Whatever The Reports About Russian Trolls Buying Ads Is Initially, It's Way, Way Worse

With several reports about data breaches occurring over the past few years, we've developed something of a mantra around here: it's always, always worse than first reported. Yahoo just went through this having finally admitted that literally every email account was compromised way back in 2013 after having first said it was only a few hundred thousand accounts that were impacted. Deloitte and Equifax followed this same playbook with their own breaches, trickling out little by little just how wide an impact those hacks had achieved.

And now we're seeing something of a spinoff of that mantra when it comes to the impact Russian trolls and the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA) advertising buys had on Facebook. You may recall that everything about this story seemed fairly minimalist in the initial reporting. The amount of money spent on the ad-buy itself was low enough to induce eyerolls from many. Facebook itself estimated that 11.4 million people saw ads bought by the IRA over the course of two years or so, which is not the kind of number that sets off all four alarms at the democracy firehouse. But Facebook has now given everyone a better idea of how much reach these ads actually had. And these numbers are far more alarming.

Facebook will inform lawmakers this week that roughly 126 million Americans may have been exposed to content generated on its platform by the Russian government-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency between June 2015 and August 2017, CNN has learned. In written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, a copy of which was obtained by CNN, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch says that 29 million people were served content directly from the Internet Research Agency, and that after sharing among users is accounted for, a total of "approximately 126 million people" may have seen it.

Facebook does not know, however, how many of those 126 million people actually saw one of those posts, or how many may have scrolled past it or simply not logged in on the day that one of the posts was being served in their News Feed.

The inability to nail down just how many eyeballs viewed these ads is, of course, due to the nature of social media. Buying the ads and targeting primary viewers of them is one thing, but it's the sharing and re-sharing of those ads that extend their reach exponentially. And it's quite nice of Facebook to come right out and admit that it actually has no idea how many people viewed these ads, even as it offers up estimates to the contrary.

This is a feature of a social media platform like Facebook, not a bug. And, to the IRA's credit, it's a brilliant and inexpensive method for having some measure of influence in a foreign country's democracy. Facebook builds a sharing tool and these folks take advantage of the very nature of that tool.

Which is what makes Facebook's attempt to downplay all of this all the more perplexing.

Nevertheless, Facebook says in its testimony that the posts from those pages represented "a tiny fraction of the overall content on Facebook."

"This equals about four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content," Stretch writes. "Put another way, if each of these posts were a commercial on television, you'd have to watch more than 600 hours of television to see something from the IRA."

Except, as Facebook and Colin Stretch damned well know, Facebook doesn't operate anything remotely like television. Nor do its ads. The engagement process of those ads is wildly different. The ability to share those ads is not a feature of television. The granular targeting for eyeballs of those ads is simply not something that can be achieved by television advertising. The geographic targeting specifically, with an eye on influencing votes and the outcome of an election, is simply not a feature available to traditional television advertising. I know why Facebook wants to pretend otherwise in this instance, but it simply isn't true.

So, even as some are trying to downplay the impact, and even the existence, of this foreign intervention into our election cycle, it's worth acknowledging that these things, like data breaches, tend to be worse than first reported. And no obfuscation from Facebook about how much like television it is can change the raw numbers, or its acknowledgement that it doesn't actually know how many people saw this stuff.

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Portugal Shows The Internet Why Net Neutrality Is Important

So if you've followed the debate over net neutrality for much of the last decade, you probably remember images like these, purporting to show what the internet might look like if we let broadband duopolies like AT&T or Comcast dictate internet access pricing structure:

And while these mock ups were tongue in cheek, large ISPs have given every indication that this idea of freedom costing extra isn't too far from their ideal. And abusing a lack of broadband competition to force users to shell out additional funds to access to the content and services of their choice isn't too far off of what has already happened, whether we're talking about AT&T's decision to block Facetime from working unless users shelled out for more expensive plans, or Verizon's recent decision to charge users $10 more just to avoid arbitrary video throttling.

In Portugal however, there are no net neutrality rules. And ISPs there have already started taking advantage of it in a way that eerily echoes the warnings net neutrality advocates have been making for years. Lisbon-based mobile and fixed broadband provider MEO has been selling broadband service tiers for some time that cap your internet data usage, after which they're happy to sell you additional buckets of data depending on which types of services you traditionally use:

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Ro Khanna 

✔@RoKhanna

In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages.

5:34 AM - Oct 27, 2017

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It's important to note that capping usage then doling out additional data based on types of contentisn't the same idea as blocking users from accessing parts of the internet unless they pay up, but it's still detrimental to the health of the internet. As we saw with T-Mobile's Binge On, these plans are designed to create the illusion of a bargain. But these types of plans not only raise questions about ISP power to dictate which companies and services are whitelisted, but they're based on a fundamentally incorrect premise that these restrictions are necessary in the first place.

Usage caps and overage fees aren't based on network or economic realities. They aren't useful to manage congestion. Their entire function is to creatively drive up costs via arbitrary barriers to entry, after which ISPs convince consumers they're somehow getting a deal by providing additional data "for free" or "at a discount." ISPs have often falsely tried to equate this as the same thing as 1-800 numbers or free shipping, which is bullshit. All that's really happening is that internet access is being artificially limited, and users are being forced to pay more money to access the internet as intended.

While people often like to focus on the threat of ISPs blocking access to content, ISPs know that's a surefire way to earn public scorn. That's why ISPs have developed a myriad of more creative ways to (ab)use the lack of competition in the space to ill effect, whether that's imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, exempting an ISPs own services from said caps, or hamstringing competitors elsewhere in the network, as we saw when ISPs began intentionally clogging peering points to drive up costs for streaming competitors and transit operators (interconnection).

With the Trump administration rushing forward with its plan to kill net neutrality here in the States, and a rise in cable's monopoly over fixed-line broadband, you can expect a whole lot more U.S. broadband pricing and package "creativity" in the not so distant future. That may not involve outright blocking your access to content, but it's more than likely to involve entirely arbitrary, uncompetitive and harmful limits you'll be told are somehow necessary and for your own good.

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Google Image Search Is A Honeypot Set Up By Aggressive Copyright Litigants

There are a lot of people out there that don't understand intellectual property issues. But perhaps no one misunderstands them quite as badly as internet marketing guru Dan Dasilva. And Dasilva has no excuse. He's been on the losing end of a copyright infringement lawsuit. Despite this, Dasilva continues to express his ignorance -- and proclaim his victimhood -- publicly on his YouTube channel. 

Dasilva snagged an image from Google's image search and used it on a website he set up for one of his clients. The photographer who took the picture -- Michael Grecco -- sued Dasilva for infringement, ultimately ending up with $27,000 settlement and $10,000 in legal fees.

There are extra gems to be present in Dasilva’s video, together with his assertion he is not going to decelerate his infringing use of different folks’s pictures. However then once more, what do you count on from a video that leads off with “my lawyer informed me to not make this video?”



Dasilva has seemingly learned nothing from this experience. In fact, it appears the lawsuit may have actually made him stupider.

"The reason I was sued was because I used a picture that I found on Google Images," Dasilva says in his warning to other content creators. But instead of simply warning people about the dangers of infringing on photographers' copyrights, Dasilva decides to warn people about "malicious" people out there who are trying to profit off their copyright.

"I never really thought that there are malicious people out there… there are people out there who maliciously put pictures on the Internet," Dasilva states. "They copyright pictures that they take, and what they do is, they'll get a copyright on it, and they'll put it out on the Internet, and it's freely available on the Internet. If you run a Google search their image will appear."

Yes, Dasilva somehow believes copyrighted photos returned in Google image searches are honeypots created by photographers. But that only scratches the surface of Dasilva's ignorance. He also appears to believe photos need to be watermarked clearly with copyright symbols in at least 12 point text so people like him won't fall into the trap of being sued for grabbing images off the internet and treating them as their own.

There are more gems to be found in Dasilva's video, including his assertion he's not going to slow down his infringing use of other people's photos. But then again, what do you expect from a video that leads off with "my lawyer told me not to make this video?"

Dasilva appears to believe he should have been given a warning by Michael Grecco, rather than sued. But given his grasp of the underlying issues (and his plan to continue his infringing acts), it's hard to believe a mere cease-and-desist would have been sufficient. He does suggest viewers search for Creative Commons images, which is a start, but seems to imply it's a last-ditch option for people with a reasonable disinterest in being sued. He also fails to clarify that Creative Commons is not nearly the same thing as public domain. Some CC licenses forbid commercial use.

If Dasilva knew anything about Grecco, he would have known the photographer is an aggressive litigant. He's sued plenty of publishing industry giants for alleged infringement. Grecco's litigation history may appear troll-like, but he's not in the business of suing IP addresses en masse or targeting individuals who may have posted his photos on their personal blogs. Grecco's aggressive litigation stance in no way validates Dasilva's claims he's the real victim here. And it must be noted Grecco has taken a far more progressive stance than many engaged in the business of infringement litigation. When he noticed PDFs of his photography book being shared at filesharing sites, he took it to mean he needed to create an electronic version to serve this underserved market.

If Dasilva finds himself sued again, it's doubtful he'll be able to secure the same representation. Unfortunately, the fallout from his lawsuit means thousands of people looking to him for e-commerce advice have just been made stupider.

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