This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Monday, February 5, 2024.
Back in October, 2023, Facebook/Meta’s Oversight Board—a Meta-funded but independently-operated watchdog group that is supposed to act as a sort of ombudsman tasked with determining how well Meta is adhering to its own rules—announced that it would look into the case of a misleadingly-edited video that appeared to show President Joe Biden repeatedly touching the chest of a young woman. The video edited news footage from the 2022 midterm elections that showed an early-voting trip to the polls by Biden and his granddaughter, who was 18-years-old and voting for the first time. The full—and entirely innocuous—clip shows Biden and the young woman taking turns placing “I Voted” stickers on one another’s shirts and sharing a kiss on the cheek. The version that was posted to Facebook was a seven-second loop that replayed the moment Biden’s hand touched his granddaughter’s chest while a song with an obscene lyric played as the soundtrack, and had a caption that accused Biden of being a “sick pedophile” [for] “touch[ing] his granddaughter’s breast” and his supporters of being “mentally unwell.” Facebook’s automated systems did not flag the video for removal, and after a user reported it as “hate speech,” those same automated systems rejected that claim and left the video up. The user then appealed to a human reviewer, who again determined that the post did not violate the rules, and left it up. This ruling was appealed to the Oversight Board, which just issued its final report on the matter. The Board upheld Meta’s decision to leave the post up, but recommended changes to its rules and enforcement to be more coherent and transparent in its aims. Because the Manipulated Media policy only currently applies to video created or altered by artificial intelligence or that makes it appear that someone said something they did not say, the video in question did not violate the rules. The Board went on to say that the policy should be rewritten to broaden its scope to include misleading audio edits and media that is changed in less sophisticated ways than with AI, like the sort of editing capabilities that exist on virtually any phone. The Board also said that the new policy should provide greater clarity on what harms it aims to prevent, suggesting that simply protecting people from being misled is an inadequate goal because lots of manipulated media does not attempt to hide the fact that it has been manipulated. The Oversight Board further recommends that Meta stop removing manipulated media on the basis of manipulation alone, and instead apply clear labels to posts that include content that has been altered and could be misleading.
A brief editorial aside:
I think it’s worth quoting from the Oversight Board’s report at some length here, if you’ll indulge me.
“The Board therefore recommends that Meta revise its Manipulated Media policy to more clearly specify the harms it seeks to prevent. Given the record number of elections taking place in 2024, the Board recommends that Meta embark on such revisions expeditiously. This is essential because misleading video or audio in themselves are not always objectionable, absent a direct connection to potential offline harm. Such harms may include (but are not limited to) those resulting from invasion of privacy, incitement to violence, intensification of hate speech, bullying, and – more pertinent to this case – misleading people about facts essential to their exercise of the right to vote and to take part in the conduct of public affairs, with resulting harm to the democratic process. Many of these harms are addressed by other Community Standards, which also apply to manipulated media. The Board is not suggesting that Meta expand the harms addressed by the Manipulated Media policy, but that it provides greater clarity on what those harms are.”
In the “Recommendations” section of its full report, the Board recommends the following three actions, again quoting directly:
1. To address the harms posed by manipulated media, Meta should reconsider the scope of its Manipulated Media policy in three ways to cover: (1) audio and audiovisual content, (2) content showing people doing things they did not do (as well as saying things they did not say), and (3) content regardless of the method of creation or alteration.
2. To ensure its Manipulated Media policy pursues a legitimate aim, Meta must clearly define in a single unified policy the harms it aims to prevent beyond preventing users being misled, such as preventing interference with the right to vote and to take part in the conduct of public affairs.
3. To ensure the Manipulated Media policy is proportionate, Meta should stop removing manipulated media when no other policy violation is present and instead apply a label indicating the content is significantly altered and may mislead. The label should be attached to the media (such as a label at the bottom of a video) rather than the entire post, and should be applied to all identical instances of that media on the platform.
There’s something about all of this that doesn’t sit well with me at all. On the one hand, I can see the value of clearly labeling manipulated videos as such—on the other hand, I don’t think it matters. I’m trying to imagine both the alleged harm that a misleading video like the one in this case can have, and the actual human being who might be harmed by it, or the harm it will do to society by virtue of the change it affects on this human being’s mind. I don’t really believe that there exists a person for whom viewing the obviously deceptively edited video of Biden putting a sticker on his granddaughter was an impactful moment. It was, instead, likely a moment of reflexive tribalism. If this person was a Biden partisan, their disgust and outrage was with the existence of a person who would take a sweet moment between a man and his granddaughter and turn it into an obscenity, ostensibly for political gain, but really quite obviously just as a signal of disgust. If this person was an anti-Biden partisan, they probably laughed at the absurdity of the edit, didn’t really believe that Biden is a pedophile, but had their tribal instinct nevertheless flattered and reinforced—they probably really do believe that to support Biden is a sign of mental unfitness, while they remain smart and good. There is of course the non-zero possibility that some person or people saw the video as not necessarily authentic but still confirmatory of a deeper truth, that Biden really is a weirdo pedophile, like all the other blood-sucking elites, because there are people out there who really do seem to sincerely believe such things. Of course, no amount of hiding silly meme videos or appropriately labeling them as “manipulated media” is going to change anything about the way they see the world.
Of course, the Oversight Board seems to more or less agree—it suggests leaving the video up, perhaps with a label, and that Meta take steps to better explain what it means by harm, including providing clarity that it should seek to prevent voting interference and ensure that people can participate in public affairs. But what strikes me as wrong is the idea that Meta has any role to play in ensuring what the Board believes are “human rights” at all. Does a post that jokingly encourages one party to “vote next Wednesday,” when the election is actually scheduled for Tuesday, infringe on a person’s right to vote and participate in public affairs? If a person’s rights are so precariously contingent on whether or not they see a meme in their Facebook feed, what does it mean to have a right at all? The couching of its recommendations in terms of the number of elections that are taking place in 2024 suggests that the Board believes that Meta has a strong responsibility to not allow misinformation or misleading video on its platform that could impact a person’s vote. But what would such enforcement really look like? I don’t mean to go down an epistemological rabbit hole, here, but something I read this morning has me thinking that any attempt to control this stuff is like trying to steer a massive ocean liner by holding your hand in the air against the wind. It’s just an impossible task that will have no impact. The ship is going where it’s going. People’s minds are basically made up.
Consider the death of George Floyd. Without getting into…the whole thing, let’s just say that most people, when they saw the video and heard the story of Floyd’s death, believed that an injustice had been perpetrated. This caused a great cultural convulsion in the spring and summer of 2020. Floyd’s death was ultimately adjudicated to be the result of unintentional second-degree murder by the police officer Derek Chauvin. Recently, a documentary film was released that claims that this was a grave miscarriage of justice. The film has been persuasive to a number of people, some surprising, some not, including Tucker Carlson, who claimed that everything you’ve been told about the Floyd case was a lie. Other, deeper, better thinkers than Carlson have also been convinced—Glenn Loury and John McWhorter expressed dismay at having been taken in by a false Floyd narrative that they say the documentary corrects, and Coleman Hughes published an essay at The Free Press a couple of weeks ago in which he claims that Chauvin should not have been convicted because the documentary proves that he was simply following through on his training.
I would encourage anyone who has seen the documentary, or been persuaded by conversations about it that it might really poke holes in the commonly accepted narrative, to read a piece published by Radley Balko on his Substack. There’s a link in the show notes at brainiron dot substack dot com. In it, Balko thoroughly answers the criticisms raised by Hughes and the documentary, and, in my view, dismantles the emerging counter-narrative that Chauvin was wrongfully convicted. I suppose mileage may vary, as they say, but the totality of the facts continues to point in one direction—but for the actions of Derek Chauvin, actions which were definitely not in keeping with his training, George Floyd would likely not have died that day. I hope that Loury and McWhorter and Hughes read Balko’s piece, because I think the truth matters, and my understanding of their public presentation is that they think it does, too. I don’t suspect it would matter to Carlson, or many others, for whom the truth very clearly does not matter. I suspect that many who were dismayed by what they saw as excesses in the response to the Floyd video—the protests, riots, calls to defund the police, the elevation of profoundly stupid ideas about race and culture to the absolute heights of prominence in the media—were primed to be convinced that the underlying facts had been manipulated in some way, in service of a cultural project with which they disagree. This is how tribalism poisons the mind. It can be incredibly difficult to sort the facts properly when all of your psychological incentives are pointed in one particular direction.
Perhaps this feels far afield from the story about Joe Biden and his granddaughter and the Meta Oversight Board, but I think it’s more or less the same conversation. That seven-second looping video plays on precisely the same part of the brain that a two-hour documentary filled with obfuscations and distortions about the murder of George Floyd does. It’s playing by a different set of rules, certainly—in one respect, the Biden video is more honest. It very clearly does not intend to be understood as a representation of something that actually happened, while the Floyd documentary claims to reveal previously hidden truths. But they both rely on the same thing in the audience—namely, that the thing that you already suspect or believe about the world is true. Crucially, one need not accept that the various claims being made are actually true, and one may even remain skeptical of their veracity after the more important work has already been accomplished: that the other side’s authority has been undermined, that at the very least they are not to be trusted.
Whether this happens because of a meme distributed on Facebook or a highly-produced documentary matters in terms of audience, maybe, but not in terms of effect. And what of Meta’s responsibility in terms of limiting the distribution of these two pieces of content, or others like it? Go peruse Elon Musk’s own Twitter/X feed from the last couple of weeks—it’s a consistent stream of a factitious narrative about immigration and the border and promotion of accounts that consistently distort the truth around this and many other stories. He owns that platform! Who is going to stop the richest man on earth from spreading misinformation or misleading statements and videos on the website for which he paid $44 billion? If Meta takes the recommendations of the Oversight Board and clearly defines the harms it aims to prevent to include protecting the right to vote and “take part in public affairs”—whatever that is supposed to mean—how can it justify allowing anything like free expression on its platform? And even if Meta somehow perfectly solves for this problem, what of the 50 million daily US users of TikTok? The spread of lies and distortions and memes via messaging apps, or the firehose of nonsense in the For You tab on Twitter, or the absurdity of whichever partisan media outlet you find absurd? The biggest mistake people make when they talk about the media is a myth that should have died when the big three networks lost their news monopolies, but managed to persist through the era of cable news, and somehow still lives today—I think probably because it is a truth that the media of all sorts cannot abide, a fact of their own irrelevance in the creation of widely accepted truth, something that puts the lie to their own self-conception, from the lowliest outrage farmer at The Gateway Pundit to the most committed serious journalists in mainstream media. The myth is that the media decides what’s true, and the public accepts it. The reality is that the people decide what’s true, and the news media creates an outlet for that worldview. The media serves the market, and legitimacy flows from the audience up, not the other way around. If Meta decides it’s going to label a video as manipulated media, and de-boost it in its algorithm, try to hide it as just another spoonful of water in an unremarkable sea, it will rise again as a much larger wave on some other platform. When the mainstream news media presented a united front on the murder of George Floyd—even if they were right—a demand was created for another story, and so that story was told, on other platforms.
I suppose this line of thinking can be credibly accused of inevitably dead-ending into a conclusion that there is functionally nothing to be done. That without a prescription, these observations are useless. Maybe. But there are no answers even conceivable until the problem is identified. Sometimes there really is nothing to be done but to let the nonsense speak for itself. The truth will out, eventually, and not because someone stuck a helpful label on it, or personally guaranteed it to be so. The truth stands on its own without any help, without whatever preconceived notions you brought to the table, without the righteous indignation that your enemies were wrong, and you were right. Let the lie go running halfway across the globe before the truth can even tie its shoes—it’s not going anywhere, anyway.
https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-GW8BY1Y3
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fake-joe-biden-video-can-stay-on-facebook-says-meta-oversight-board
https://apnews.com/video/videos-106014773bb34d96ac0998d24a77930b
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-biden-granddaughter-sticker-voting-495345266413
https://substack.com/home/post/p-141101572?nthPub=361
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
Today’s episode is obviously a bit of a departure from the format of the show up to this point. I looked at the headlines today and couldn’t figure out what the value-add proposition was to me telling you about an atmospheric river in California, or the Grammy Awards, or whatever else. I probably could have come up with something pretty funny about King Charles’s cancer revelation—well, not about the cancer, exactly, but you know what I mean. If this is going to work, if I’m going to be able to create something of interest and value and meaning, here, I’m going to have to trust my instinct to write about what I think matters, and to do so in a way that keeps the words coming, no matter what. Sometimes, that will sound like a traditional ten minute newscast with a handful of colorful asides, some history, and some overly-effortful jokes. Other times, it will sound more like it did today. I hope only to provide a few minutes of thought about the world that might spark something on your end, make you think about things a little differently, or at least enjoyably fill a few minutes of your day. I hope only to be worthy of the time you grant me. So, thanks for listening.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
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