Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter dodge questions on social media and national security:
Executives from four of the biggest social media companies testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, defending their platforms and their respective safety, privacy and moderation failures in recent years.
Congress managed to drag in a relatively fresh set of product-focused executives this time around, including TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, who testified for the first time before lawmakers, and longtime Meta executive Chris Cox. The hearing was convened to explore social media's impact on national security broadly and touched on topics ranging from domestic extremism and misinformation to CSAM and China.
Committee Chair Sen. Gary Peters pressed each company to disclose the number of employees they have working full-time on trust and safety and each company in turn refused to answer — even though they received the question prior to the hearing. Twitter General Manager of Consumer and Revenue Jay Sullivan chipped in the only numerical response, noting that the company has 2,200 people working on trust and safety "across Twitter," though it wasn't clear if those employees also did other kinds of work.
It's no secret that social media moderation is patchy, reactive and uneven, largely because these companies refuse to invest more deeply in the teams that protect people on their platforms. "We've been trying to get this information for a long time," Peters said. "This is why we get so frustrated."
Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) steered the content moderation conversation in another important direction, questioning Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox about the safety efforts outside of the English language.
"[In] your testimony you state that you have over 40,000 people working on trust and safety issues. How many of those people focus on non English language content and how many of them focus on non U.S. users?" Padilla asked.
Cox didn't provide an answer, nor did the three other companies when asked the same question. Though the executives pointed to the total number of workers who touch trust and safety, none made the meaningful distinction between external contract content moderators and employees working full-time on those issues.
[...] "I'll be honest, I'm frustrated that... all of you [who] have a prominent seat at the table when these business decisions are made were not more prepared to speak to specifics about your product development process, even when you are specifically asked if you would bring specific numbers to us today," Peters said, concluding the hearing. "Your companies continue to avoid sharing some really very important information with us."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2022, @11:53PM (2 children)
A pox upon these platforms. They have caused more problems than that they have done good.
A pox upon them!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2022, @06:05AM (1 child)
Attack them in the wrong way, and the small sites will be hurt the most.
(Score: 0, Spam) by PFBundy on Sunday September 18 2022, @08:35PM
SoylentNews needs no pox, it has suffered enough, and didn't even get called before Congress. Only one moderator left. Greatest contributor of stories is a banned user. Full of Microsoft and Systemd shills. Resident neo-Nazi anti-semite still does drive-bys. Maybe it is time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday September 18 2022, @01:17AM
Call for a deep auditing of the books.
All the books.
Personal and Corporate.
EVERYTHING.
And do it over and over and over, looking at EVERYTHING until they start talking.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday September 18 2022, @01:43AM (4 children)
TikTok is a Chinese company. Why does it answer the US government at all I wonder...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday September 18 2022, @09:23AM (2 children)
Companies answer to the law of the land in which they operate. Not the law of the land in which their owners reside.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday September 18 2022, @03:45PM (1 child)
I thought internet does not have borders; at least in free countries.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2022, @06:13PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2022, @06:05PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Sunday September 18 2022, @04:52AM (1 child)
He just missed on who the watchers would be.
I'm sure these comapnies danced a jig and cut a check (possibly cash).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2022, @05:16PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday September 18 2022, @11:36AM (3 children)
Cardinal Fang! Fetch...THE COMFY CHAIR!
Seriously, as much as I enjoy a good show, this is just embarrassing. Everyone knew right from day 1 of the internet that images posted online end up being scrapped by foreign intelligence and advertisers for meta-data facial recognition. It's not even a copyright violation (excuse my poor taste but I don't find much artistic value in your family vacation selfies)... So, why should SNS companies spend time and money on identifying and reporting entities doing it or place employee restrictions on accessing such data? They have guys to handle underage, nudity and hate-speech moderation as well as stuff like "this guy is scamming people" or "that post has a link to pirated music" that can be considered as "trust and safety issues"... But ask them how many of them handle non-English complaints and... Well, might as well ask Chuck E Cheese how many counter-espionage personal they keep to go through the tables to look for Chinese bugs.
Really, the whole charade just reeks of that brain-dead "series of tubes" willful ignorance you can't help cringe about.
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(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday September 18 2022, @01:05PM
These are social gatherings within the tubes. Thus the issues with seeing who's at the party.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 18 2022, @03:26PM (1 child)
Incorrect. IANAL but I don't believe that's how copyright works. No one has the right to take your photographs and use them for their own purposes, particularly for commercial gain, without your consent. These companies know that and you will find, buried in contracts of adhesion [cornell.edu], language that grants them the right to use and resell any copyrighted works that you provide to them.
Part of the problem is that there is, based on the controls presented to the user for the management of their account, certain expectations of privacy. Take Facebook for example. You have an account and you have connected that to your "friends" where "friends" is a relationship between accounts. If you upload a photo you can choose to only make that available to yourself, your friends, friends of your friends, or anyone. Unless you plowed through some huge (unrealistic) number of pages of incomprehensible legalize, you have no indication or reminder that your photo and any accompanying data will be shared with all and sundry business "partners" of Facebook.
Just like (in the US at least) there are requirements for truth in lending disclosures around loans, there should be requirements around privacy disclosures for these companies and any others that want to profit from your data. In my opinion there should be stronger protections where individuals should have to opt in for sharing of personal data and companies should not be permitted to unnecessarily penalize users for not doing so. I don't care if you built your business model around duping users out of their data. It's still their data and you should still have to ask before using it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday September 18 2022, @05:35PM
I was pretty specific regarding selfies you post on SNS since I was trying to separate the copyright from the privacy issues by making it clear you have no expectation of privacy since you posted the images of yourself in the public and you have little to no claim to the copyrights since you gave those away to the SNS... But, there's plenty of "fair use" and "creative value" limitation to copyright laws that prevent them from serving as privacy measures. Otherwise, the whole Clearview AI scandals and the GDPR and the CCPA/CPRA laws wouldn't have been a thing. But to give a concrete scenario: There's little stopping a company from funding an academic research project from putting together a biometric database using scrapped images while releasing some token paper and then go off to hand over the database to their funders as commonly done to circumvent public funding restrictions by various researchers and companies all over.
Anyhow, for what it's worth, now that Roe v. Wade is repealed, all those privacy concerns are finally blowing up in our collective faces rather spectacularly so I'm pretty sure we're going to see a lot of legislation changing the status quo. However, as it stands, you can be sure your facial features are available in various databases and AI products that are made available to advertisers and state actors and copyrights were never hindered this.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sjolfr on Sunday September 18 2022, @08:32PM
Pass some privacy laws that aren't weak-tea nonsense designed to trick and placate the masses. Pass laws that protect us and punish abuses.
It's high time that privacy was no longer for sale. Privacy should be the default for everything (and not a political definition of privacy that ends up letting companies farming it because they have an app that tricks people in to an agreement - thus becoming the standard that everyone expects).. Phone, web, application, etc. data should not be farmed - period. If a company relies on that business model then let them die a natural death.
First we need education on data usage. I'm talking the kind that get used in anti-smoking ads. Expose the ways that data is mined and who it's sold to.
Second we need education on what will protect us all from that crap. Encryption, open source code, hardware ownership, and vendor accountability.
Then we need political will. Politicians need to prioritize the privacy of the citizenry - period.
Lastly there's public adoption. We need more and more developers adopting open standards and developing hardware that's based on those open standards.
Instead we have a government that fights to keep our data open so they can mine it themselves without undo effort. Wise up folks.