Look, I’m as delighted as you are to see Alex Jones’ ability to spread
hatred curtailed – because in a world where all the important speech
takes place online, and where online speech is owned by four or five
companies, being kicked off of Big Tech’s services is likely to be an
extinction-level event.
And yeah, it’s cute to see him wander from platform to platform, looking for a home, while “Conservatives” wake up and discover
that 40 years of Ronald Reagan antitrust-lite policies have given a
handful of shareholder-driven tech companies control over public
discourse (I call it “reaganfreude”).
But as David Greene – civil liberties director at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation – writes in the Washington Post, the big picture
here is terrible.
The platforms’ version of policing bad speech is sloppy, capricious and
arbitrary. People get censored for discussing terrorist atrocities,
while actual videos of terrorist atrocities stay up. Millions of
accounts are disconnected for being bots, with no recourse for actual
activists who are caught like dolphins in that big ole tuna net. Real
protests are delisted for being “inauthentic,” while Nazis organize in
the open.
Greene has a very, very modest proposal for how the platforms should conduct censorship, based on the widely accepted “Santa Clara Principles” on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation:
1. The companies should publish up-to-date stats on which posts and accounts they’ve shut down;
2. The companies should notify you when your post or account is flagged or removed;
3. You should have a right to appeal takedowns, and the rules should be evenhandedly enforced.
These are, as I say, modest goals. They’re a lot more likely to produce
good takedowns and healthy online forums that disconnecting people by
the millions using algorithms, or picking them off one by one only when
the public outcry gets loud enough.
The problem is we’ve given these companies this power by allowing them to build monopolies. And companies are less likely to allow us rights than our pale excuse for democratic goverments are.
What we need is the good representative democracy that can be achieved with Proportional Representation.
Inside the Fake Science Factory
(German/English subtitles) documents Svea Eckert and team’s years of
investigation into predatory journals and the criminals behind them.
Predatory journals are fake scientific/scholarly journals that pretend
to be “open access” journals and solicit fees from the people who submit
to them to pay for editing and peer review. But they’re just publishing
mills that print anything (as pranksters routinely demonstrate) and hire anyone to sit on their “prestigious” editorial boards (ditto).
There are two prevailing stories about who publishes in these journals:
naive scholars early in their careers who get suckered in, and desperate
or crooked academics looking to burnish their credentials in order to
progress in their fields (Eckert’s team documents scholars at top
universities like Stanford and Yale who have done this).
But Inside the Fake Science Factory reveals a much uglier and more evil
side to these journals: they are widely used by criminals and corporate
lobbyists to give a veneer of scientific credibility to dangerous
nonsense.
The documentary profiles First Immune, a corporation with an expensive,
untried alleged quack cancer remedy whose CEO David Noakes is going on
trial in the UK for “conspiracy to manufacture a medical product without
a license.” Noakes and First Immune were heavy users of fake journals,
publishing dozens of papers in them, then using these publications to
lure people with potentially fatal illnesses into paying them for
“therapies.”
(The documentarians demonstrate how easy this is by successfully
submitting a paper arguing that beeswax is better than chemotherapy for
treating cancer to the Journal of Integrative Oncology, published by WASET)
But petty quacks are small potatoes for fake science companies: their
big customers are corporations like Astrazeneca, Philip Morris, and the
nuclear safety company Framatone, who cite their articles in scam
journals as evidence of the scientific rigor of their products and
services, fooling both customers and regulators.
The documentary identifies some of the perpetrators behind the scam
journals (and their accompanying scam “conferences” which consist of a
handful of people standing around hotel ballrooms for a couple hours,
but later padding their CVs with the papers they’ve delivered at learned
conferences). The documentary claims the WASET scam empire is run by a
Turkish family, Cemal Ardil and his children Bora and Ebru, whose 5,000
“journals” and conferences brought in $4.1 million in 2017, according to
the documentarians.
They also finger OMICS (sued by the FTC in 2016).
The team behind the doc presented their findings (and the ways they
punked the scammers) at Defcon this year. I’m not sure if their
presentation will be online, but I’m definitely watching their doc.
