains or causing an epidemic of mental illness. Focusing solely on social media may mean that the real causes of mental disorder and distress among our children go unaddressed.

Offline risk—at the community, family, and child levels—continues to be the best predictor of whether children are exposed to negative content and experiences online. Children growing up in families with the fewest resources offline are also less likely to be actively supported by adults as they learn to navigate the online world. If we react to these problems based on fear alone, rather than considering what adolescents actually need, we may only widen this opportunity gap.

We should not send the message to families—and to teens—that social-media use, which is common among adolescents and helpful in many cases, is inherently damaging, shameful, and harmful. It’s not. What my fellow researchers and I see when we connect with adolescents is young people going online to do regular adolescent stuff. They connect with peers from their offline life, consume music and media, and play games with friends. Spending time on YouTube remains the most frequent online activity for U.S. adolescents. Adolescents also go online to seek information about health, and this is especially true if they also report experiencing psychological distress themselves or encounter barriers to finding help offline. Many adolescents report finding spaces of refuge online, especially when they have marginalized identities or lack support in their family and school. Adolescents also report wanting, but often not being able to access, online mental-health services and supports.

All adolescents will eventually need to know how to safely navigate online spaces, so shutting off or restricting access to smartphones and social media is unlikely to work in the long term. In many instances, doing so could backfire: Teens will find creative ways to access these or even more unregulated spaces, and we should not give them additional reasons to feel alienated from the adults in their lives.

This is why I find Haidt’s idea of “well, we should do these ideas anyway, even if I have no proof to support them, because they can’t do any harm” so problematic. They can do real, and lasting, harm. They take attention away from dealing with the very complex realities facing teens about mental health today. They especially give parents and teachers an easy excuse to avoid tackling those real issues.

On top of that, if it is true that mental health issues (and a lack of proper resources to deal with them) are driving kids to social media as an alternative, taking that away can have real negative consequences. As Odgers notes, it can also make things worse by driving kids into darker corners of the internet, seeking answers.

We’ve already seen this come true with eating disorder content online. Attempts by social media companies to block such content and shut down groups discussing eating disorders did not diminish the existence of eating disorders among teens. Because it was a “demand side” problem (kids looking for such communities) rather than a “supply side” (kids deciding to explore eating disorders because they were encouraged on social media), it meant that when those communities were shut down, the kids still sought it out. And they found it, but in darker corners of the internet, where there was less oversight and fewer people within those same communities helping to guide the members towards useful recovery resources.

For all the talk of “protecting the children” online, and so much focus on Haidt’s utter nonsense, shouldn’t we be at least somewhat concerned that Haidt’s solutions have a very real chance of doing real harm to kids?

Filed Under: candice odgers, jonathan haidt, mental health, protect the children, social media