Chris Peterson

So I haven’t had an invite to Google+ go through yet, partially because of demand, partially because I think folks have been inviting me with my GApps account and Google+ isn’t compatible with that from what I see. But a lot of my friends have it, and have been talking about it on Facebook (very meta).

Before I go making any grand statements, I realize that my experience is limited and defined by my friends – specifically, my affinity group tends to overrepresent tech-savvy early-adopters.

Still, I’ve been stunned by the response to Google+. Seems like half of my friends already have it and are glowing about how great it is, and the other half desperately want in because they have been looking to leave Facebook.

My best friend Shane, like everyone else in our generation, was a ferocious Facebook user at first. But once things began getting icky three or four years ago, he changed his profile to this:

It’s still early, but I’m beginning to wonder if that alternative has finally arrived.

Computerworld, on Google+:

However, what Google hopes will set its social network apart from Facebook and the smaller social networking services is that Google+ is set up to allow users to communicate within separate groups of their online friends. Instead of posting an update that goes out to everyone, Google+ enables users to create “circles” or groups, such as a user’s poker buddies, college friends, work colleagues and family members.

Now a user can communicate separately with each group.

“The “circles” idea makes a lot of sense,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research. “It’s smart, and while you can do something similar in Facebook, it’s not Facebook’s main thing. It’s not as easy to do.”

From Google itself:

You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.

Called it.

e: from the Times:

“In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world,” said Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product management at Google who is leading the company’s social efforts with Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president of engineering.

Architecture metaphors and everything!

Dilbert author and noted misogynist men’s rights advocate Scott Adams appears to have finally figured out that we live in a socially constructed world, but from what I can tell, his chief insights are a bit…backwards.

‎The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

Reading this analysis is like watching someone piecing together various observations into a theory of gravity, then, eyes narrowing in dim realization before widening in abject terror, flinging themselves to the ground, clutching desperately at the turf to keep from falling up.

Oh my.

On the heels of the J30Strike fiasco, Facebook has turned its auto-censor cannon at…Ebert?

For movie critic Roger Ebert, it took only hours to criticize the late Jackass star Ryan Dunn for drinking and driving. Facebook just as swiftly took the film critic’s page down.

Dunn had died in a car crash that also took his friend’s life. After Ebert’s post about the late Jackass star, Facebook pulled the page and put up a placeholder disclaimer saying that the site doesn’t allow pages with hateful, threatening or obscene content.

Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes told us via email, “The page was was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

My guess is something similar happened to J30Strike here. Lots of people flagged the post as abusive and the page was taken down.

I don’t support speaking ill of the dead. But I don’t think you need to in order to think this is also a dumb and bad decision. And Noyes’ response is exactly the same as yesterday, leading me to believe this happens fairly often.

The problem, of course, is that Ebert has a lot of clout, and J30Strike censorship ended after an investigative reporter called.

What about the folks who don’t have that much power? Are their rights restored as rapidly? I doubt it. And that still troubles me.

Earlier today I posted about a current crisis of censorship on Facebook.

Background:

• Citizen activists created J30Strike.org, a website advocating peaceful demonstration against austerity measures in the U.K. on June 30th
• Sometime in the last 48 hours or so, anyone who tried to post or share a link to J30Strike on their Facebook account was blocked from doing so, receiving instead an error message much like this one informing them that the site had been reported as abusive or spam
• I discovered the block through word of mouth – primarily people noting it on Facebook, evading the prohibition by spelling out J 30 STRIKE DOT ORG – and wrote a blog post about it
• Soon after that, people trying to share my blog post on Facebook began receiving error messages as well, marking my link as abusive or spam
• Somewhere in here, all known redirect links to the site (bitly, tinyurl, etc) stopped working as well
• Posting links to J30Strike began intermittently working again for at least some people this evening, after many formal reports submitted to Facebook and at least one call from a journalist

What’s the deal? Well, there are two possible explanations, and they are both troubling, albeit in different ways.

The first explanation is the good old-fashioned corruption of shadowy censors within Facebook. Very straightforward. Someone at Facebook is a fan of austerity measures and doesn’t like movements like J30Strike; she adds it to their spam system as a pretext, with the intent to keep individuals from learning about the site.

This scenario, while admittedly conspiratorial, is somewhat more plausible than you may think. Peter Thiel, one of the executives known to guide Facebook in many ways, is a well-known ultra-libertarian who, I think it’s safe to say, support austerity measures. And, as I mentioned in my previous post, Zuckerberg and David Cameron were last seen chumming around via videochat, talking about ways to solicit cuts from the Facebooking public.

But I actually don’t think that’s what happened here. Or at least, I’m willing to believe that there is another explanation, despite the shady pattern of blocking and unblocking that occurred this afternoon. And it’s not because I put it past Facebook to do something this scummy – lord knows I’ve called them worse before.

No – there is a second explanation that is both more benign and believable in its cause and just as terrible in its consequences.

See, I think it is more likely than not that Facebook was on the level. No grand conspiracy involving cryptocorporate machinations. Sure, maybe a few ticked-off Tories hit the “Report” button on J30Strike with the intent to get it kicked. But the censorship itself was all the product of automated technology. The initial site gets reported and kicked. Facebook has smart technology to sniff redirects to their destination and then block them as well. And since the metagraf pulled automatically from the text by the Facebook Share functionality included, in the grey text, the forbidden URL, my site got banned too.

I think this is probably what happened. And while it may seem acceptable, it troubles me all the more.

We often conflate intent with outcome. The intuitive argument goes something like this: if Facebook didn’t intend to commit censorship – if this was all just a set of dominoes toppled by a few disingenuous reports – then it can’t be criticized for the automated authoritarianism that occurs.

Call me a consequentialist, but I’m not OK with that.

Facebook is increasingly the space within which people receive their information, including civic information. Shared newspaper links, blog posts, and conversations in the comments may not intuitively accrue as much respect as the Federalist Papers, but they are at least as important in the public discourse as the proverbial crier on the common was generations ago.

But where once there was a town common, there is now a walled garden, and the architecture of this enclosure threatens to throttle the pamphleteer before he so much as primes his printing press.

Assume the best of intentions on the part of Facebook for a moment. Look at what still happened.

A site advocating citizen activism vanishes from the face of Facebook. Then, alternate routes – the redirects – are shut down. After crushing the conversation, Facebook then successfully silenced the metaconversation – that is, posts like mine, commenting on the controversy, which merely linked to the content. Users had to resort to guerilla tactics – coded, deceptive transformations of the domain name – in order to spread the word slowly amongst the community.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the incredible, suffocating centralized power the Facebook filter represents to controversial opinions. Had this been in a traditionally public forum, banning truly offensive or abusive material would have had to survive the strict scrutiny of a skeptical judge. But on Facebook – merely a mediated public – presumably a few reports were enough to simply disappear (used as verb; gulag connotations intended) an entire movement. And it only came back because enough people – again, including at least one journalist who called Facebook to investigate – knew about it already. Had those avenues not been open, J30Strike on Facebook would have simply succumbed to a kind of automated crib death.

That scares the living hell out of me – just as much as a conservative cabal at the helm of a conspiracy.

We need to find out what happened here. We need to know how it was that a nonviolent, democratic demonstration was denied entry into the civic conversation. And we need Facebook to eradicate this Terminator style automated censorship from its architecture.

If the protests in the Middle East taught us anything, it is that these digital spaces can facilitate real action. In this Facebook cannot be Janus-faced, humbly accepting accolades for its role in toppling tyrants while simultaneously silencing citizens at home.

We’re far past the point where Facebook may acceptably discount or defer its moral responsibilities. We’re far past the point where they may plausibly claim to be a simple amoral actor in the social space. They are, by virtue of their own incredible success, co-consuls (with Google) of the world’s greatest information empire. We deserve, and must demand, their greatest care when it comes to matters of civic expression. Because the freedom of speech is too important to be merely automated out of existence.

Facebook strives to be the center of our social world – but is it also becoming its censor?

Via a friend, it appears that Facebook blocks links to the site http://www.j30strike.org/, a worker’s strike in London protesting austerity measures by the government.

See for yourself. Go to your Facebook profile and try to post the URL to your wall, or to share a link on that domain. Facebook refuses to let you post it, and has for the last few days.

It’s worth noting that J30Strike isn’t child porn. It isn’t incitement to terrorist attacks. It isn’t a ticking time bomb. It’s none of the sort of clear and present dangers usually cited as cause for censorship. It’s a website advocating for and educating about peaceful democratic activism.

The catchphrase of the critical legal studies movement is “all law is politics.” It’s important to realize that Facebook is politics too. With this move, Facebook is taking an active stand against democratic activism, and an active stand in favor of austerity. Facebook is Janus-faced; humbly accepting praise for facilitating democratic activism in the Middle East while, at the same time, blocking it in the West.

e: I should note that Facebook is now returning a message that says “this link could not be posted because it has been flagged as abusive or spam.” Let’s assume, for the moment, that this message is in earnest (and not the darker, more conspiratorial conclusion that that this is mere pretext). It doesn’t change my concern. If Facebook structures its technological architecture such that activist websites can be removed by a few folks reporting it as abusive, then it has the same abhorrent, centralized, censoring effect. You don’t need to have Peter Thiel pulling the strings for it to be a bad thing, as long as the effect is the same. Especially if such censorship can’t be remedied despite many people (over the last few days) notifying Facebook, through the appropriate channels, that the site is legitimate.

e2: it appears that the bit.ly link to j30strike is also blocked from being posted; the tinyurl.com link was just blocked as well within the last few hours.

e3: while again there is no hard evidence that Facebook’s leadership ordered this particular link blocked, this chummy video chat between Zuckerberg and Cameron about spending cuts doesn’t look so great in context.

e4: a friend sent a screenshot showing that if you try to share this post on my blog Facebook blocks it because the auto-imported metagraf includes the censored link. Now, obviously this is an effective tactic from a spam-blocking standpoint (again, assuming best intentions from Facebook here). What’s amazing is the way that, in cases like this, it shuts down metaconversations as well. Not only can you not share J30Strike; you can’t even share sites that link prominently to J30Strike in order to discuss it!

e5: I want to emphasize again that it this is troubling no matter why it is happening. If Facebook officials specifically sought out and blocked J30Strike, that’s troubling in a very obvious sort of way. But even if this censorship occured bottom-up (where enough people voted it as spam to be deleted, and where the avenues of redress and recategorization have been obviously insufficient for a few days) it’s still problematic, because the technology is self-executing. As a friend wrote, “[if that is the case] then it’s a fully automated system which can both censor something and then censor any and all discussion of the censorship itself.”

e6: scattered reports coming in that the J30Strike site can now be posted; will try to confirm, though my point in e5 still stands.

e7: Mother Jones has a story up about this, and I have some additional reactions as well.

e8: MorningStar picks up this post but doesn’t offer link? Pshaw.

Following up on this post of mine:

TPM: Facebook Founder: Public’s Worries Over Privacy Are Overblown:

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the media and the public have unrealistic, schizophrenic expectations of the social network because they praise it for enabling social revolutions at the same time as they bash it for invading their privacy.

At the same time as:

TPM: Facebook Hires Two Former Bush White House Aides:

Facebook has hired two former White House Bush aides to help it to better influence the debate raging in Washington right now over how privacy regulations should be overhauled in the age of social media.

Facebook says that [new hire Joel] Kaplan will oversee its public policy strategy…For his part, Kaplan, a Harvard Law School graduate and former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, worked with Bush to enact the USA PATRIOT Act.

Mark Zuckerberg: blowing off privacy concerns while hiring one a Scalia acolyte and one of the architects of the PATRIOT Act to guide your public policy?

He is a liar.

e: or, as the SNL clip put it,

No greater honor for the Baron of Burgermap:

Just returned from the IvyPlus conference, which this year was held at Yale. Lots of admissions folks from the Ivies (“plus” Stanford & MIT) were there.

Great panels, great food, and lots of learning. One of the most persistent threads was the difficulty in the present environment with so much mania over the high app counts to selective universities, and the strains that places not only one our processes and time but on our psyches.

But I was fundamentally reassured by the good people who were there. Lots of folks I spoke with were very intelligent, talented individuals, who could be doing (or had previously done) any number of things but had committed themselves to this work because they thought it important. That was a nice, validating experience to have.

More thoughts on IvyPlus to come on the MITAdmissions blog; and, if you haven’t had the opportunity to check it out lately, I’m somewhat proud of my Life is Improv post 🙂

From the Telegraph:

HOLLIS – Brookline resident and parent Valerie Ogden talked dirty to the School Board on Tuesday night.

In the two minutes she was allotted during the public comment part of the Hollis/Brookline Cooperative School Board meeting, Ogden recited a run-on sentence of sexually explicit words excerpted from a memoir on the high school reading list.

“I’m astounded by what we’re allowing our students to get their hands on,” Ogden said.

The audience cheered.

Over the past year or so a small group of puritanical parents have emerged from the ooze to terrorize my old hometown. Beginning with last year’s challenges of various books and documentaries – one parent, “disturbed after learning students viewed a film about drug use in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina”, is apparently disturbed by just plain learning – and continuing through the stunts at school board meetings this spring, this small group of radical anti-intellectuals have attempted to strip the school curriculum of anything that would teach senior students about important issues.

Unlike many stories, which become more important the closer you get to them, the problem of small minds in small towns becomes even more urgent the further one draws away from them. Because these crusades aren’t only happening in Hollis. They’re happening all over the state, region, and country.

When I worked on the banned books map I thought that book challenges would be concentrated in certain areas – the South, the Bible Belt, etc – that we elite, effete liberals of the northeast think of, snobbishly, as cultural backwaters. I was wrong. Anti-intellectualism is endemic, and present wherever there are people:

A few weeks ago, one of the book banners published a similarly stupid op/ed in the town paper:

To the Editor:

I recently came across a draft of the SAU 41 mission statement. It read like a United Nations charter for global childhood education. There were references to a global society, to a world community, to environmental initiatives, and to philanthropic activity. The students apparently will become stewards of the environment and will appreciate diversity and complexity.

Although training good global citizens is, of course, an admirable goal, I would be more impressed if there had been more emphasis on academics. Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that a school’s primary function is the education of its students, not the development of global citizens.

I would suggest that students first learn to be good American citizens, and the first lesson should be why they are so blest to live in this country. In a world full of war, poverty, and starvation, only a relative handful of nations enjoy freedom and prosperity. The United States has enjoyed more freedom and prosperity than any other nation in the history of the world. Millions of people have come to our nation to live a better life, and no other nation has attracted anywhere near the immigrants that we have. Students should understand the reasons why.

Our success derives from our adherence to the Constitution and to capitalism. The prosperous nations around the world are those who have adopted capitalism. The Constitution is unique among world documents in that it guarantees our citizens individual freedoms and liberties. I know that this may not sit well with people more interested in developing global students, but students need to first be stewards of the Constitution and of capitalism. Only then will their special role in the world be clear: to continue to be a shining beacon of hope and encouragement for people living in less fortunate nations.

ALFRED F. CHASE JR.

I wrote the following in response, which was published the next week:

In last week’s issue of The Journal, Alfred F Chase Jr criticized the SAU 41 mission for being too globally minded. A school, he said, should function to educate its students, not to develop global citizens. He then praised capitalism and the Constitution for awhile, before thrillingly concluding that these domestic institutions were the true proper subjects of study so that students might understand their “special role in the world.”

As a proud alumnus of SAU 41 I dispute Mr Chase’s first premise: that a global perspective is incompatible with a proper education. Indeed, as the unresolved internal tensions in Mr Chase’s own letter demonstrate – after all, what is our “special role in the world” if not a function of our global citizenship? – they are in fact inseparable.

When students graduate from SAU 41 the vast majority of them leave home for school or work. Outside of our small, safe, sheltering community, they confront actual problems in the world: problems of the poor, the disadvantaged, the subaltern. And they become members of a broader, interconnected society that operates locally, nationally, and globally.

What are we educating students for if not to prepare them for this world in which they will live? For that matter, what meaningful distinction is there nowadays between “education of students” and “development of global citizens,” beyond a knee-jerk reaction against anything that sounds vaguely un-American?

Mr Chase calls his opinion “old-fashioned.” It isn’t. It is merely ill-considered, with more good snark than good sense. It is of a kind with the sentiment to sanitize our schools of any allergens from the actual world that may have contaminated the curriculum. Both do much more damage to the development of our students than any global education – or banned book – ever could.

Hollis/Brookline is pastoral in its landscape, but it need not be provincial in its perspective. Our small towns should not be small-minded. Whether Mr Chase likes it our not, graduates of SAU 41 will become citizens of a global society. It is the duty of the schools to prepare them for it.

I’ve been encouraged by the hundreds of HBHS alums who have joined a Facebook group to voice their support of teachers and education and against censorship. These issues are small and local, but there are many small localities; fight them where you find them.