Mediaboss Marketing

Fake news captures attention and is corrosive. Like many similar social problems online, it is a symptom of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism explains the economic incentives that drive media production and distribution on internet platforms like Facebook. The business model used by internet platforms relies on collecting data and using that data to create profiles of users to predict their interests and behavior.

This allows Facebook to serve tailored advertisements to users. Its this matching of advertisements to people that makes Facebook incredibly valuable to advertisers an advertisement that more closely matches someones interest is more likely to end in a sale and companies are willing to pay top dollar for this.

The economic incentives that push Facebook to collect as much user data as possible also explain why we should not rely on Facebook to stem the tide of fake news.

The economic incentives that push Facebook to collect as much user data as possible also explain why we should not rely on Facebook to stem the tide of fake news. Facebook does not have a financial stake in dispassionately disseminating true or unbiased information. Instead, it has a financial incentive to increase traffic on the platform (more eyeballs to view ads) and increase user participation through cheap, data-generating behavior, such as superficial Likes and shares that Facebook can then analyze to better model and predict user behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff writes that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists [like Facebook] ... is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. Similarly, to the extent that fake news enables continued surveillance and tracking by Facebook, we should not expect the company to be interested in genuine solutions that might threaten its business model.

Fake news may be only a symptom of a deeper set of political economy issues, but studying the phenomenon usefully highlights two distinct types of more general social problems that plague networked media and require different interventions.

The first type of fake news hoaxes rely on the rapid-click business model that is sometimes associated with clickbait. Creators of hoaxes dont really care about the content or substance of the fake message; theyre not trying to change anyones beliefs or affect their behavior beyond manipulating them into clicking.

Facebook and other proprietary platforms enable this business model because it coincides with their incentives as surveillance capitalists.

A potential solution to this species of fake news is to create new platforms like federated social networks that do not rely on advertising revenue and, by extension, the economic incentives that force Facebook and other proprietary social networks to optimize for clicks and ignore user privacy to more effectively serve ads.

Federated social networks like Diaspora dont nudge users to overshare information or structure their sites to encourage clicks and other superficial engagements that can be analyzed. Their business model doesnt require it.

A potential solution to this species of fake news is to create new platforms like federated social networks that dont rely on advertising revenue.

So far, federated social networks have only gained fringe acceptance. There are many possible reasons for this, but network effects and the high costs of switching create a significant barrier to overcome. Simply put, even if these alternatives offered significant advantages over Facebook, it is difficult to motivate people to leave the platform that theyve grown accustomed to and where theyve already built an extensive social network.

Even if federated social networks were to gain widespread adoption, they may not be well suited to act as media distributors. Federated social networks offer some improvements for news distribution because they do not rely on the economic incentives that drive Facebook to select stories like hoaxes that generate lots of clicks but pollute the news ecosystem.

Yet simply removing the economic incentives that drive media distribution on social networks may not be a full solution, because it doesnt target the underlying motivations that drive a second species of fake news: Propaganda.

The creation and distribution of propaganda isnt motivated by making money through superficial engagements like clicks. Instead, the goal is to affect beliefs, preferences and attitudes by cultivating false or intentionally misleading narratives. Facebook and other platforms enable these actors because they deny that they are media companies and refuse to develop or exercise editorial expertise.

Facebook needs to act like a media company and make determinations about newsworthiness or the credibility of certain sources and articles.

In some sense, Facebook has backed itself into a corner with the platform objectivity narrative and a refusal to admit that its a media company. Situations emerge where Facebook needs to act like a media company and make determinations about newsworthiness or the credibility of certain sources and articles. When Facebook starts making these decisions, a large subset of its user base falls back on Facebooks own cultivated narrative that its just a platform and should not be making these decisions.

In short, people dont really trust Facebook to be making these decisions. Nor should they.

We need a way forward that addresses both the perverse economic incentives and expertise issues that justifiably undermine the publics faith in networked news distribution. What would it take to create a new, trusted social networking platform that combats hoaxes and propaganda while serving the public interest more generally?

The BBC provides some clues. The key ingredients for a trusted media platform are an institutional structure that supports independence and a firm commitment to cultivating and exercising editorial expertise. The BBC has these features and, as a result, it is widely judged to be a decent model of a trusted, competent public media platform. Of course, the BBC is not perfect; it does not (yet) manage a social network; and it is not the only viable model.

NPR and an array of other publicly minded companies could focus on developing a trusted social media platform, but as we highlight below, the BBC has already cultivated the technological and social capital required for a trusted social networking platform and could serve as a possible model for what could be built.

The BBC is deeply trusted by the public. The level of public trust is so strong that it could motivate people to switch over from Facebook because of the BBC brand. Of course, a BBC social network would not have to operate as a substitute, such that people would have to choose one or the other. Many U.K. citizens would presumably choose both. The two social networks might complement each other.

The public trusts the BBC to cover stories impartially, and also trusts that the BBC covers a wide variety of topics. This trust translates nicely to the role that the BBC would play as the operator of a social media platform. The BBC could curate news sections that continued its missions of covering a diverse set of issues while leveraging its impartiality.

The BBCs reach and trust would allow its social media platform to help establish a baseline set of facts that make debate across ideological lines possible and pressure against the development of filter bubbles and echo chambers.

The BBC has media expertise, which it can draw from to make sound editorial judgments and create content specific to the platform making it better-situated than both federated social networks and Facebook to create and deliver news content.

Media expertise is crucial for disseminating news in a networked environment. A truly peer-to-peer platform, like federated social networks, may be effective as interpersonal communication platforms, but this model does not account for the expertise required for mass-media distribution. Effective mass-media distribution requires nuanced judgments about newsworthiness as well as identifying and critiquing propaganda narratives.

Unlike Facebook, the BBC already has a seasoned staff of media experts who could and might be willing to focus their efforts on the broad array of judgments and decisions that attend disseminating news through a social media platform. In practice, this expertise most likely would be leveraged as an input for the BBCs own algorithms. For example, one can image some randomly selected fraction of news-related content on the platform is evaluated by a BBC editor and rated for quality, and that such ratings would be incorporated into the machine-learning system.

The BBCs funding model shields it from coercive economic and political pressure.

The BBCs funding model shields it from coercive economic and political pressure.

The BBC is funded through a license model, which would insulate a BBC social media platform from having to respond to the incentives that attend online advertising. Without the market pressure to model and predict user behavior for more effective advertising, a BBC-based social media platform could respect privacy rights of users as its funding model does not depend on user data as fuel for its advertising profit engine. Thus, the BBC could plausibly claim, We will not surveil or profile you or in any way seek to sell you or anyone else anything about you. You are our client, and you can trust us.

This independence frees up a BBC platform to select for news stories that do more than entertain and confirm the biases of its users to increase engagement and monitoring. The BBC could tailor its algorithms to promote stories that optimize for other values besides entertainment. There could still be space for news stories that entertain, but the motivations underlying news story selections could also include commitments to other core public values like diversity of information, an informed public and nonfragmented space for public debate.

The license model also insulates the BBC from unwarranted government interference. Because license fees are paid directly by the public and not funded through taxation, the BBC is not necessarily responsive to government demands about how to report events or what events require coverage.

The public sphere is fragmented with partisan (or, at worst, intentionally deceptive) political outlets servicing a substantial proportion of the news content. Facebook thus far has not embraced a traditional editorial role to critique false and misleading narratives.

Worse still, Facebooks current distribution methods either do not address this problem or exacerbate it by serving false content that confirms their suspicions.

Some commentators have recognized the importance for noncommercial platform alternatives, while others have recognized the importance of funding public media content.

A BBC platform combines these ideas to create a more robust solution. A trusted social network platform strips the perverse economic incentives of surveillance capitalism while providing much needed editorial expertise for news creation and distribution on its platform.

Importantly, this doesnt need to be done by the BBC. Other organizations that are financially independent and have or are at least willing to cultivate editorial expertise are in a good spot to develop a trusted social networking platform.

We need our platforms to put people and democratic society ahead of cheap profits. Creating and developing a trusted social network platform does just that.

Brett Frischmann is a professor at Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University and the Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information and Technology Policy at Princeton Universitys Center for Information and Technology Policy. This fall, he will join Villanova University as the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics. He is an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Reach him @BrettFrischmann.

Mark Verstraete is a privacy and free expression postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and a graduate of Harvard Law School. Reach him @markverstraete.

Read more:
We need our platforms to put people and democratic society ahead of cheap profits - Recode

SOCIAL NETWORKING COULD SET TREND FOR INTERESTING TRAIN JOURNEYS Voyagers World Vikas Jagetiya, Founder, OMitra, aims to redefine train travel through social networking and keeping the passenger updated on the train's services at any given point of time during the journey. The OMitra Train Social App is the first company in India ...

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SOCIAL NETWORKING COULD SET TREND FOR INTERESTING TRAIN JOURNEYS - Voyagers World

Daily Mirror

Social networking lands teacher in trouble Daily Mirror Social networking outlets such as Facebook are used by people to express their personal opinions and views about issues they are interested in. Recently, a male teacher of Kuliyapitiya Central College faced repercussions from the Education Ministry ...

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Social networking lands teacher in trouble - Daily Mirror

In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court will decide whether a warrant is required for the government to obtain historical cell-site records from a customers account. This post asks a question for those who think the answer should be yes: How do you deal with the Fourth Amendment rights of the cellphone providers? Im not sure what the answer should be, but I think its an important question to help understand the issues and stakes in Carpenter.

This is a complex issue, so Im going to break it down into three steps. Ill start with an overview of the third-party doctrine. Ill then turn to third-party rights under current law. Ill next consider different ways the third-party rights might work if the Supreme Court holds that a warrant is required.

I. Overview of the Third-Party Doctrine

Lower courts have held, consistently with U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that historical cell-site records are not protected under the Fourth Amendment. They have mostly based this holding on the third-party doctrine, the rule that you dont maintain Fourth Amendment rights in information that you voluntarily disclose to a third party.

As I explained in this article, the third-party doctrine was originally intended to be the subjective expectation of privacy test in Justice Harlans Katz concurrence. The idea was that you can only have privacy in what you try to hide from others: You need to manifest your subjective expectation of privacy to have Fourth Amendment rights, shielding it from observation, so that you cant have such rights in what you knowingly disclose to others. As my article explains, this rule has been around for a very long time, but it accidentally moved over time from the subjective expectation test into the objective expectation of privacy test in the 1970s and 1980s.

The third-party doctrine has had very wide application. If a criminal confesses to his friend about his crimes, the government can get the information from the friend without implicating the criminals Fourth Amendment rights. If a person commits an offense in front of an eyewitness, the government can get the information from the eyewitness without implicating the criminals Fourth Amendment rights. If a person goes to the bank and deposits a check, the government can get the information from the bank without implicating his Fourth Amendment rights. And if a person dials a number to place a phone call, the government can get the numbers dialed from the phone company without implicating his Fourth Amendment rights.

II. What About the Constitutional Rights of the Third Party?

A key implication of the third-party doctrine is that the government only has to deal with the constitutional rights of the person or business that received and now possesses the information. Upon the informations receipt, the thinking goes, the sender of the information no longer has Fourth Amendment rights in it. Only the rights of the recipient/holder of the information matter.

That raises the question of to what extent the constitutional rights of the holder of the information can limit law enforcement. The answer is: some, although not much. First, the Supreme Court has held that there are no Fourth Amendment limits to the government compelling a person to testify about what they know and what they saw. That raises Fifth Amendment issues if the person who would testify may be thought to be involved in criminal activity, but the compelled testimony is not a search or seizure under the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1 (1973).

Second, if the government compels a person or company to hand over stored records as opposed to live testimony, the Fourth Amendment applies to the records but the constitutional limit is only unreasonable burdensomeness. There is no warrant or probable cause requirement. See, e.g., Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906); In re Horowitz, 482 F.2d 72 (2d Cir. 1973) (Friendly, J.). To be sure, the Fourth Amendment still applies fully to direct entry. The government ordinarily needs a warrant to break into a business and seize records just like it needs a warrant to break into a home. But its a different situation when the government is compelling assistance rather than searching directly.

These same Fourth Amendment rules apply when the government is seeking information that a business happens to hold about its customers. Whether the target of the investigation is the business or its customers doesnt matter under the Fourth Amendment. This means that if the government is seeking a companys assistance to disclose records about the businesss customers, the information is protected under the Fourth Amendment in the abstract because the business has its own Fourth Amendment rights. At the same time, the third-party business generally can be required to keep and disclose the records under a fairly low burden. See, e.g., California Bankers Association v. Shultz, 416 U.S. 21 (1974); Couch v. United States, 409 U.S. 322 (1973); Donaldson v. United States, 400 U. S. 517 (1971). And because the information or records ordinarily could not incriminate the third party in criminal activity, the third party business cannot assert a Fifth Amendment privilege against production. See Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391 (1976).

The idea that a business has only modest Fourth Amendment rights to fight compelled disclosure of customer records isnt new. It has been around a long time. For example, in First National Bank v. United States, 267 U.S. 576 (1925), the IRS wanted to see if a couple had underreported their income on their federal income tax forms. The IRS issued a summons to the couples bank requiring the bank to produce their books showing the couples banking account records. The idea was that the bank statements would reveal whether the couple had falsely reported their income. The bank refused to comply under the Fourth Amendment on the ground that producing the records was an unreasonable search or seizure and that the bank wanted to keep its customers account records private.

The district court rejected the banks claim. This is not a question of a search and seizure of a partys books and papers, the court wrote, but of whether a witness who has information as to a partys dealings may be required to testify to those facts, and produce book entries as to such entries in connection with and supporting such testimony. It would be monstrous, the court rather dramatically added, for the government not to be able to determine the proper taxes that a person owed simply because the bank desires to protect the dealings of its customers from unauthorized investigation. The Supreme Court then affirmed the district court in a one-sentence per curiam opinion upon the authority of the courts precedents about subpoenas for business records (including Hale v. Henkel, cited above).

III. Applying the Traditional Approach to Historical Cell-Site Records

Applying this traditional body of law to historical cell-site records is pretty straightforward, I think. The cellphone company generates and stores business records of what cell towers were used to connect a customers calls. Those records are like the banks records in First National Bank. The cellphone provider is ordered to be a witness who has information as to a partys dealings [and] may be required to testify to those facts, and produce book entries as to such entries in connection with and supporting such testimony.

Granted, Congress requires an intermediate facts court order under the Stored Communications Act for the government to compel those records. A mere subpoena, which would be sufficient under the Fourth Amendment, isnt enough under the statute. But if the lesser process of a subpoena is sufficient to satisfy the rights of the company, presumably the greater process of an intermediate facts court order is as well (although that hasnt been challenged), And under the third-party doctrine, access to the account records wouldnt implicate any Fourth Amendment rights of the user.

If youll pardon a brief digression, its not even clear you need the third-party doctrine to say that the records dont implicate the users Fourth Amendment rights. The third-party doctrine is traditionally about the disclosure of private information that a suspect has revealed. The idea is that the suspect has private information, chose to reveal that information (often in confidence) to someone, and then the government sought that private information from that person. The cell-site business records in Carpenter are arguably one step removed from that. They are business records of how a private company decided to direct calls to and from the user. The records are about what a private company did for a user, not necessarily what a user chose to disclose in confidence to the company.

But at the very least, the third-party doctrine seems to fit the Carpenter case under traditional caselaw principles. So the old answer would be no Fourth Amendment rights for the customer, although statutory rights provided by Congress, and only modest Fourth Amendment rights for the cellphone provider.

IV. If the Third-Party Doctrine is Rejected, How Should Courts Deal With Third-Party Rights?

Thats the old law, at least. Now lets consider how the Fourth Amendment would work if the Supreme Court rejects that traditional approach. Lets assume the Supreme Court agrees with the defendant on both issues in Carpenter: First it holds that users have Fourth Amendment rights in cell-site records, and second it holds that the records are protected by a warrant protection.

Now we get to my question: Assuming the Supreme Court makes these two holdings, how would this work with respect to the providers rights? The government does not seek cell-site records by breaking into the providers business and rummaging around its offices and computers. That would ordinarily require a warrant even under the traditional law of the third-party doctrine. The records are already protected under the Fourth Amendment as held by the company, after all, and ordinarily the government would need a warrant to break into the company headquarters and seize them because of the companys Fourth Amendment rights.

The tricky problem, I think, is what to do with the providers rights once the user also has rights in the records. Assume, for now, that the company does not want to comply with the governments legal process. If the records were about the provider, a subpoena would be enough for the government to force the company to disclose them.

Heres what Im stuck on: How do you reconcile the conflict between that rule and a warrant requirement if the Fourth Amendment rights belong to the user? Is the idea that a company served with a subpoena for business records has to figure out if the subpoena implicates only its own Fourth Amendment rights (in which case the subpoena complies with the Fourth Amendment so long as it is not overbroad) or if it also implicates a users Fourth Amendment rights (in which case the subpoena is insufficient and a warrant is required?). If the government issues a subpoena for business records and it turns out that a customer also had rights in the data, would we say that compelled compliance with the subpoena violated the rights of the user but not the company?

Alternatively, if it doesnt make sense for every subpoena and sub-warrant court order to require a standing analysis before knowing if compliance is legal, which rule do you apply to both situations if a single rule has to be chosen? Do you say that both situations require a warrant, such that all subpoenas issued to businesses now require probable cause and warrant particularity (effectively eliminating the use of business record subpoenas for investigations)? Or do you say that neither situation requires a warrant, such that the user has Fourth Amendment rights in cell-site records but that a valid subpoena is enough to overcome the Fourth Amendment rights just as it it would for ordinary business records?

Next assume that the cellphone company wants to cooperate. If both the user and the company have Fourth Amendment rights in the records, then I imagine the common authority doctrine would apply. Under the common authority doctrine, if there is mutual use of the property by persons generally having joint access or control for most purposes, they both can consent to a search. See United States v. Matlock, 415 U.S. 164 (1974). Cellphone customers may not have joint access and control over cell site records: They dont know what the records say and have no ordinary means of accessing them. But if they nonetheless have Fourth Amendment rights in the records, I would think that at least the company has common authority over the records allowing them to legally consent to law enforcement access to the records.

If thats right, though, how does it work if the phone company is willing to help the government? Imagine Carpenter holds that users have Fourth Amendment rights in cell-site records, and that a warrant is ordinarily required. Can a provider tell the government that as long as the government has a 2703(d) court order, as required by the statute, that it will voluntarily consent to hand over the records under the common authority doctrine? If so, whether there is really a warrant requirement would depend on what the company wants to do: Because both the user and the company have common authority over the companys business record, the company could consent and eliminate the right.

You could try to avoid this by saying that the cellphone providers lack common authority over their own business records. But that seems like a hard result to justify. The companies created and used the records and keep them. It seems hard to say that they lack access to or control over the records that they created and keep for their own use.

Granted, caselaw would suggest that companies lack common authority to consent to a government search of the contents of communications, such as emails. In physical space, the landlord of an apartment or the hotel employee at the hotel lacks common authority to consent. See Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610 (1961) (landlord); Stoner v. California, 376 U.S. 483 (1964) (hotel employee). By analogy, I would think that an email provider couldnt ordinarily consent to a search of the contents of a users emails, at least barring some unusual terms of service. But with cell-site records, I would think that the phone companies have at least common authority (if not exclusive authority) over the records of how their network connected calls.

V. Let Me Know Your Thoughts

For the seven readers that have made it this far, let me know your thoughts! There may be good answers to these questions. But it seems like largely uncharted territory, and Im not sure yet what those good answers are.

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Third party rights and the Carpenter cell-site case - Washington Post

Version 3.49-2 (05/20/2017) Engine fixes (keep-alive, redirects, new hashtables, unit tests)

Installing HTTrack: Go to the download section now! For help and questions: Visit the forum, Read the documentation, Read the FAQs, Browse the sources

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

WinHTTrack is the Windows (from Windows 2000 to Windows 10 and above) release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. See the download page.

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