The Interface is a daily column and newsletter about the intersection of social media and democracy. Subscribe here . On one hand, we spent maybe too much time this week on the question of whether one person should lose access to his social media accounts. On the other hand, it’s a question that illuminates some of the central tensions that led me to start this newsletter. How can social media be used to do harm? Can tech companies effectively rein in their worst users? Also, what the hell is Twitter’s deal? Will Oremus tries to answer the latter question with some reporting on what people inside Twitter are saying about Alex Jones. He offers a handful of theories on the company’s paralyzed, contradictory stances on Infowars. First, there’s Twitter’s bias toward inaction on almost all things; second, there’s its terror of being called partisan by conservatives or by Congress. There’s also the possibility that Twitter will ban Jones, and is still finalizing its public case for doing so. Finally, Oremus concludes, is the possibility that there’s currently a big internal fight about Jones that hasn’t been resolved yet. This is my own theory, and here’s a smidge of evidence that it’s true. Yesterday I asked the company for comment on Oliver Darcy’s damning report showing that, contrary to Twitter’s public statements, Jones had repeatedly violated the Twitter rules. The company told me a statement was coming, then never delivered. That’s the sort of thing that happens when a company is still trying to figure out its own position. Meanwhile in The New York Times, Kevin Roose has more detail on how Mark Zuckerberg made the decision to ban Jones from Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg, an engineer by training and temperament, has always preferred narrow process decisions to broad, subjective judgments. His evaluation of Infowars took the form of a series of technical policy questions. They included whether the mass-reporting of Infowars posts constituted coordinated “brigading,” a tactic common in online harassment campaigns. Executives also debated whether Mr. Jones should receive a “strike” for each post containing hate speech (which would lead to removing his pages as well as the individual posts) or a single, collective strike (which would remove the posts, but leave his pages up). Late Sunday, Apple — which has often tried to stake out moral high ground on contentious debates — removed Infowars podcasts from iTunes. After seeing the news, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a note to his team confirming his own decision: the strikes against Infowars and Mr. Jones would count individually, and the pages would come down. The announcement arrived at 3 a.m. Pacific time. Much attention has focused on how Facebook moved forward with a ban only after Apple did the same thing. To me, the preceding paragraph is just as noteworthy: it shows the company was already building its case for doing so when it kicked him off the platform. That speaks to something I said Tuesday: that the platforms all seemed to be moving independently to the same conclusion, reinforcing one another’s decisions along the way. It made me think of a point Charlie Warzel made earlier this month: A few months ago, during the rapid fallout of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, a smart person mentioned to me the first rule of crisis PR. The idea is to quickly figure out what the ultimate end game of a disaster will be, and then cut all the bullshit and just jump straight to doing whatever uncomfortable thing you’ll inevitably have to do under duress days, weeks, or months later. I’ve been thinking a lot about that maxim the past two weeks as the platforms make declarations about Infowars as a legitimate publisher, followed by some hedging, then a bit of backtracking, some light finger-wagging, a short timeout, and finally an ominous suggestion that the publisher is on thin ice. All the statements, interviews, and bad press seems to be careening toward a particular outcome for Facebook, YouTube, and Infowars, and it seems as if everyone but the platforms knows it. Facebook and YouTube have now careened all the way to that “particular outcome” — banning Jones — while Twitter is still contemplating the end game. I suspect the company will arrive at the same place its peers did eventually. The only question is how much self-inflicted damage it will sustain in the meantime. Democracy Facebook pages with large U.S. following to require more authorization It’s about to get a lot harder to run your “We Love Texas” Facebook page from Moscow: The new measures will require administrators of Facebook pages to secure their account with two-factor authentication and confirm their primary home location. Facebook will also add a section that shows the primary country from where a page is being managed. Here’s How Russia’s Twitter Trolls Reacted To Charlottesville This weekend is the anniversary of the deadly United the Right rally in Charlottesville. Peter Aldhous examines how Russian trolls tried to amp up the conflict on Twitter as it happened. Among other things, they heavily promoted the usage of the word “Antifa,” which then caught on. By the summer of 2017, the Left Trolls were mostly a spent force. But that’s when nearly 130 Right Trolls, which posed as Trump supporters, had their big surge, their output rising to more than 10,000 tweets a day until suddenly dropping away after Aug. 18 — presumably when Twitter banned many of the accounts. How Big Is the Alt Right? Inside My Futile Quest to Count Does the white nationalist movement sometimes called “the alt-right,” which can feel ubiquitous on social media, get too much attention? Emma Grey Ellis tries to count up its members: In Charlottesville, the best estimates put rally participant numbers between 500 and 600 people. For context, that’s five times as big as any far-right rally in the last decade, but is still only a tiny fraction of what you’d expect from their (inflated) digital footprint. It’s also two hundred times smaller than 2017’s March for Science, and a thousand times smaller than 2017’s Women’s March. All signs point to an even lower turnout for Unite the Right in DC. Students In Bangladesh Are Deleting Their Posts About The Protests Because They’re Scared Of Reprisals A social media crackdown in Bangladesh is what actual censorship of free speech looks like, in case anyone is wondering: Students who had been part of the demonstrations told BuzzFeed News they were terrified of arrest following the protests and were deleting any messages of support they’d posted online, while a photojournalist who was badly injured covering the demonstrations described the situation as chaos and said anyone with a camera had become a target. Much of this fear rests on a loosely worded law passed in Bangladesh 12 years ago — widely referred to as Section 57 — that allows for the prosecution of anyone posting material online that the authorities determine could “deprave and corrupt” its audience, cause a “deterioration in law and order,” or prejudice “the image of the state or a person.” Elsewhere The Story Behind The Story That Created A Political Nightmare For Facebook John Cook, former editor of Gawker Media, posts an odd “defense” of the 2016 Gizmodo story alleging that Facebook “routinely suppressed conservative news.” In it, he acknowledges that the story was framed in an aggressively conspiratorial way so as to draw the attention – and attendant clicks — of the Drudge Report audience. It confirms, rather than debunks, the idea that the story was framed in a misleading way so at to draw the maximum amount of outrage of conservatives, despite the fact that conservative news sources continue to draw more engagement than any other ideology on the platform. Joshua Benton’s Twitter thread on how the Gizmodo story backfired says it all better than I can: While I think the problems with the Gizmodo Facebook Trending story went well beyond the headline, good to see even this limited mea culpa https://t.co/cZbR29aL69 pic.twitter.com/Gc8iyEqzLR — Joshua Benton (@jbenton) August 10, 2018 The most engaged publishers on Facebook in July 2018 And while we’re once on the subject of “suppressing conservative speech,” here’s the monthly report from Newswhip:<doc-sep>Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- As Covid-19 continues to ravage India, financial professionals across the country are grappling with an increasingly surreal disconnect between the epidemic’s devastation and a record-breaking boom in local markets.The world’s worst coronavirus outbreak has battered India’s economy and lifted its official Covid death toll to more than 318,000 -- a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount.And yet investors continue to snap up Indian assets, fueling a 65% rally in the Nifty 50 Index over the past 12 months that has outpaced every other major equity benchmark worldwide. The measure’s surge to a record on Thursday has coincided with the fastest rate of Indian initial public offerings since 2017 and an unprecedented flood of foreign-currency bond issuance by local companies.While the combination of pandemic pain and financial-market euphoria is hardly unique to India, nowhere else has the contrast been so extreme.Bulls say the gains are justified by central bank stimulus at home and abroad, along with signs that the current virus wave may be peaking and optimism that India’s long-term economic growth potential will emerge from the crisis intact. Skeptics point to overly rosy earnings estimates and the risk of further outbreaks in a country where vaccination rates remain stubbornly low. India’s central bank weighed in on Thursday, warning in its annual report that the surge in stocks “poses the risk of a bubble.”What’s clear is that financiers on all sides of the debate are stretched thin. Booming markets have left the industry swamped with work at a time when many employees have been sickened by the virus. Some have had to franticly search for medical help after hospitals were overrun and oxygen supplies fell short. Almost everyone has at least one friend or family member who has died.“You feel numb, as if we are in the midst of a war and are losing people one after the other,” said Vikaas Sachdeva, the Mumbai-based chief executive officer of Emkay Investment Managers Ltd., who lost four members of his extended family to the virus.Sachdeva expects Indian markets to be volatile in the near term as investors weigh uncertainties around the vaccination program and the possibility of a third wave. His firm has been buying shares of Indian companies with “high quality” management, betting that the country’s long-term investment case remains intact.India’s $2.9 trillion stock market has been buoyed in part by resilient demand from international investors, who’ve purchased a net $34.9 billion of shares over the past 12 months. While they pared holdings in April and early May, buying by local mutual funds and insurance companies has helped fill the gap. A steady decline in reported Covid cases since mid-May -- along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to avoid another nationwide lockdown -- have added weight to calls for further market gains.Indian companies have taken advantage of the exuberance in markets to raise about $4 billion via public offerings since the start of the year, on track for the busiest first-half since 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.“The IPO boom is being driven by Indian technology companies coming of age with businesses doing better than expected,” said Sunil Khaitan, India head of global capital markets at Bank of America. “Tech companies are advancing their fundraising plans and financial sponsors also believe this is a good time to bring in public market investors in these companies amidst ample global liquidity.”Khaitan expects India IPO volumes to more than double in 2021 from the previous year.The surge in activity has left some financial firms scrambling to complete deals after employees were sidelined by the virus. The head of equity capital markets at a Mumbai-based investment bank, who asked not be named discussing private matters, said that at one point 25% of his 40-person group was infected.About 200,000 Indian bank employees have been infected and 1,200 have died since the pandemic began, the industry’s largest union estimated this month.Among the biggest risks for India market optimists is another virus wave. Just 3.2% of the population has been fully vaccinated, versus 39.7% in the U.S. and 10.1% in Brazil, according to Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Tracker.The Indian economy’s recovery from last year’s recession is already showing signs of sputtering. The country lost 10 million jobs in May, according to private research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Among the 40 companies in the Nifty 50 index that have posted quarterly results so far, more than half have missed analysts’ estimates. While India’s central bank predicts the economy will grow at a 10.5% pace this fiscal year, other forecasters including S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service have recently cut their estimates to below 10%.“If this Covid situation keeps affecting newer areas and new strains keep emerging, then there is a problem for the near term,” said Deepak Jasani, head of retail research at HDFC Securities Ltd.Sachdeva, the Emkay CEO, said Covid will impact him and his colleagues in ways that go far beyond their work in finance. He’s reading “The Difficulty of Being Good” by Gurcharan Das, who writes about his search for a meaningful life.“The pandemic has brought about a change in many of us and we are more aware of things that matter most in life,” Sachdeva said. “We would though have to see if this is indeed a permanent change when life comes back normal.”(Updates death toll in second paragraph)More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.<doc-sep>Twitter has permanently banned the accounts of right-wing conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones and InfoWars for violating the company's abusive behavior policies, the company said Thursday. The ban appears to be related to a heated exchange between Jones and a CNN reporter Wednesday, which Jones live-streamed on the Twitter-owned video service Periscope. Jones ranted at the reporter, as well as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, following back-to-back congressional hearings where Dorsey addressed online election interference, as well as accusations of political bias and conservative censorship on the platform. "We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts' past violations," the company said in a series of tweets. "We wanted to be open about this action given the broad interest in this case." tweet 1 and 2 tweet 2 and 3 The ban comes weeks after Jones' accounts were removed or suspended by other major tech companies including Apple, Facebook and YouTube. Twitter had initially declined to take disciplinary action against Jones, saying the accounts had not violated community guidelines, but later suspended him from posting on his accounts for a period of seven days. Accounts for Jones and Infowars were also banned from Periscope. Jones will not be able to recreate his presence on the sites under another account.<doc-sep>
After more than a week of controversy and pressure, Facebook removed four pages run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from its platform. According to a blog post published Monday morning, Facebook removed the Alex Jones Channel, Alex Jones, InfoWars, and Infowars Nightly News pages for "repeatedly posting content over the past several days" that violates the company's Community Standards. "Since then, more content from the same Pages has been reported to us," the blog post states. "Upon review, we have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies." The four pages in question haven't been totally axed from Facebook; they've just been unpublished so that no one can view them. Jones has the opportunity to file an appeal to get his pages restored, but if he loses the appeal (or doesn't appeal at all), Facebook will permanently remove the pages from its platform. Facebook's action comes after Apple removed five of the six InfoWars podcasts from its platforms, including iTunes. While Apple didn't host Jones' content, anyone with an iPhone or iPad could find those podcast episodes. Now with this removal, all of those podcast episodes cannot be searched for, listened to, or downloaded from Apple's platforms. Last week, Spotify took down numerous episodes of InfoWars' and Alex Jones' podcasts from its platform as well, but nearly one year's worth of episodes remains streamable on Spotify. Alex Jones had already received a 30-day ban from Facebook for posting content that violated the company's Community Standards. Facebook attempts to explain its violation policies in its blog post, stating that both personal accounts and pages receive strikes when forbidden content gets posted. After surpassing an undisclosed number of strikes, the page is unpublished. Following this structure, it's unclear how many strikes Jones and his pages have received since Facebook removed four videos from his pages about a week ago. But not all strikes are created equal. Facebook says that the severity of the punishment may vary depending on the type of content posted. "For example, some content is so bad that posting it just once means we would remove the account immediately," Facebook wrote in the blog post. "In the case of other violations, we may warn someone the first time they break our Community Standards." YouTube has a similar strike system with slightly clearer rules: if a channel receives three strikes for violating the company's community guidelines within three months, the channel will be removed from YouTube. The company has other punishments that come along with strikes as well, like a temporary ban on live streaming. However, each individual strike expires three months after being issued. Facebook has come under fire in the past few weeks for allowing content creators like Jones to publish fake news, falsities, and hateful content freely on its platform. The company may have a definition for hate speech and types of hateful content, but its decision to allow conspiracy-theory content to live on its platform frustrates many users. The company reminded users in its most recent blog post that "wrong and untrue" statements are allowed on Facebook, while content that "attacks or dehumanizes others" is not.