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During his AMA I asked clarifying questions that never got answered about Reddit's policies about federal programs and partnerships regarding the management of

by themeek 11y ago

During his AMA I asked clarifying questions that never got answered about Reddit's policies about federal programs and partnerships regarding the management of political discussion attributed to foreign actors - and whether like other social media sites - foreign political content including propaganda are considered by Reddit to be 'spam' and 'trolling' and therefore subject to Reddit's comment deletion and shadowbanning capabilities. I unfortunately did not see a reply. It's my understanding that many of these executives of social media websites face the challenge of negotiating what the community wants and the curation requests and preferences of partners - both governmental, 'civil society' and business customers and investors.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
Was your question basically "will sockpuppetting be allowed"?
- themeek 11y ago
  Not quite. I wanted to get a picture of whether the socketpuppeting that is done on reddit was colored by particular objectives - whether US and partner sockpuppeting is allowed where adversary sockpuppeting is not - and whether censorship of certain types of content was performed on the behest of partnerships. Basically, an overall clarification about the policies, the technologies and the coded language for reddit's stance on sockpuppeting and content curation.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    If the actual case was "yes, we will allow US sockpuppeting, and forbid Russian/Chinese sockpuppeting", would you actually have expected an honest answer? This is sort of a corporate equivalent of "are you still beating your wife", isn't it?
    - themeek 11y ago
      This is 100% absolutely the case. But it's important to ask hard questions and get denials: even when they are blatant lies it makes the organization responsible for the lies (and any associated fallout) and it puts pressure 'upstream' for more comprehensive public discussion and justification. It also has the virtue of being public, where other redditors and HN folk can peruse it and maybe become interested in the topic. I'm not wholey against or for any 'side'. I'm actually pretty confused and can see good reasons abound on all sides and my guess is that solutions, whatever they are to whatever challenges are percieved, are probably pretty complicated. But I believe in public deliberation and awareness: the more people who participate in these discussions I think the better. Finally widespread awareness of sockpuppeting and other means of content curation - no matter who the perpetrator - weakens sockpuppeting as a tactic. So I think it's also important to publicly challenge social media CEOs to speak publicly about these challenges for this reason.
theseatoms 11y ago
Do we have any evidence around the frequency and/or magnitude of US federal government pressure/censorship tactics towards social media sites? I don't doubt that it happens, but I would expect much more noise about this if it was truly widespread.
- themeek 11y ago
  We do but it's unfortunately not widely covered. The Snowden document released on the strategic objectives - the high level goals driving all NSA technology - included strategic communication, which we know from DoD investment in the last two presidents has increasingly been focused toward social media (with some programs like SMISC and MINERVA as public research instanciations of the policy). We know quite a bit about the US attempted partnerships with Twitter (historically Twitter has refused partnership but now is more congenial) from FOIA documents and news sources and that the US uses sockpuppets in many places, including Twitter for its own propaganda purposes worldwide. We know that the Facebook studies on nudging voting behavior and emotions had ties to these programs as well. We know that threat intelligence systems include patterns to block certain URLs and content that is foreign controlled propaganda - notably of Russian origin and that there are people in the government full time on tracking Salafist ideas online for both blocking when they reach American audiences and engagement of various sorts overseas. We know that there is a firewall between the State Department and DoD when it comes to the programs (State Department has the overt programs for the most part and the DoD the covert). We know a few things from various leaks about partnerships (HB Gary Federal, etc) with private sector intelligence firms. We also have reports from the US and journalists about some of the techniques of adversary nations and we have some details especially about GCHQs JTRIG capabilities and some of the areas the NSA and GCHQ have worked in due to Snowden document. We have a couple of other examples - things like ZunZuneo - that some social media platforms are fronts for various countries rather than merely partners. We also know some things about the law in the United States for messaging: foreign messaging the US has pretty much no limitations. While it will censor American political speech (al-Alwaki's youtube videos, etc) for the most part it can justify minimal amounts of this and focuses on foreign speech and foreign aimed influence. It is legal in the United States to message Americans under wartime powers, states of emergency (Occupy and Ferguson were both considered states of emergency), and for the purposes of getting domestic support for overseas military operations. The Smith-Mundt Act was recently revised to remove the limitation on the US government to prevent foreign-aimed propaganda from being incidentally consumed by Americans (the internet makes this hard) but it's unfortunate that this happens quite a lot (why they had to make the revision) and that it has, in the past, been purposefully abused. We also know some things about historical partnerships, but most of that has to do with 'old media' and it's hard to draw real policy and technical implications from programs that existed a generation ago. The things we know about those partnerships today (partnerships with media executives, leaked editing of journalism coverage) that look like the old stuff don't focus on social media so much - the social media programs are a relatively new initiative.
x0x0 11y ago
reddit is largely immune to political pressures that other large social media sites must endure for the simple reason that reddit makes shit for money and has no business operations abroad. Facebook and Twitter have to listen to foreign governments because they want to do business in those countries.
- themeek 11y ago
  That sounds mostly right to me. Barely floating or even running in the red (making shit for money) also provides financial incentives. But beyond the monetary there are plenty of types of leverage - legal, "human", and access to information (in reddit this is probably also not as strong leverage). There's also rewards that can be given to individuals who have some say in the direction of reddit. For example Pao was on the board of National Defense Thinktanks in Washington - an opportunity to both give a small stipend and for conversations to open dialogue and for perception.

by themeek 11y ago

pavel_lishin 11y ago

Was your question basically "will sockpuppetting be allowed"?

themeek 11y ago
Not quite. I wanted to get a picture of whether the socketpuppeting that is done on reddit was colored by particular objectives - whether US and partner sockpuppeting is allowed where adversary sockpuppeting is not - and whether censorship of certain types of content was performed on the behest of partnerships. Basically, an overall clarification about the policies, the technologies and the coded language for reddit's stance on sockpuppeting and content curation.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  If the actual case was "yes, we will allow US sockpuppeting, and forbid Russian/Chinese sockpuppeting", would you actually have expected an honest answer? This is sort of a corporate equivalent of "are you still beating your wife", isn't it?
  - themeek 11y ago
    This is 100% absolutely the case. But it's important to ask hard questions and get denials: even when they are blatant lies it makes the organization responsible for the lies (and any associated fallout) and it puts pressure 'upstream' for more comprehensive public discussion and justification. It also has the virtue of being public, where other redditors and HN folk can peruse it and maybe become interested in the topic. I'm not wholey against or for any 'side'. I'm actually pretty confused and can see good reasons abound on all sides and my guess is that solutions, whatever they are to whatever challenges are percieved, are probably pretty complicated. But I believe in public deliberation and awareness: the more people who participate in these discussions I think the better. Finally widespread awareness of sockpuppeting and other means of content curation - no matter who the perpetrator - weakens sockpuppeting as a tactic. So I think it's also important to publicly challenge social media CEOs to speak publicly about these challenges for this reason.

theseatoms 11y ago

Do we have any evidence around the frequency and/or magnitude of US federal government pressure/censorship tactics towards social media sites? I don't doubt that it happens, but I would expect much more noise about this if it was truly widespread.

themeek 11y ago
We do but it's unfortunately not widely covered. The Snowden document released on the strategic objectives - the high level goals driving all NSA technology - included strategic communication, which we know from DoD investment in the last two presidents has increasingly been focused toward social media (with some programs like SMISC and MINERVA as public research instanciations of the policy). We know quite a bit about the US attempted partnerships with Twitter (historically Twitter has refused partnership but now is more congenial) from FOIA documents and news sources and that the US uses sockpuppets in many places, including Twitter for its own propaganda purposes worldwide. We know that the Facebook studies on nudging voting behavior and emotions had ties to these programs as well. We know that threat intelligence systems include patterns to block certain URLs and content that is foreign controlled propaganda - notably of Russian origin and that there are people in the government full time on tracking Salafist ideas online for both blocking when they reach American audiences and engagement of various sorts overseas. We know that there is a firewall between the State Department and DoD when it comes to the programs (State Department has the overt programs for the most part and the DoD the covert). We know a few things from various leaks about partnerships (HB Gary Federal, etc) with private sector intelligence firms. We also have reports from the US and journalists about some of the techniques of adversary nations and we have some details especially about GCHQs JTRIG capabilities and some of the areas the NSA and GCHQ have worked in due to Snowden document. We have a couple of other examples - things like ZunZuneo - that some social media platforms are fronts for various countries rather than merely partners. We also know some things about the law in the United States for messaging: foreign messaging the US has pretty much no limitations. While it will censor American political speech (al-Alwaki's youtube videos, etc) for the most part it can justify minimal amounts of this and focuses on foreign speech and foreign aimed influence. It is legal in the United States to message Americans under wartime powers, states of emergency (Occupy and Ferguson were both considered states of emergency), and for the purposes of getting domestic support for overseas military operations. The Smith-Mundt Act was recently revised to remove the limitation on the US government to prevent foreign-aimed propaganda from being incidentally consumed by Americans (the internet makes this hard) but it's unfortunate that this happens quite a lot (why they had to make the revision) and that it has, in the past, been purposefully abused. We also know some things about historical partnerships, but most of that has to do with 'old media' and it's hard to draw real policy and technical implications from programs that existed a generation ago. The things we know about those partnerships today (partnerships with media executives, leaked editing of journalism coverage) that look like the old stuff don't focus on social media so much - the social media programs are a relatively new initiative.

x0x0 11y ago

reddit is largely immune to political pressures that other large social media sites must endure for the simple reason that reddit makes shit for money and has no business operations abroad. Facebook and Twitter have to listen to foreign governments because they want to do business in those countries.

themeek 11y ago
That sounds mostly right to me. Barely floating or even running in the red (making shit for money) also provides financial incentives. But beyond the monetary there are plenty of types of leverage - legal, "human", and access to information (in reddit this is probably also not as strong leverage). There's also rewards that can be given to individuals who have some say in the direction of reddit. For example Pao was on the board of National Defense Thinktanks in Washington - an opportunity to both give a small stipend and for conversations to open dialogue and for perception.