President Donald Trump has long railed against social media sites for what he says is their politically biased censoring of conservative voices, and now he’s looking for proof.
The White House on Wednesday released a tool that invites people who’ve been censored on social media and who suspect political bias as the cause to “share your story with President Trump.”
The first page says:
SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies.
No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.
Read the fine print
Anyone thinking of using the tool should take a good, long look at the user agreement, which grants the US government – including, but not limited to, the president’s executive office – an irrevocable license to any content you submit on the site.
You grant the U.S. Government (including, but not limited to the Executive Office of the President) a license to any “Content” (including but not limited to the photographs, information, text, or otherwise) you post or submit on this site… The license you grant is irrevocable and valid in perpetuity, throughout the world, and in all forms of media… You should not post any information that you do not wish to become public…
That means that whatever content curled somebody’s toes enough that a social media platform removed it will potentially see the bright light of day, as it uses your stuff in any way it likes:
This permission grants the U.S. Government a license to use, edit, display, publish, broadcast, transmit, post, or otherwise distribute all or part of the Content (including edited, composite, or derivative works made therefrom).
The user agreement makes clear that “you understand this form is for information gathering only.”
The reporting form, hosted on Typeform, asks users to submit screenshots of and links to the banned content. It also provides a text field where users can describe the enforcement actions taken against them. Users can choose between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or “other” as the platform from which their content was taken down.
The form also urges you to hand over your phone number, though in a strangely roundabout way for a web-based system, asking you, “Would you mind sharing your phone number, in case we need to get in touch?”
What it actually means is, “Enter your phone number in case we need to get in touch (or leave blank if you don’t want to provide it),” which would be a much clearer way of putting it on the form.
Long-simmering resentment
There’s a lot of context behind Wednesday’s rollout of this tool. For years, conservatives have been alleging that the big platforms – Facebook, Google, and Twitter – have been censoring them. When they ran the House, Republican lawmakers held multiple hearings on the matter.
Trump has in the past threatened regulation: last year, he suggested that the administration could take aim at the way Google displays its search results; in March, he again criticized the companies, accusing them of “collusion” and a “hatred they have for a certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election.”
Regardless of where your politics lie, the bigger picture is probably that, as soon as social media companies make themselves the arbiters of what’s acceptable and what’s not, they open themselves to accusations of bias. Even if they banned people at random you’d be able to find a way to cut the data so that it looked biased against somebody.
The White House is now looking at capturing a whole lot of data. It remains to be seen how it will use the results.
Readers, if you plan to chime in with your own tale(s) of being silenced, feel free to share with us the details – including your thoughts on the form and how the government might use the data you submit with it…
IT
This is what happens when social media becomes totally monopolized. Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube/Google. These 3 companies own our information gathering, information finding, social interactions, digital media, what pictures we see, what posts we see, who can post what, etc. With that being said, it has become evident that there is a very overwhelming liberal/left-wing bias in Silicon Valley (no shocker there). Therefore these monopolized companies, whom face zero repercussion for their actions, are of course going to implement their bias and suppress or flat out ban voices or opinions that don’t line up with theirs. No matter what your political affiliation is, this is scary stuff…
Mahhn
I’ve had videos removed (that were private) of being in a gun range. and images of an antique pistol rebuild removed. And everything anti-hilldog was removed. None of the mocking R post removed, but mocking D are removed. I find both sides the same criminal and or incompetent corporate shrills, I do see FB bias to the Dem party. I expect its because they spend more money marketing there. It’s like most restaurants, they serve coke or pepsi, but not both. Contracted vendor. Politics is the same. It’s all about the money.
Jan Doggen
The article does not explain the “and your phone number” in the title. Question 6 says “Would you mind sharing your phone number, in case we need to get in touch?” I entered “Yes” and could submit the form, so that part of the data collection can be circumvented. I agree that many people will blindly fill this in though. BTW It’s surprising how little data validation there seems to be on the form, given all the nonsense I entered.
Paul Ducklin
I was on the point of removing the words “and your phone number” from the headline before publishing the article – as you say, it’s optional – but then I figured as you did: the form doesn’t *demand* your phone number, but it certainly *seeks* it. To be fair, the form asks for very little personal information, but it definitely “seeks your phone number”.
However, to reduce confusion, I added an explanation to the text of the article itself to make the reference to phone numbers clear. Thanks for pointing that out.
Like you, I just entered Yes (but you can just put in nothing).
RW
If the Trump Whitehouse wanted better media coverage, they could just try doing less terrible things..
I laughed so hard when the google excitative was asked by a republican committee why pictures of Trump come up when you google ‘Idiot’ :)
Brian T. Nakamoto
Linking to the WhiteHouse.gov “techbias” link that redirects to the TypeForm link (“a tool”) in the article would help support that this appears to be legit.
Paul Ducklin
Ironically, the official whitehouse DOT gov link only seems to work if you visit from a US IP number (that conclusion is based on a brief experiment using Tor circuits – when my exit node was in the US, I was able to access the page; when it wasn’t, I got a ‘page not available’ message).
The form page itself is accesssible from anywhere (again, according to my brief experiment), and requires only that you should be a US citizen or permanent resident before proceeding. So although your suggestion is a good one, I am going to leave the link pointing directly to the form itself, because that’s really what the article is about.
To summarise:
https://whitehouse.gov/techbias — for the announcement/landing page
https://whitehouse.typeform.com/to/Jti9QH — for the form itself
Brian T. Nakamoto
The “techbias” page indeed returns a “Page is unavailable” when I connect to it from an IP in the UK via a VPN. I like that a US government site (unilaterally controlled by the executive branch) about tech bias has geo bias. :p The White House homepage is accessible via the IP in the UK so it doesn’t seem to be a matter of trying to be compliant with GDPR.
Paul Ducklin
To be fair, the site is about tech bias in the US and the reports are supposed to come from the US so the geoblock makes good sense. What doesn’t make sense is having such a peculiar and misleading message – clearly the page *is* available in the typical networking sense because some content was served up, so why not explain with a clearer message? And if a geoblock is not possible on the survey page, why not at least add a question “are you presently in the US or one of its territories now” for consistency?
Krogtar
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and the like are at a crossroad:
If they are a publisher then I’m all for publishers deciding what they have on their site.
If they are a platform then they should be applying the rules equally and not infringing on peoples rights.
The argument of them being a private company is all well and good but once you monopolise the online town square with no genuine alternative then you have a responsibility.
the simple question is:
Are you a publisher or platform?
They can no longer just have their cake and eat it!
People can talk all they want about foreign interference in elections and the political discourse but as long as silicone valley and their leftist, progressive agendas are the biggest influence on politics in the world!
anonymous coward
This article may surprise some readers outside the US, but it is old news to US citizens. In the US, all written communication, including letters and web forms, to government agencies or officials are available publicly, in perpetuity, under freedom of information laws. (There are some exceptions for tax, medical, and legal issues, of course.) Some of the biggest US headlines come from information gleaned from public records.
The disclaimer for this tech bias form is simply reminding people that data retention occurs and that it may be used in the future. The tech industry could learn a lesson from this sort of honesty.