[Plura-list] Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation; Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020; A lethally boring story

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation: By all means, look at
the mergers, but don't forget the outsourcing!

* Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020: An annual tradition.

* A lethally boring story: How pharma monopolists escape liability.

* This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🦕 Antitrust and Facebook's paid disinformation

Facebook has just entered antitrust hell, as nearly every US state and
the federal government have taken the giant company to court, asserting
that the company used predatory acquisitions to achieve its monopoly.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked

But while we definitely need to pay close attention to the company's
acquisitions, it's also worthwhile to look at the parts of its business
it outsources - parts of the business that are key the safety of its
users and its compliance with the law.

A new, engrossing, lengthy BuzzFeed article by Craig Silverman lays out
a detailed case that Facebook systematically profits from
disinformation: financial fraud, identity theft, dangerous scam
products, and political disinformation.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ad-scams-revenue-china-tiktok-vietnam

Now, Facebook is HUGE, which means that it can't possibly perfectly
police its sprawling self-serve ad platform, but what Silverman
documents isn't cases that slip through the cracks: it's a deliberately
constructed system designed to maximize profits from scam ads.

(And of course, no one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets
reading THOU SHALT OPERATE A SELF-SERVE AD MARKET AT A SCALE THAT
PRECLUDES POLICING THOSE ADS)

Silverman's reporting reveals the role that outsourcing plays in
Facebook's ad negligence: the company hires third parties like
Accenture, who, in turn, hire low-waged subcontractors to monitor its
ads for ripoffs and disinformation.

This means that FB's moderation all takes place through multiple layers
of indirection, so when an Accenture manager tells their subs to leave
up ads bought by hacked accounts and FB can proclaim its innocence.

We don't get to look at the terms of the Accenture-FB deal to see
whether FB provides incentives to tolerate fraud. We don't get to know
whether moderators are being told to tolerate scams from China and
Russia because FB wants the business or because Accenture went rogue.

So, back to antitrust. Facebook says that there's nothing wrong with
buying up all the businesses that are adjacent to its core business -
that acquiring everything from Whatsapp and Instagram to Oculus and
Giphy produces "efficiencies" that benefit FB users.

But when you look at the parts of its business that it *doesn't* try to
own, a different story emerges: FB's in-house divisions are the ones
that generate lock-in and prevent competition; it outsources the parts
that create negative externalities - that harm the rest of us.

In so doing, the company maintains two completely contradictory (and
nakedly self-serving) positions: first, that it is a fantastic
administrator that efficiently manages multiple, disparate businesses
under a single roof, to the benefit of its customers and shareholders.

But *also*, Facebook's position is that essential business functions -
like preventing repeat-offender predators from destroying the lives of
its users - are literally impossible for it to integrate into its core
business and has to be outsourced to specialists like Accenture.

This isn't a new phenomenon. Facebook has sustained global legal and
reputational risks for the rampant paid fraud and disinformation its
ad-targeting system enables. With every scandal, Facebook's crisis
communications consisted of solemn promises to do better.

Inevitably, these promises are broken, and when they are, FB insists
that it's just as shocked and disappointed as we are and swears it will
launch a full investigation to prevent any more such lapses. Lather,
rinse, repeat.

But it's actually worse than that. FB's paid disinformation scandals are
just the problems that are so widespread they come to public attention -
the tip of the paid disinfo iceberg. There's so much more that we don't
ever learn about.

That's because FB doesn't want us to learn about it. Ad Observer is a
project at NYU's Engineering school: it recruits FB users to run a
plugin that makes copies of the ads FB shows them and then uploads them
to a repository called Ad Observatory.

This, in turn, gets mined by academics, researchers and accountability
journalists to discover and document FB's failures to live up to its own
standards for fighting paid disinformation.

Naturally, FB threatened to sue them.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

FB says it has to sue Ad Observer to protect its users' privacy (no,
really), but FB's highly selective concern for its users' safety has an
obvious pattern: the company protects users only when it is protecting
its own ass; the rest of the time, it literally sells them out.

There've been reports that FB is dropping its legal threats against Ad
Observer, but that's not quite true:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vegw/facebook-decides-to-let-research-project-collecting-ad-targeting-data-continuefor-now

This morning, I heard from someone at the Mozilla Foundation who's
working with the Ad Observer group who told me that FB has not even
scheduled a meeting with the team, let alone informed them that it is
rescinding its legal threat.

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🦕 Daddy Daughter Xmas Podcast 2020

Every year since my daughter was four, we've recorded a Daddy Daughter
Christmas Podcast. The tradition started when her nursery school closed
a day before my wife's work, so I took the kid to my office for the day
and we started fooling around with my mic.

At first we used to sing - Rudolph, Jingle Bells, etc - but over the
last couple years she's partially or fully vetoed it. This year, my now
twelve-year-old has completely refused any music interludes.

Instead, I've interviewed her about the stuff she likes and hates about
2020 and her Christmas plans, and then she delivers an extremely
detailed and lucid tutorial on good horsewomanship, it's great!

If you want to listen to this year's episode, you can get it on my
podcast feed:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Or download the MP3 directly:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_371/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_371_-_Daddy_Daughter_Xmas_2020.mp3

The show notes have links to the previous seven instalments as well as
the photos from years gone by:

https://craphound.com/news/2020/12/11/daddy-daughter-podcast-2020-edition/

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🦕 A lethally boring story

Here is a boring story that it literally murdering you.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/drug-middlemen-shift-arguments-to-escape-liability-state-laws/

It's about "pharmacy benefit managers," a phrase engineered to cause
your eyes to glaze over.

PBMs are middle-men your employer pays to manage your medication. They
decide which drugs your doctor can prescribe for you and negotiate the
price that they'll pay drug companies and retailers for your meds.

But the largest PBMs are divisions of monopolistic insurers like CVS
Health (CVS Caremark) Cigna (Express Scripts) and United Health
(Optumrx). They have a conflict of interest, and a history of abusing
patients by denying them med and/or charging vast co-pays to fill scrips.

In theory, 1974's Employee Retirement Income Security Act requires PBMs
to be "fiduciaries" - legally obliged to act in your best interest. In
exchange, ERISA bans states from meddling in PBM business, in the name
of keeping administrative costs low.

Like many industrial regs, ERISA imposes a burden and offers a shield:
act as a fiduciary and you escape a patchwork of 50 state-level
regulations.

But like any monopolistic industry, PBMs have lots of money to spend to
get right of the burden and keep the shield.

The largest PBMs have been busily fixing drug prices at sky-high rates
and passing the costs on to employers and their employees. This is
DEFINITELY not acting as a fiduciary!

When the people who can no longer afford their meds bring class-action
suits, the PBMs cite ERISA's ban on state regulation and walk away.

Meanwhile, they argue that when they price-gouge on drugs, they're not
engaged in the part of being a PBM that requires them to act as
fiduciaries, and further, that almost nothing a PBM does is bound by
fiduciary rules.

I am fully aware of how boring this is: words like "fiduciary" and
acronyms like "PBM" and "ERISA" are eye-glazers without parallel. But
the upshot is this: tails they win, heads you lose. And what you lose is
the medication that keeps you alive.

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🦕 This day in history

#10yrsago Pornoscanners trivially defeated by pancake-shaped explosives
https://web.archive.org/web/20101225211840/http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/fulltext.pdf

#5yrsago What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/west-point-cybersecurity-nsa-privacy-edward-snowden

#5yrsago Ted Cruz campaign hires dirty data-miners who slurped up
millions of Facebook users’ data
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-president-campaign-facebook-user-data

#5yrsago Harlem Cryptoparty: Crypto matters for #blacklivesmatter
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3danqk/the-black-community-needs-encryption

#5yrsago Happy Birthday’s copyright status is finally, mysteriously
settled
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/media/happy-birthday-copyright-case-reaches-a-settlement.html

#1yrago Twitter wants to develop an open, decentralized, federated
social media standard…and then join it
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191210/21054943552/twitter-makes-bet-protocols-over-platforms.shtml

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🦕 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 517 words (92561
total).

Currently reading: The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 25)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/12/07/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-25/

Upcoming appearances:

* Colloquium on Information Security, Dec 14
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-31st-hphpe-virtual-colloquium-on-information-security-tickets-128859336745

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Worldshapers
https://theworldshapers.com/2020/12/06/episode-72-cory-doctorow/

* A More Competitive Web (Techdirt Podcast):
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201201/10183045801/techdirt-podcast-episode-264-more-competitive-web-with-cory-doctorow-daphne-keller.shtml

* Big Tech Podcast:
https://www.cigionline.org/big-tech/cory-doctorow-true-dangers-surveillance-capitalism

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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